Then, glancing back, she surprised in his face that look she had almost forgotten—the frightened, baffled, anxious expression which she associated with the days when, as Ellen Neal put it, "the Indians were after him."
Instantly the reaction came. It was she he feared now, not "Indians"—she, his own little girl, Joan!
She ran and put her arms around him tightly, protectingly. "Nonsense!" she cried, her voice beautiful with the instinct of all the mothers who had made her. "The law'll never know a thing about it. What has the old law got to do with you and me? You've done the best you could, Daddy, I'm sure."
Richard Darcy answered humbly, like a repentant child, "I have, daughter, truly I have. I'm sorry...."
Later, as she walked wearily homeward through streets that no longer exhilarated her, no bachelor-maid now with a latch-key, nor yet an independent young traveler in foreign lands, but merely a poor relation dependent on the bounty of a step-mother, Joan made for herself a new beatitude:
"Blessed are the weak," she thought stoically, "for they have got to be taken care of."
CHAPTER XI
The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of senile decrepitude. But such was the fashion of building in its day that it showed no particular signs of its approaching end beyond a slight tilt to leeward and the rather eczematic effect of its stuccoed brick facade. A high-waisted door surmounted by a fine fan-light and supported by slender columns which had once been white led into a square panelled hall from which curved a staircase of exquisite proportions. These things in a city of larger growth and greater sophistication would have marked the house as the natural abode of artists and their ilk; but in Louisville, where art is yet chiefly a thing to be taken in courses by the elect, it let itself out in rooms for light housekeeping and other humble purposes. The slender columns were defaced by such signs as, "Feather Cleaning and Artificial Flowers,"—"Furniture Upholstered,"—"Plain Dressmaking," etc.
The neighborhood, except for this one decrepit mansion standing well in from the sidewalk with an ancient sycamore for company, had long since forgotten its former claims to fashion; but it was still respectable. Trust Ellen Neal for that! She had the same flair for respectability as had the Misses Darcy for gentility. No doubtful character, whether in house or individual, could fail to yield up its weakness to the corrosive rectitude of Miss Neal's shrewd eye.