“But Dr. Wallace’s father was rich, probably, and you are not,” said Mrs. Ives.
“I feel able to meet all the necessary expenses, and I can trust David not to be extravagant.”
“New Hampshire is so far away! And it will be so long before we see David again!”
“We shall hope to see him in the Christmas vacation.”
“Yes, of course. But I can’t help feeling that David will be leaving home for good; he will be coming back to us now only for visits! You don’t want to go, do you, David?”
“I don’t know, mother,” David said, torn by various impulses. “Yes, I think I do.” And then he jumped up and, going behind her chair, put his arm round her and his face down on hers and kissed her.
That evening Dr. Ives had to go out on some professional calls; he chugged away in the shabby little second-hand automobile that he had bought three years before. “Some day, when all my patients pay their bills, I’ll get a new machine,” he was accustomed to remark to the family. He also was accustomed to declare that he rather enjoyed tinkering the old rattletrap.
Now David, sitting in the library and perusing the catalogue of St. Timothy’s School, suspected that for some time he had been the object of his father’s many economies. Turning over the pages, he resolved that he would justify his father’s faith in him, that he would work hard and not be extravagant, and that he would come home showing that he had profited by the opportunities given him by the family’s sacrifice. And as he turned the pages the thrill of eager anticipation grew stronger in him. He glanced over the long list of names—boys from all quarters of the country, boys even from far corners of the earth. David, who had never traveled more than forty miles from the city in which he had been born and brought up, and who had never known any boys except those in the immediate neighborhood of his home, felt a tingling of romance as he read the names.
While he read Ralph sat quiet over a storybook, and Mrs. Ives, with a pile of mending in her lap, worked at intervals and at intervals gazed wistfully at her older boy. He was her favorite, though she felt guilty in admitting it even in her heart; Ralph had always been more thoughtless, more unmanageable, a more trying kind of boy. It made her feel quite helpless to think of dealing with Ralph alone after David had gone. But that was not the worst to which she must look forward, that was not the saddening thought. What weighed her down was, as she had said, the premonition that when David went away it would be really for good and all. It would be years and years before home would be more than a place to which he made visits. Perhaps what was now, and always had been, his home would never really be his home again. And his father and his mother, who had always been so near to him, would never be so near to him again. Tears filled her eyes and fell unnoticed while David and Ralph read; she wiped them away furtively and determined to be brave. Perhaps it was all for the best, and she would not begrudge anything that was best for David. But it seemed such a doubtful venture,—and David’s father did not look well,—but she was not going to imagine that any more; it produced such a heaviness about the heart. She was going to try to be cheerful; she had never been cheerful enough.