CHAPTER XLIII
WHEREIN WE FIND GRANT ADAMS CALLING UPON KENYON’S MOTHER, AND DARKNESS FALLS UPON TWO LOVERS
Once in a while an item appeared in the Harvey Tribune that might have been found nowhere else, and for reasons. For instance, the issue of the Tribune that contained the account of the Captain’s party also contained this item, which Daniel Sands had kept out of every other paper in town:
“Mortimer Sands, son of D. Sands of the Traders’ Bank, has returned from Arizona, where he has been seeking health. He is hopeful of ultimate recovery.”
Another item of interest appeared in the same issue of the paper. It related that T. Van Dorn, former Judge of the District Court, is in Washington, D. C., on legal business.
The Adams family item, which the paper never failed to contain, was this:
“K. Adams will leave next week for New York, where his new opera, ‘Rachel,’ will have its first appearance next autumn. He will be missed in our midst.”
And for a paper with no subscribers and no patronage, it is curious to note that the Tribune carried the news above mentioned to all of Harvey, and all of Harvey discussed the news. Not that the town did not know more or less of the facts as hereinabove related; but when a fact is read in print it becomes something different from a fact. It becomes a public matter, an episode in the history of the world.
In the same issue of the paper was a statement from Grant Adams that he had decided to throw his life with the Socialists and with that group known as the revolutionary Socialists. Grant was enough of a personage, and the declaration was short enough and interesting enough, to give it a place in the newspapers of the country for a day. In the State where he lived, the statement created some comment–mostly adverse to Dr. Nesbit, whose political association with Grant Adams had linked the Doctor’s name with Grant’s. Being out of power, Dr. Nesbit felt these flings. So it happened that when, the Sunday following the announcement, Grant came with his father and Kenyon in the rattling old buggy up to the Nesbit home on Elm Street, Amos Adams found a rollicking, frivolous, mischievous host–but Grant Adams found a natty, testy, sardonic old man, who made no secret of his ill-humor.
Kenyon found Lila, and the two with their music indoors made a background for the talk on the veranda. Nathan Perry, who came up for a pill or a powder for one of his flock, sat for a time on the veranda steps. For all his frivoling with the elder Adams, Nathan could see by the way the loose, wrinkled skin on the Doctor’s face kept twitching when Grant spoke, that the old man had something on his mind.
“Grant,” cried the Doctor, in his excited treble, “do you realize what an ornate, unnecessary, unmitigated conspicuous, and elaborate jack you’ve made of yourself? Do you–young man? Well, you have. Your revolution–your revolution!” shrilled the old man. “Damn sight of revolution you’ll kick up charging over the country with your water-tank patriots–your–your box-car statesmen–now, won’t you?”
“Here–Doctor,–come–be–”
But the Doctor would not let Grant talk. The chirrup of the shrill old voice bore in upon the younger man’s protest with, “Now, you let me say my say. The world’s moving along–moving pretty fast and generally to one end, and that end is to put food in the bellies, clothes on the back, and brains in the head of the working man. The whole trend of legislation all over the world has gone that way. Hell’s afire, Grant–what more do you want? We’ve given you the inheritance tax and the income tax and direct legislation to manipulate it, and, by Ned, instead of staying with the game and helping us work these things out in wise administration, you fly the coop, and go squawking over the country with your revolution and leave me–damn it, Grant,” piped the little, high voice, sputtering with rage, “you leave me–with my linen pants on a clothes-line four miles from home!”
Then slowly the little lines began to break in his loose skin. A faint smile, then a grin and then a laugh, spread over the old face, and he wiped his watering eyes as he shook his head mournfully.
Grant was gathering himself to reply when Nate Perry rasped in with his high-keyed Yankee voice: “I guess that about covers my views, Grant–if any one should ask you.”
The crusader rose in Grant: “It’s you men who have no sense,” he cried. “You think because I declare war on the profit system that I propose to sail out and overturn it with a few bombs over night. Look here, men; what I propose to do is to demonstrate right here in the Wahoo Valley, where there are all sorts of laboring people, skilled, unskilled, continuous, overpaid and underpaid, foreign and American–utterly unlike, incoherent, racially and industrially–that they have in them capacities for organizing; unused abilities, untried talents that will make them worthy to take a higher place in the economic scale than they now have. If I can amalgamate them, if I can weld them into a consistent, coherent labor mass–the Irish, the Slav, the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, the French, the Dutch, the Letts, and the Mexicans–put to some purpose the love of the poor for the poor, so that it will count industrially, you can’t stop the revolution.” He was wagging his head, waving his stump of an arm and his face showed the temperamental excitement that was in him.
