Her voice broke, but she fiercely bit back the sob before it escaped her lips.
"I will, dear, I promise you. We will both think of you and pray for you every minute. Jinny, are you sure it's wise? Couldn't we send some one—John Henry would go, I know—in your place?"
A spasm of irritation contracted Virginia's features. "Please don't, mother," she begged, "it just worries me. Whatever happens, I am going." Then she sobbed outright. "He wanted me to go with him at first, and I wouldn't because I thought it was my duty to stay at home with the children. If anything should happen to him, I'd never forgive myself."
She was slipping her black cloth skirt over her head as she spoke, and her terror-stricken face disappeared under the pleats before Mrs. Pendleton could turn to look at her. When her head emerged again above the belt of her skirt, the expression of her features had grown more natural.
"You'll go down in a carriage, won't you?" inquired her mother, whose mind achieved that perfect mixture of the sentimental and the practical which is rarely found in any except Southern women.
"I suppose I'll have to. Then I can take my satchel with me, and that will save trouble. You won't forget, mother, that I give Lucy a teaspoonful of cod-liver oil after each meal, will you? She has had that hacking cough for three weeks, and I want to break it up."
"I'll remember, Jinny, but I'm so miserable about your going alone."
Turning to the closet, Virginia unearthed an old black satchel from beneath a pile of toys, and began dusting it inside with a towel. Then she took out some underclothes from a bureau drawer and a few toilet articles, which she wrapped in pieces of tissue paper. Her movements were so methodical that the nervousness in Mrs. Pendleton's mind slowly gave way to astonishment. For the first time in her life, perhaps, the mother realized that her daughter was no longer a child, but a woman, and a woman whose character was as strong and as determined as her own. Vaguely she understood, without analyzing the motives that moved Virginia, that this strength and this determination which so impressed her had arisen from those deep places in her daughter's soul where emotion and not thought had its source. Love was guiding her now as surely as it had guided her when she had refused to go with Oliver to New York, or when, but a few minutes ago, she had knelt down to wash and bandage Harry's little earth-stained feet. It was the only power to which she would ever surrender. No other principle would ever direct or control her.
Marthy, who appeared with Jenny's supper, was sent out to order the carriage and to bear a message to the rector, and Virginia took the little girl in her lap and began to crumble the bread into the bowl of milk.
"Wouldn't you like me to do that, dear?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, with a submission in her tone which she had never used before except to the rector. "Don't you want to fix your hair over?"