Mrs. Marshall sprang up and approached him with an anxious face. He shook his head: "Too late. Disappeared. No trace."
She sat down again, looking sad and stern.
Professor Marshall put on his hat with violence, and went away.
When he came home to luncheon there was a fresh sensation, and again a disagreeable one. He brought the astounding news that, at the very beginning of the semester's work, he had been deserted by his most valuable assistant, and abandoned, apparently forever, by his most-loved disciple. Saunders had left word, a mere laconic note, that he had accepted the position left vacant by the dismissal of Arnold's tutor, and had entered at once upon the duties of his new position.
Professor Marshall detailed this information in a hard, level voice, and without further comment handed his wife Saunders' note. She read it rapidly, this time with no perplexity, and laid it down, saying to her husband, briefly, "Will you kindly remember that the children are here?"
Judith looked at Sylvia in astonishment, this being the first time that that well-worn phrase, so familiar to most children, had ever been heard in the Marshall house. Why shouldn't Father remember they were there? Couldn't he see them? Judith almost found the idea funny enough to laugh at, although she had not at all in general Sylvia's helpless response to the ridiculous. Sylvia did not laugh now. She looked anxiously at her father's face, and was relieved when he only answered her mother's exhortation by saying in a low tone: "Oh, I have nothing to say. It's beyond words!"
Luncheon went on as usual, with much chatter among the children. Some time later—in the midst of a long story from Lawrence, Mrs. Marshall herself brought up the subject again. Buddy was beginning to struggle with the narrative form of self-expression, and to trip his tongue desperately over the tenses. He had just said, "And the rabbit was naughty, didn't he was?" when his mother exclaimed, addressing her husband's grim face, "Good Heavens, don't take it so hard, Elliott."
He raised an eyebrow, but did not look up from the pear he was eating. "To be responsible, as I feel I am, for the pitching into a cul-de-sac of the most promising young—"
His wife broke in, "Responsible! How in the world are you responsible!" she added quickly, as if at random, to prevent the reply which her husband was evidently about to cast at her. "Besides, how do you know?—one never knows how things will turn out—she may—she may marry him, and he may have a life which will give him more leisure for investigation than if—"
Professor Marshall wiped his lips violently on his napkin and stood up. "Nothing would induce her to marry him—or any one else. She's extracted from marriage all she wants of it. No, she'll just keep him trailing along, in an ambiguous position, sickened and tantalized and fevered, till all the temper is drawn out of him—and then hell be dropped,"