In the meanwhile the time was passing very heavily at the White House. Mrs. Joscelyn had got up, after enduring the torture of lying still as long as she was capable of it, and was seated in the uneasy seat in the parlour window, gazing out, though with her work by her, with which to veil her watch should anyone come in. Joscelyn had said nothing about it last night. He had been almost conciliatory at breakfast to Joan, who thought, on the whole, that it was better to let well alone, and make no allusion to what had passed. “I will speak my mind to him sooner or later,” she said to herself; “but it comes easier when you are angry and don’t mind what you say.” Thus she did from calculation what so many people do against all calculation, resolving to take advantage of the next storm to deliver her soul. She and her father got on tolerably well when the mother was out of the way. Joscelyn spoke to his daughter about his farm affairs, about the prospects of his stables, and the horses upon which he set his hopes. He was a considerable horse-dealer, and she knew as much about them as any woman was capable of knowing. She was quite willing to discuss the points of the last new filly, and quite able to do so, and an intelligent critic, which her mother had never been. “If she knows a horse from a cow it’s all she does,” he said of his wife; and perhaps she had been sometimes a little impatient of these constant discussions; but Joan had an opinion and gave it freely. Joan ate a good breakfast, notwithstanding that half her mind was with Harry, and that she kept her eye upon the window, that she might not miss old Simon coming back--and she talked with perfect good-humour notwithstanding all that had happened. She did not care, now that it was over, about her locking-out; indeed she was of opinion that it was better not to give her father the gratification of supposing that he had produced any effect upon her. But when Mrs. Joscelyn came downstairs, appealing to her with her pale face Joan’s difficulties were much increased. She could not be hard upon her mother at such a moment; indeed she was never hard upon her mother. She entreated her not to make a fuss; not to take on; brought her a footstool; put out her work for her, and so went off to her own occupations again. “But bless my heart, I would be crazy before dinner-time if I were to sit with mother, and go over it and over it, and see her wringing her poor hands--poor dear!”