"Isn't it strange?" asked Betty. "I was wondering about that while we were out at the Inn this evening. She was in such high spirits, that I thought of that line from Moore:
"'The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns,'
and thought if she should take sorrow as intensely as she does her pleasures, any great grief would overwhelm her."
They had been discussing the situation for more than an hour, when the door from the bedroom opened, and Mary came out. Her eyes were red and swollen as if she had been crying a week, but she was strangely calm and self-possessed. She had rushed away from them an impetuous child in an uncontrollable storm of grief. Now as she came in they all felt that some great change had taken place in her, even before she spoke. She seemed to have grown years older in that short time.
"I am going home to-morrow," she announced simply. "I would start to-night if it wasn't too late to get the Washington train. I shall have to go back there to pack up all my things."
"But, Mary," remonstrated Joyce, "mamma said not to. She said positively we were to stay here and you were to make the most of what is left to you of this year at school."
"I know," was the quiet answer. "I've thought it all over, and I've made up my mind. Of course you mustn't go back. For no matter if the company does pay the expenses of Jack's illness and allows him a pension or whatever it was mamma called it, for awhile, you couldn't make fifty cents there where you could make fifty dollars here. So for all our sakes you ought to stay. But as long as I can't finish my course, a few weeks more or less can't make any difference to me. And I know very well I am needed at home."
"But Jack—he'll be so disappointed if you don't get even one full year," argued Joyce, who had never been accustomed to Mary's deciding anything for herself. Even in the matter of hair-ribbons she had always asked advice as to which to wear.
"Oh, I can make it all right with Jack," said Mary confidently. "I wouldn't have one happy moment staying on at school knowing I was needed at home. And I am needed every hour, if for nothing more than to keep them all cheered up. When I think of how busy Jack has always been, and then those awful days and weeks and years ahead of him when he can't do anything but lie and think and worry, I'm afraid he'll almost lose his mind."