"I shall let you find that out for yourself—as we go on."
"Oh! as we go on?"
"Yes, as we go on, Jennie. We're going on. Don't make any mistake about that. I know how you feel. Everything looks so dark to you now that you can't believe it will ever be light again; but it will be, Jennie. All families and all individuals go through these experiences—not as terrible as yours, perhaps—but terrible all the same. Not one of us is spared. Sometimes it seems to you as if you just couldn't go through with it; but you can. You must hang on—and bear it—and it will pass. That's what I'm here for—to help you to hang on—and, Jennie, clinging together, as we're doing, we'll come out to the light—even Teddy—and your mother. Oh, look! There the light is now—the light everlasting—that always comes back, if we only wait for it!"
At the pointing of his finger and his sudden cry she turned to face the eternal wonder of the moonrise.
[CHAPTER XXVI]
During the next few months, the necessity for bracing Teddy and his sisters to meet fate threw Bob Collingham's personal preoccupations more and more into the background. All that was implied by the fact that Jennie was his wife and he was her husband went into this single supreme task.
Habit came to his aid by fitting them all to the situation as though they had never been in any other. They grew used to the fact that Teddy was in jail and might come out of it only by one exit. Teddy grew used to it himself. The family, once more at Marillo, grew used to the odd arrangement by which Bob and Jennie worked together and lived apart. The Collinghams grew used to the thought of the Folletts, and the Folletts to that of the Collinghams.
"You get used to anything," Junia commented to her husband, as one who has made a new discovery. "It seems to me as if Edith's living in that flat on Cathedral Heights and keeping only one maid is all I'd ever dreamed for her."
To Bob, this wonting of the mind was the easier because Wray stayed in California, his absence making it possible to leave in abeyance the subjects that couldn't yet be touched upon.
The first chance of fortifying the three girls seemed to present itself on a night in that autumn when it was still warm enough to sit on the screened piazza. His car was, as usual, before the door, and in an hour or so he would be making his way to Marillo. As he had returned to his work at the bank, his spare time was now in the evenings.