“Go ahead, Grant,” said Perry. “Play out all your line–show us your game.”
“Well, then–here’s my game. For five years we’ve been collecting a district strike fund–all our own, that doesn’t belong to any other organization or federation anywhere. It’s ours here in the Wahoo. It’s independent of any state or national control. I’ve collected it. It’s been paid because these men here in the Valley have faith in me. We have practically never spent a penny of it. There are about ten thousand workers in the Valley–some, like the glassblowers, are the aristocracy of labor; others, like the breaker boys, are at the bottom of the scale. But we’ve kept wages up, kept conditions as high as they are anywhere in the country–and we’ve done it without strikes. They have faith in me. So we’ve assessed them according to their wages, and we have on hand, with assessments and interest, over a third of a million dollars.”
He looked at Perry, and nodded his head at the Doctor. “You fellows think I’m a cream-puff reformer. I’m not. Now, then–I’ve talked it over with our board–we are going to invest that money in land up and down the Valley–put the women and children and old men on it–in tents–during the growing season, and cultivate that land in three-acre tracts intensively. Our Belgian glassblowers and smelter men have sent for their gardeners to teach us. Now it’s merely a question of getting the land and doing the preliminary organization. We want to get as much land as we can. Now, there’s my game. With that kind of a layout we can win any strike we call. And we can prove to the world that labor has the cohesive coöperating faculty required to manage the factories–to take a larger share of the income of industry, if you please. That’s my revolution, gentlemen. And it’s going to begin right here in the Wahoo Valley.”
“Well,” returned Nate Perry, “your revolution looks interesting. It’s got some new gears, at least.”
“Go it while you’re young,” piped the Doctor. “In just about eighteen months, you will be coming to me to go on your bond–to keep out of jail. I’ve seen new-fangled revolutions peter out before.”
“Just the same,” replied Grant, “I’ve pinned my faith to these men and women. They are now working in fear of poverty. Give them hope of better things instead of fear and they will develop out of poverty, just as the middle class came out under the same stimulus.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” interrupted Perry, “but I do know that I could take that money and put three thousand families to work on the land in the Wahoo Valley and develop the best labor in the country.”
He laughed, and Grant gazed, almost flared, so eager was his look, at Perry for a moment, and said: “When the day of the democracy of labor comes–and it will come and come soon–men like you will take leadership.”
There was more high talk, and Nathan Perry went home with his pill.
When he was gone, the music from indoors came to the three men. “That’s from his new opera, father,” said Grant, as his attention was attracted to the violin and piano.
“Good Lord,” exclaimed the Doctor, “I’ve heard so much of that opera that I caught myself prescribing a bar from the opening chorus for the grip the other day!”
The two elder men looked at each other, and the Doctor said, “Well, Amos–that’s mostly why I asked you to come up to-day. It wasn’t for the society of your amateur revolutionist–you may be sure of that.”
The Doctor tempered his words with a smile, but they had pricks, and Grant winced. “I suppose we may as well consider Lila and Kenyon as before the house?”
“Kenyon came to me last night,” said Grant, “wanting to know whether he should come to father first, or go to Dr. Nesbit, or–well, he wondered if it would be necessary to talk with Lila’s own father.” All the grimness in Grant’s countenance melted as he spoke of Kenyon and the battered features softened.
“And that is what I wish to talk about, Grant,” said the Doctor gently. “They don’t know who Kenyon is–I mean, they don’t know about his parentage.” Grant looked at the floor. Slowly as the old shame revived in him, its flush rose from his neck to his face and met his tousled hair. The two old men looked seriously at one another. The Doctor emphasized the solemnity of the occasion by lighting a pipe.
“I don’t know–I really don’t know what is right here,” he said finally. “Is it fair to Laura to let her daughter marry the son of a woman who, more than any other woman in the world, has wronged her? I’m sure Laura cherishes no malice toward Kenyon’s mother. Yet, of course,” the Doctor spoke deliberately and puffed between his words, “blood is blood. But I don’t know how much blood is blood, I mean how much of what we call heredity in human beings is due to actual blood transmission of traits, and how much is due to the development of traits by family environment. I’m not sure, Amos, that this boy’s bad blood has not been entirely eliminated by the kindly, beautiful family environment he has had with you and yours. There seems to be nothing of the Müllers in him, but his face and his music–I take it his music is of German origin.”
“I don’t know–I don’t know, Doctor,” answered Amos. “I’ve tried to take him apart, and put him together again, but I can’t find where the parts belong.”
And so they droned on, those three wiseacres–two oldish gentlemen and a middle-aged man, thinking they could change or check or dam the course of true love. While inside at the piano on the tide of music that was washing in from God only knows what bourne where words are useless and passions speak the primitive language of souls, Lila and Kenyon were solving all the problems set for them by their elders and betters. For they lived in another world from those who established themselves in the Providence business out on the veranda. And on this earth, even in the same houses, and in the same families, there is no communication between the worlds. With our powerful lenses of memory we men and women in our forties gaze earnestly and long at the distant planets of youth, wondering if they are really inhabited by real people–or mere animals, perchance–if they have human institutions, reasonable aspirations or finite intelligences. We take temperatures, make blood counts and record blood pressure, reckon the heart-beats, and think we are wondrous wise. But wig-wag as we may, signal with what mysterious wireless of evanescent youth-fire we still hold in our blood, we get nothing but vague hints, broken reminiscences, and a certain patchwork of our own subconscious chop logic of middle age in return. There is no real communication between the worlds. Youth remains another planet–even as age and childhood are other planets.
Now, after the three wise men had considered the star glowing before them, they decided thus:
“Well,” quoth the Doctor, “it seems absolutely just that Lila should know who her husband is, and that Laura should know whom her child is marrying. So far as I am concerned, I know this Adams blood; I’ll trust it to breed out any taint; but I have no right to decide for Lila; I have no right to say what Laura will do–though, Grant, I know in my heart that she would rather have her child marry yours than to have anything else come about that the world could hold for her. And yet–she should know the truth.”
Grant sat with his head bowed, and his eyes on the floor, while the Doctor spoke. Without looking up, he said: “There’s some one else to consider, Doctor–there’s Margaret–after all, it’s her son; it’s her secret. It’s–I don’t know what her rights are–perhaps she’s forfeited them. But she is at least physically his mother.”
The Doctor looked up with a troubled face. He ran his hand over the place where his pompadour once used to rise, and where only a fuzz responded to the stroke of his dry palm, and answered:
“Grant–through it all–through all the tragedy that she has brought here, I’ve kept that secret for Margaret. And until she releases me, I can never break my silence. A doctor–one of the right sort–never could. Whatever you feel are her rights–you and she must settle. It must be you, not I, to tell this story, even to my own flesh and blood, Grant.”
Grant rose and walked the long, straight stretch of the veranda. His shoulders, pugnacious, aggressive, and defiant, swayed as he walked heavily and he gazed at the floor as one in shame. Finally he whirled toward the Doctor and said:
“I’m going to his mother. I’m going now. She may have mighty few rights in this matter–she cast him off shamefully. But she has just one right here–the right to know that I shall tell her secret to Laura, and I’m going to talk to her before I tell Laura. Even if Margaret clamors against what I think is right, I shall not stop. But I’m not going to sneak her secret away without her knowing it. I suppose that’s about the extent of her rights in Kenyon: to know before I tell his wife who he really is, so that Margaret will know who knows and who does not know her relation to him. It seems to me that is about the justice of the case.” The Doctor puffed at his pipe, and nodded a slow assent.
“Now’s as good a time as any,” answered the Doctor, and added: “By the way, Amos–I had a telegram from Washington this morning, saying that Tom is to be made Federal judge in the new district. That’s what he’s doing in Washington just now. He is one of those ostensible fellows,” piped the Doctor. “Ostensibly he’s there trying to help land another man; but Tom’s the Van Dorn candidate.”
He smoked until his pipe revived and added, “Well, Tom can afford it; he’s got all the money he needs.”
Grant, who heard the Doctor’s news, did not seem to be disturbed by it. His mind was occupied with more personal matters. He stood by a pillar, looking off into the summer day.
“Well, I suppose,” he looked at his clothes, brushed the dust from the top of his shoes by rubbing them separately against the calves of his legs, straightened his ready-made tie and felt of the buttons on his vest, “I suppose,” he repeated, “I may just as well go now as at any other time,” and he strode down the steps and made straight for the Van Dorn home.
When he came to the Van Dorn house he saw Margaret sitting alone in the deep shade of a vine-screened piazza. She wore a loose flowing purple house garment, of a bizarre pattern which accented her physical charms. But not until he had begun to mount the steps before her did he notice that she was sound asleep in a gaping and disenchanting stupor. Yet his footstep aroused her, and she started and gazed wildly at him: “Why–why–you–why, Grant!”
“Yes, Margaret,” he answered as he stood hat in hand on the top step before her, ignoring her trembling and the terror in her eyes. “I’ve come to have a talk with you–about Kenyon.”
She looked about her, listened a second, shuddered, and said with quivering facial muscles and shaky voice, “Yes–oh, yes–about Kenyon–yes–Kenyon Adams. Yes, I know.”
The eyes she turned on him were dull and her face was slumped, as though the soul had gone from it. A tremor was visible in her hands, and the color was gone from her drooping lips. She stared at him for a moment, stupidly, then irritation came into her voice, as he sat unbidden in a porch chair near her. “I didn’t tell you to sit down.”
“No.” He turned his face and caught her eyes. “But I’ll be comfortable sitting down, and we’ve got more or less talking to do.”
He could see that she was perturbed, and fear wrote itself all over her face. But he did not know that she was vainly trying to get control of herself. The power of the little brown pellets left her while she slept, and she was uncertain of herself and timid. “I–I’m sick–well–I–I–why, I can’t talk to you now. Go ’way,” she cried. “Go ’way, won’t you, please–please go ’way, and come some other time.”
“No–now’s as good a time as any,” he replied. “At any rate, I’ll tell you what’s on my mind. Mag, now pay attention.” He turned his face to her. “The time has come when Lila Van Dorn and her mother must know who Kenyon is.”
She looked vacantly at him, then started and chattered, “Wh-wh-wh-wha-what are you s-s-sas-saying–do you mean?”
She got up, closed the door into the house, and came tottering back and stood by her chair, as the man answered:
“I mean, Maggie, exactly what I said. Kenyon wants to marry Lila. But I think, and Doctor Nesbit thinks, that before it is settled, Lila and her mother, and you might as well include Mrs. Nesbit, must know just who their daughter is marrying–I mean what blood. Now do you get my idea?”
As he spoke, the woman, clutching at her chair back, tried to quiet her fluttering hands. But she began panting and a sickly pallor overcame her and she cried feebly: “Oh, you devil–you devil–will you never let me alone?”
He answered, “Look here, Mag–what’s the matter with you? I’m only trying to play fair with you. I wouldn’t tell ’em until you–”
“Ugh!” She shut her eyes. “Grant–wait a minute. I must get my medicine. I’ll be back.” She turned to go. “Oh, wait a minute–I’ll be back in five minutes–I promise, honest to God, I’ll be right back, Grant.” She was at the door. As she fumbled with the screen, he nodded his assent and smiled grimly as he said, “All right, Maggie.”
When he was alone, he looked about him, at the evidence of the Van Dorn money in the temple of Love. The outdoor room was furnished with luxuries he had never seen. He sniffed as though he smelled the money that was evident everywhere. Beside Margaret’s chair, where she had dropped it when she went to sleep, was a book. It was a beautifully bound copy of the Memoirs of some titled harlot of the old French court. He was staring absent-mindedly at the floor where the book lay when she came to the door.
She came out, sat down, looked steadily at him and began calmly: “Now, what is it you desire?”
She said “desiah,” and Grant grunted as she went on: “I’m shuah no good can come and only hahm, great suffering–and Heaven knows what wrong, by this–miserable plan. What good can it do?”
Her changed attitude surprised him. “Well, now, Maggie,” he returned, “since you want to talk it over sensibly, I’ll tell you how we feel–at least how I feel. The chief business of any proper marriage is children. This marriage between Kenyon and Lila–if it comes–should bring forth fruit. I claim Lila has a right to know that he has my blood and yours in him before she goes into a life partnership with him.”
“Oh, Grant, Grant,” cried Margaret passionately, “the sum of your hair-splitting is this: that you bring shame upon your child’s mother, and then cant like a Pharisee about its being for a good purpose. That’s the way with you–you–you–” She could not quite finish the sentence.
She sat breathing fast, waiting for strength to come to her from the fortifying little pill. Grant picked up his hat. “Well–I’ve told you. That’s what I came for.”
She caught his arm and cried, “Sit down–haven’t I a right to be heard? Hasn’t a mother any rights–”
“No,” cut in Grant, “not when she strangles her motherhood!”
“But how could I take my motherhood without disgracing my boy?” she asked.
