But it was a lifetime. He was not a boy any more, to have to endure his elders making decisions for him. His future was his own, and he had earned the right to that. Drew did not know that his face had hardened, that he suddenly looked a stranger to the woman who was watching him with concern.
"Please, Drew, you mustn't allow yourself to be so bitter—"
"Bitter? About Red Springs, you mean? Lord, I never wanted the place. I hate every brick of it, and I think I always have. But I don't hate Forbes or Aunt Marianna if that's what you're afraid of. It's just that I have no place there any more."
Her mouth tightened. "But you have! You owe it to Marianna to listen to her now. This is important, Drew, more important than you can guess. No, Boyd—" her gesture checked her son as he arose from the chair—"this is none of your affair. Come with me, Drew!"
He picked up a borrowed coat, also much too wide for him, pulled it on over the bunchiness of his shirt, and followed her, swallowing what he knew to be a useless protest.
The parlor was as bright with sun as the upper room had been. As Drew entered a pace or two behind Cousin Merry, the officer in blue strode away from the hearth to meet them. But Aunt Marianna forestalled her husband's greeting, rising suddenly from a chair, her crinoline rustling across the carpet. She held out her hands, and then hesitated, studying Drew's face, looking a little daunted, as if she had expected something she did not find. The assurance she had displayed at their last meeting on the Lexington road was missing.
"Drew?"
He bowed, conscious that he must present an odd figure in the ill-fitting clothing of Meredith Barrett's long dead husband.
Major Forbes held out his hand. "Welcome home, my boy."
My boy. Consciously or unconsciously the major's tone strove to thrust Drew into the past, or so he believed. The major might almost be considering Drew an unruly schoolboy now safely out of some scrape, welcome indeed if he would settle down quietly into the conventional mold of Oak Hill or Red Springs. But he was no schoolboy, and at that moment the parlor of Oak Hill, for all its luxury and warmth, was a box sealing him in stifling confinement which he could no longer endure. Drew held tight control over that resurgence of his old impatience, knowing that his first instinct had been right: the old life fitted him now no better than his coat. But he answered civilly: