CHAPTER XIII
AN AWAKENING
A little scrawl of a note, delivered just after breakfast at Mr. Elton’s door, brought Madeline to visit Mrs. Percival, who, like her mother, seemed to be in continual need of her.
She found that lady lying in her favorite chair in the library—the chair that had been her refuge in the days of her early widowhood, that had comfortably housed her when books carried her away from her own world of sorrows and problems into the world of illusions, the chair in which she had dreamed of the great things that were to come into a younger life, not her own, and yet deeply her own,—her son’s.
Now she lay back in it with clasped hands, thinner than usual and with eyes sadder. Madeline came in like a young Hebe, glowing with health and vigor, and infinitely tender toward fragility.
“You are ill, dear mother Percival,” cried the girl, dropping to her knees and slipping an arm behind her friend’s back in an unconscious attitude of protection.
Mrs. Percival’s fingers followed the soft curve that the girl’s hair made around her forehead.
“No, dear,” she said slowly, “but I had something to tell you. I wanted to speak to you myself, before any one else had the chance.”