Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence. In the light of the moon, the road was silver, and the fields with their shocks of wheat were gold. CHAPTER V THE SERENADE "I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper in his lap, and looked up at his wife over his glasses. "Isn't she well?" he asked. "M--yes," replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the word in her lack of conviction, "I guess so." "Don't you know?" the judge demanded in some impatience with her uncertainty. "She says she feels all right." "Well, then, what makes you think she isn't?" "Oh, I don't know," replied Mrs. Blair, "she seems so quiet, that's all." "Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or demonstration," said the judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the bench. "No, that's so," assented Mrs. Blair. "But she's always cheerful and bright." "Is she gloomy?" "No, I wouldn't exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied--rather wistful I should say, yes--wistful." She seemed pleased to have found the right word. "Oh, she's all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I presume there was dancing." "Yes." "I don't know that we should let her go out that way." The judge took off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other about in the Chenowiths' yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that they would get into Mrs. Chenowith's flower beds. "You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us," argued Mrs. Blair. "No, I suppose not. But then--that was different." Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served to dissipate their cares. She went to the edge of the veranda and pulled a few leaves from the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the judge put on his glasses and spread out his paper. "I'll take her out for a drive this afternoon," said Mrs. Blair, turning to go indoors. "She'll be all right," said the judge, already deep in the political columns. That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia closely, and after a while he said: "You're not eating, Lavinia. Don't you feel well?" Lavinia turned to her father and smiled. "Oh, I'm all right." Her smile perplexed the judge. "You look pale," he said. Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length of the table. "My girl's losing her color," he forged ahead. Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of pain appeared in her face, causing it to grow paler. "Please don't worry about me, papa," she said. Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia's dislike of this personal discussion. She tried to catch her husband's eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia narrowly through his glasses. "Did you go riding this afternoon?" he asked as if he were examining a witness whom counsel had not drawn out properly.