She found Courtney Barr seated in a large arm chair, her mother perched on the arm of it, one tiny foot in a silver slipper swinging with nervous rapidity. The man smiled bleakly, a smile that did not reach his cold gray eyes, as Sally took the nearby chair that he indicated.
“Mrs. Barr and I have been discussing your immediate future, Sally,” he began ponderously, in tones that he evidently thought were kind.
Institutional timidity closed down upon Sally; under those cold eyes she lost that ephemeral beauty of hers which depended so largely upon her emotions. It was her institutional voice—meekness hiding fear and rebellion—which answered: “Yes, sir.”
“Oh, let me talk to her, Court!” Enid begged. “You’re scaring my baby to death. He fancies himself as an old ogre, Sally darling, but he’s really a dear inside. You see, Sally, I was so eager to find my baby that I made no plans at all.”
Courtney Barr said, “I think I’d better do the talking after all, my dear. Your sentimentality—natural, of course, under the circumstances—would make it impossible for you to state the case clearly and convincingly.”
Sally’s cold hands clasped each other tightly in her lap as she stared with wide, frightened eyes at the man who was about to arrange her whole future for her.
“I have made Mrs. Barr understand how impossible it will be for us to take you into our home at once, as our adopted daughter,” Courtney Barr went on in his heavy, judicial voice.
Sally sprang to her feet, her eyes blazing in her white face. “I didn’t ask to be found, to be adopted!” she cried. “If you don’t want me, say so, and let me go back to David!”
It was the loving distress on Enid Barr’s quivering face that quickly brought Sally to bewildered, humiliated submission, rather than the cold anger and ill-concealed hatred in Courtney Barr’s pale gray eyes. Enid had left the arm of her husband’s chair and had drawn Sally to a little rose-up-holstered settee, and it was with her mother’s hand cuddling hers compassionately that Sally listened as the man’s heavy, judicial voice went on and on:
“I am sure, Sally, that when you have had time for reflection you will see my viewpoint. Naturally, your mother’s happiness means more to me than does yours, and I believe I know my wife well enough to state positively that a newspaper scandal or even gossip among our own circle would cause her the most acute distress. It shall be our task, Sally, to see that she is spared such distress.