He met her eyes. They were steady eyes, and were brightening. The man stared at her and answered: “When I brought him to you after mother died, a little, toddling, motherless boy, when I wanted you to come with us to mother him–and I didn’t want you, Maggie, any more than you wanted me, but I thought his right to a mother was greater than either of our rights to our choice of mates–then and there, you made your final choice.”
“What does God mean,” she whined, “by hounding me all my life for that one mistake!”
“Maggie–Maggie,” answered the man, sitting down as she sank into a chair, “it wasn’t the one mistake that has made you unhappy.”
“That’s twaddle,” she retorted, “sheer twaddle. Don’t I know how that child has been a cancer in my very heart–burning and gnawing and making me wretched? Don’t I know?”
“No, you don’t, Mag. If you want the truth,” replied Grant bluntly, “you looked upon the boy as a curse. He has threatened you every day of your life. The very love you think you have for him, which I don’t doubt for a minute, Mag, made you do a mad, foolish, infinitely cruel, spiteful thing–that night at the South Harvey riot. Perhaps you might care for Kenyon’s affection now, but you can’t have that even remotely. For all his interest in you is limited by the fact that you robbed Lila of her father. All your cancer and heart burnings, Mag, have been your own selfishness. Lord, woman–I know you.”
He turned his hard gaze upon her and she winced. But she clearly was enjoying the quarrel. It stimulated her taut nerves. The house behind her was empty. She felt free to brawl.
“And you? And you?” she jeered. “I suppose he’s made a saint of you.”
The man’s face softened, as he said simply, “I don’t claim to be a saint, Mag. But I owe Kenyon everything I am in the world–everything.”
“Well, it isn’t much of a debt,” she laughed.
“No,” he repeated, “it’s not much of a debt.” After a moment he added, “Doctor Nesbit has kept this secret all these years. Now it’s time to let these people know. You can see why, and the only reason I came to you–”
“You came to me, Grant,” she cried, “to tell me you were going to shame me before that–that–before her–that old, yellow-haired tabby, who goes around doing good! Ugh–”
Grant stared at her blankly a full, uncomprehensive minute. Finally Margaret went on: “And I suppose the next thing you long-nosed busybodies will do will be to get chicken hearted about Tom Van Dorn’s rights in the matter. Ah, you hypocrites!” she cried.
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Grant sternly; “if Lila should go to her father for advice–why shouldn’t he have all the facts?”
Margaret rose. Her bright, glassy eyes flashed. Anger colored her face. Her bosom rose and fell as she exclaimed: “But she’ll not go to him. Oh, he’s perfectly foolish about her. Every time a photographer in this town takes her picture, he snoops around and gets one. He has her picture in his watch, in which he thinks she looks like the Van Dorns. When he goes away he takes her picture in a leather frame and puts it on his table in the hotel–except when I’m around.” She laughed. “Ain’t it funny? Ain’t it funny,” she chattered hysterically, “him doddering the way he does about her, and her freezing the life out of him?” She shook with mirth, and went on: “Oh, the devil’s coming round for Tom Van Dorn’s soul–and all there is of it–all there is of it is the little green spot where he loves this brat. The rest’s all rotted out!”
She laughed foolishly. Then Grant said:
“Well, Mag–I must be going. I just thought it would be square to tell you before I go any further. About the other–the affair of Lila and her father is no concern of mine. That’s for Lila and her mother to settle. But you and I and Kenyon are bound together by the deepest tie in the world, Maggie. And I had to come to you.” She stared into his gnarled face, then shut her eyes, and in an instant wherein they were closed she lapsed into her favorite pose and disappeared behind her mask.
“Vurry kind of you, I’m shuah. Chahmed to have this little talk again.”
He gazed at the empty face, saw the drugged eyes, and the smirking mouth, and felt infinitely sad as a flash of her girlhood came back to his memory. “Well, good-by, Mag,” he said gently, and turned and went down the steps.
The messenger boy whom Grant Adams passed as he went down the walk to the street from the Van Dorn home, put a telegram into Mrs. Van Dorn’s lap. It was from Washington and read:
“Appointment as Federal Judge assured. Notify Sands. Have Calvin prepare article for Monday’s Times and other papers.”
She re-read it, held it in her hand for a time as she looked hungrily into the future.
