Domestic fiction; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
There was much going on to make the time pass pleasantly. Nellie Austin
and her brother Amos were visiting the Everetts; and in whatever was
planned for their pleasure and the pleasure of the household Fidelia had
a share. There were fishing parties and berrying expeditions; and they
went sometimes to the woods, or to visit some mountain or waterfall, or
chasm among the hills.
Dr Everett himself, when one of his rare days of leisure came, liked
nothing better than to go with the young folks; and it was a day to be
marked with a white stone when he could make one of the party. Dr
Justin had more leisure, and could go oftener. Dr Everett was as merry
and as eager for adventures as any of them. Dr Justin was quiet, and
took the place of a looker-on rather than a sharer in the amusements of
the young people. Privately some of them were inclined to think him
something of a tyrant, for he kept them in order, and did not hesitate
to assume and exercise authority when occasion called for it, nor to
reprove--and that with sufficient emphasis--any of them who through
thoughtlessness or selfishness interfered with the pleasure of the rest.
But this did not often happen, and he was a favourite among them all.
Fidelia came to like Dr Justin better than at Eastwood she would have
supposed possible. She went very often with the rest of the young
people, and no one of them all enjoyed the delights of woods and fields
and mountains more than she. Nellie Austin declared that she hardly
recognised in her the dull, determined student of the first part of the
year. She was light-hearted and happy; and she told Nellie, and herself
as well, that she had good cause.
Eunice was well, and every day made it more clear to them that they had
made no mistake in deciding to share their home with Mrs Stone. And
then she was going back to the seminary and her beloved studies again.
Yes, Eunice was very well--"for her," Fidelia sometimes added with a
sigh, which meant that Eunice might never be altogether well and strong
again. But she was happy--there could be no doubt about that. Dr
Justin came sometimes as a visitor to the house, quiet and grave there
as elsewhere; and his quietness and gravity was the reason that Fidelia
liked him better than she had liked him at Eastwood, she told herself.
Nothing could be more evident than that he exerted no disturbing
influence on Eunice. They were friendly--they were even confidential,
Fidelia sometimes thought. But she never spoke of Dr Justin to her
sister, except as his name came in the account which Eunice always liked
to hear of the expeditions in which she could take no part; and she day
by day grew less afraid lest her sister might have something to tell her
of him that she would not like to hear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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