“I remember how it used to be,” he thought, “when Joyce was a baby. That time when there was a blizzard, and the milkman didn’t come—Lord, she was almost wild! I had to go out in the storm to see what I could do. Couldn’t get milk anywhere, and I didn’t dare to go home and tell her so.”
He smiled a little at the memory of that very good-natured young husband, struggling through the blizzard in a vain search for milk. In the end he had gone to their family doctor. The doctor had laughed at him and told him to use condensed milk, and had written down directions on a piece of paper. Then Frank had gone home to find them all crying—Madeline and Hilda and the baby.
Mrs. Holland saw her husband’s smile, and it did not please her. It was so easy for Frank to smile, so easy for his nimble mind to turn away from anything disagreeable and go off upon another tack! She knew very well that his heart ached at the thought of losing Joyce. He had suffered and would suffer from that; but he could forget for a time, and she could not.
He had always been like that. There was gray in his hair, and he had grown much stouter—a big man, a handsome, jovial sort of Porthos, in place of the slender and romantic young fellow he had been; but he was changed in no other way. As he smiled, he had raised his hand to his mustache in a gesture that was familiar to her. It meant that something had amused him. He was not thinking about Joyce, because that would disturb him, and he did not like to be disturbed.
“Oh, life’s too short to worry!” he was fond of saying.
Sometimes the anxious young mother had found consolation in that debonair phrase, but to-day it seemed heartless and false. Life too short? It was the monstrous length of life that appalled her now. Twenty years more to her allotted span—twenty years, and they might be all empty, all useless.
Her divinely appointed work in the world had been to bear and to rear her child, and now it was done. Joyce was going away to a new life of her own in a distant city, and she no longer needed her mother. Nobody needed Madeline Holland any more—certainly not Frank. He loved her, but he was a remarkably independent creature, quite sufficient unto himself in his own cheerful fashion.
She looked across the table at him. He was a little downcast for the moment, but as he caught her eye he smiled. He had finished his breakfast. He rose, came round the table to her, and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Well, old girl!” he said. “Here we are, eh? Day’s come at last! Thing is, she’s got a good man—fine fellow. She’ll be happy, eh?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Holland.