She had seen it from the minute when he began to tell his halting tale about Claude. It was pitiful the way in which he had betrayed himself.

From Fay she had got no more than a hint--a hint she had been quick to collate with her knowledge of some secret grief on Thor's part; but she hadn't been really sure of the truth till she saw he was trying to hide it. That Thor should be trying to hide anything made her burn inwardly with something more poignant than humiliation.

She had smiled when he looked so imploringly toward her, but she hardly knew why. Perhaps it was to encourage him, to give him heart. For the first time in her life she felt the stronger, the superior. She was sorry for him, even though there was something about this new and unexpected phase in him that she despised.

She had got no further than that when the guests came and she had to give them her attention. When they left, and Thor was seeing them to the door, she took the opportunity to slip up to her room again. She locked the door behind her, and locked the door that communicated with his dressing-room. Once more she took her stand before the pier-gla.s.s.

Something had come to her; she was sure of it. It had come almost since that afternoon. If it was not beauty, it rendered beauty of no importance. It was a spirit, a fire, that made her a woman who could be proud, a woman a man might be proud of. She had come to her own at last.

She could see for herself that there was a subdued splendor about her which raised her in the scale of personality. She had little vanity; hitherto she had had little pride; but she knew now, with an a.s.surance which it would have been hypocritical to disguise, that she was the true mate of the man she had taken Thor to be. She had known it before--diffidently and apologetically. She knew it now calmly, and as a matter of course, in a manner that did away with any necessity for shrinking or self-depreciation.

She moved away from the mirror, taking off the string of small pearls she wore and throwing them on the dressing-table. In the middle of the room she stood with a feeling of helplessness. It was so difficult to see what she ought to do. What was one's duty toward a husband who had practically told her that he had married her only because he couldn't marry a woman he loved better? Other questions began to rise within her, questions and protests and flashes of indignation, but she beat them back, standing in an att.i.tude of reflection, and trying to discern the first steps of her way. She knew that the emotions she was keeping under would a.s.sert themselves in time, but just now she wanted only to see what she ought to do during the next half-hour.

There came into her mind what Uncle Sim had said at supper--"Just got to say _Abba--Father_, and see." She shook her head. She couldn't say _Abba--Father_ at present. She didn't know why--but she couldn't.

Whatever the pa.s.sion within her, it was nothing she could bring before a Throne of Grace. It crossed her mind that if she prayed at all that night she would pa.s.s this whole matter over. And in that case, why pray at all?

And yet the thought of omitting her prayers disturbed her. If she did it to-night, why not to-morrow night? And if to-morrow night, where would it end? It was not a convincing argument, but it drew her toward her bedside.

Even then she didn't kneel down, but clung to one of the tall, fluted posts that supported a canopy. She couldn't pray. She didn't know what to pray for. Conventional pet.i.tions would have had no meaning, and for the moment she had no others to offer up. It was but half consciously that she found herself stammering: "_Abba--Father! Abba--Father!_" her lips moving dumbly to the syllables.

It brought her no relief. It gave her neither immediate light on her way nor any new sense of power. She was as dazed as ever, and as indignant.

And yet when she raised herself from the weary clinging to the fluted post she went to both the doors she had locked and unlocked them.

CHAPTER XXIV

The consciousness of something to be suppressed was with Lois when she woke. "Not yet! Not yet!" was the warning of her subliminal self whenever resentments and indignations endeavored to escape control.

With Thor she kept to subjects that had no personal bearing, clearly to his relief. At breakfast they talked of the Mexican rising under Madero, which was discussed in the papers of that morning. She knew that the question in his mind was, "Does she really know?" but she betrayed nothing that would help him to an answer.

When, after having kissed her with a timid, apologetic affection which partly touched and partly angered her, he left for the office, she put on a hat and, taking a parasol, went to see Dr. Hilary.

The First Parish Church, the oldest in the village, stands in a gra.s.sy delta where two of the rambling village lanes enter the Square. The white, barn-like nave, with its upper and lower rows of small, oblong windows, retires discreetly within a grove of elms, while a tall, slim spire grows slimmer through diminishing tiers of arches, balconies, and lancet lights till it dwindles away into a high, graceful pinnacle.

Behind the church, in the widest section of the delta, the parsonage, a white wooden box dating from the fifties supporting a smaller box by way of cupola, looks across garden, shrubbery, and lawn to Schoolhouse Lane, from which nothing but the simplest form of wooden rail protects the inclosure.

It was the time for bulbs to be in flower, and the spring perennials.

Tulips in a wide, dense ma.s.s bordered the brick pavement that led from the gate to the front door. Elsewhere could be seen daffodils, irises, peonies just bursting into bloom, and long, drooping curves of bleeding-heart hung with rose-and-white pendents. By a corner of the house the ground was indigo-dark with a thick little patch of squills.