While Grant Adams and Margaret were talking, the two old men on the porch, who once would have grappled with the problems of the great first cause, dropped into cackling reminiscences of the old days of the sixties and seventies when they were young men in their twenties and Harvey was an unbleached yellow pine stain on the prairie grass. So they forgot the flight of time, and forgot that indoors the music had stopped, and that two young voices were cooing behind the curtains. Upstairs, Laura Van Dorn and her mother, reading, tried with all their might and main to be oblivious to the fact that the music had stopped, and that certain suppressed laughs and gasps and long, silent gaps in the irregular conversation meant rather too obvious love-making for an affair which had not been formally recognized by the family. Yet the formality was all that was lacking. For if ever an affair of the heart was encouraged, was promoted, was greeted with everything but hurrahs and hosannas by the family of the lady thereunto appertaining, it was the love affair of Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn.
The youth and the maiden below stairs were exceedingly happy. They went through the elaborate business of love-making, from the first touch of thrilling fingers to such passionately rapturous embraces as they might steal half watched and half tolerated, and the mounting joy in their hearts left no room for fear of the future. As they sat toying and frivoling behind the curtains of the wide living room in the Nesbit home, they saw Grant Adams’s big, awkward figure hurrying across the lawn. He walked with stooping shoulders and bowed head, and held his claw hand behind him in his flinty, red-haired hand.
“Where has he been?” asked Kenyon, as he peered through the open curtain, with his arm about the girl.
“I don’t know. The Mortons aren’t at home this afternoon; they all went out in the Captain’s big car,” answered the girl.
“Well,–I wonder–” mused the youth.
Lila snatched the window curtain, and closing it, whispered: “Quick–quick–we don’t care–quick–they may come in when he gets on the porch.”
Through a thin slit in the closed curtains they watched the gaunt figure climb the veranda steps and they heard the elders ask:
“Well?” and the younger man replied, “Nothing–nothing–” he repeated, “but heartbreak.”
Then he added as he walked to the half-open door, “Doctor–it seems to me that I should go to Laura now; to Laura and her mother.”
“Yes,” returned the Doctor, “I suppose that is the thing to do.”
Grant’s hand was on the door screen, and the Doctor’s eyes grew bright with emotion, as he called:
“You’re a trump, boy.”
The two old men looked at each other mutely and watched the door closing after him. Inside, Grant said: “Lila–ask your mother and grandmother if they can come to the Doctor’s little office–I want to speak to them.” After the girl had gone, Grant stood by Kenyon, with his arm about the young man, looking down at him tenderly. When he heard the women stirring above on the stairs, Grant patted Kenyon’s shoulder, while the man’s face twitched and the muscles of his hard jaw worked as though he were chewing a bitter cud.
The three, Grant and the mother and the mother’s mother, left the lovers in such awe as love may hold in the midst of its rapture, and when the office door had closed, and the women were seated, Grant Adams, who stood holding to a chair back, spoke:
“It’s about Kenyon. And I don’t know, perhaps I should have spoken sooner. But I must speak now.”
The two women gazed inquiringly at him with sympathetic faces. He was deeply embarrassed, and his embarrassment seemed to accentuate a kind of caste difference between them.
“Yes, Grant,” said Mrs. Nesbit, “of course, we know about Lila and Kenyon. Nothing in the world could please us more than to see them happy together.”
“I know, ma’am,” returned Grant, twirling his chair nervously. “That’s just the trouble. Maybe they can’t be happy together.”
“Why, Grant,” exclaimed Laura, “what’s to hinder?”
“Stuff!” sniffed Mrs. Nesbit.
He looked up then, and the two women could see that he flinched.
“Well,–I don’t know how to say it, but you must know it.” He stopped, and they saw anguish in his face. “But I–Laura,” he turned to the younger woman and made a pitiful gesture with his whole hand, “do you remember back when you were a girl away at school and I stopped writing to you?”
“Yes, Grant,” replied Laura, “so well–so well, and you never would say–”
“Because I had no right to,” he cut in, “it was not my secret–to tell–then.”
Mrs. Nesbit sat impatiently on her chair edge, as one waiting for a foolish formality to pass. She looked at the clumsy, bulky figure of a man in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and obviously was rather irritated at his ill-timed interjection of his own childhood affair into an entirely simple problem of true love running smoothly. But her daughter, seeing the anguish in the man’s twisted face, was stricken with a terror in her heart. Laura knew that no light emotion had grappled him, and when her mother said, “Well?” sharply, the daughter rose and went to him, touching his hand gently that had been gripping the chair-back. She said, “Yes, Grant, but why do you have to tell it now?”