looked at me with the same expression,” persisted Anne. “I felt it, even in the midst of my admiration of her beauty. She looked at me resentfully—she did, indeed, Captain Jim.”
“The resentment must have been about something else, Mistress Blythe, and you jest come in for a share of it because you happened past. Leslie does take sullen spells now and again, poor girl. I can’t blame her, when I know what she has to put up with. I don’t know why it’s permitted. The doctor and I have talked a lot abut the origin of evil, but we haven’t quite found out all about it yet. There’s a vast of onunderstandable things in life, ain’t there, Mistress Blythe? Sometimes things seem to work out real proper-like, same as with you and the doctor. And then again they all seem to go catawampus. There’s Leslie, so clever and beautiful you’d think she was meant for a queen, and instead she’s cooped up over there, robbed of almost everything a woman’d value, with no prospect except waiting on Dick Moore all her life. Though, mind you, Mistress Blythe, I daresay she’d choose her life now, such as it is, rather than the life she lived with Dick before he went away. That’s something a clumsy old sailor’s tongue mustn’t meddle with. But you’ve helped Leslie a lot—she’s a different creature since you come to Four Winds. Us old friends see the difference in her, as you can’t. Miss Cornelia and me was talking it over the other day, and it’s one of the mighty few p’ints that we