It was a relief to Lois to find the old man himself, bareheaded and in an alpaca house-jacket, rooting out weeds on the lawn, his thin, gray locks tossed in the breeze. On seeing her pause and look over the clump of wiegelia, which at this point smothered the rail, he raised himself, dusted the earth from his hands, and went forward. They talked at first just as they stood, with the budding shrubs between them.

"Oh, Dr. Hilary, I'm so anxious about Rosie Fay."

"Are you now?" As neither age nor gravity could subdue the twinkle in his eyes, so sympathy couldn't quench it. "Well, I am meself."

"I think if I could see her I might be able to help her. Or, rather,"

she went on, nervously, "I think I ought to see her, whether I can help her or not. Have you seen her?"

"I have not," he declared, with Irish emphasis. "The puss takes very good care that I sha'n't, so she does. She's only got to see me coming in the gate to fly off to Duck Rock; and that, so her mother tells me, is all they see of her till nightfall. It's three days now that she's been struck with a fit of melancholy, or maybe four."

"Do you know what the trouble is?"

He evaded the question. "Do you?"

"I do--partly."

"Then you'll be the one to tackle her. As yet I haven't asked. I prefer to know no more about people than what they tell me themselves."

She found it possible to secure his aid on the unexplained ground that there had been a misunderstanding between her husband and herself, on the one side, and Jasper Fay on the other. "I don't _know_ that I can help her. I dare say I can't. But if I could only see her--"

"Well, then, you shall see her. Just wait a minute while I change me coat and I'll go along with you."

On the way up the hill Lois questioned him about the Fays. "Did you know much of the boy?"

"Enough to see that he wasn't a thief--not by nature, that is. He's what might have been expected from his parents--the stuff out of which they make revolutionists and anarchists. He came into the world with desires thwarted, as you might say, and a detairmination to get even. He didn't steal; he took money. He took money because they needed it at home, and other people had it. He took it more in protest than in greed, if that's any excuse for him."

"The mother is better, isn't she?"

"She's clothed and in her right mind, if she'll only stay that way. She gets into one of her old tantrums every now and then; but I'm in hopes that the daughter's trouble will end them."

This hope seemed to be partially fulfilled in the welcoming way in which the door was opened to their knock. "I've brought you me friend, Mrs.

Thor Masterman," was the old gentleman's form of introduction. "She wants to see Rosie. If Fay makes any trouble, tell him it's my wish."

"I've really only come to see Rosie, Mrs. Fay," Lois explained, not without nervousness, when the two women were alone on the door-step.

"No, I won't go in, thank you, not if she's anywhere about the place.

I'm really very anxious to have a talk with her."

Having feared a hostile reception, she was relieved to be answered with a certain fierce cordiality. "I'm sure I hope you'll get it. It's more'n her father and I can do."

"Perhaps she'd talk to me. Girls often will talk to a--to a stranger, when they won't to one of their own."

"Well, you can try." In spite of the coldness of the handsome features, something in the nature of a new life, a new softening humanity, was struggling to a.s.sert itself. "_We_ can't get a word out of her. She'll neither speak, nor sleep, nor eat, nor do a hand's turn. It's the work that bothers me most--not so much that it needs to be done as because it'd be a relief to her." She added, with a shy wistfulness that contrasted oddly with the hard glint in her eyes, "I've found that out myself."

"Have you any idea where she is?"

She pointed toward Duck Rock. "Oh, I suppose she's over there. She was to have picked the cuc.u.mbers this morning, but I see she hasn't done it."

"Has Mr. Fay told you what the trouble is?"

"Well, he has. But then he's so romantic. Always was. Land's sake! I don't pay any attention to young people's goings-on. Seen too much of it in my own day. I don't say that the young fellow hasn't been foolish--and I don't say--you'll excuse me!--that Rosie ain't just as good as he is, even if he _is_ Archie Masterman's son--"

"Oh no, nor I," Lois hastened to interpose.

"But there's nothing wrong. I've asked her--and I _know_. I'm sure of it."

Lois spoke eagerly. "Oh yes; so am I."

"So that there's that." She went on with a touch of her old haughtiness of spirit: "And she's every mite as good as he is. It's all nonsense, Fay's talking as if it was some young lord who'd jilted a girl beneath him. Young lord, indeed! I'll young lord him, if he ever comes my way. I tell Rosie not to demean herself to grieve for them that are no better than herself. It's nothing but romantics," she explained further. "I've no patience with Fay--talking as if some one ought to shoot some one or commit murder. That's the way Matt began. Fay ought to know better at his time of life. I declare he has no more sense than Rosie."