There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison
Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had
been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her
father had not been the same since.
He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at
her, however. He was very gentle with her.
And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when
Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there
would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding
and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a
little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and
closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house,
safe and cared for.
That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house
of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone
outside, cold and frightened.
She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.
The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics,
but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however,
avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and
her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a
time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and
she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.
"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,"
she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car
to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.
Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the
day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to
feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin
high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house
on the hill could she drop her pose.
She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison
Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were,
of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had
deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been
any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not
beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the
thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had
there found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when he
talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit
and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.