It was evidently a relief to the old gentleman to be able to offer to do something for her.
“No,” promised Elizabeth, “I shouldn’t hesitate.”
Colonel Thomas watched her until she turned at the top of the hill.
“Now she has a row to hoe!” said he aloud.
Chapter III
“I WILL NOT BELIEVE IT!”
Elizabeth had a great deal of time to think on the way home. Old Joe, who in three days had traveled about fifty miles, could not be encouraged beyond a slow walk. But she did not think very connectedly. Mind and soul were weary; her troubles presented themselves rather as a dull, undefined pain than as a sharp anxiety. Things could wait, she said to herself.
It would be necessary, of course, for her to tell Herbert, and she trembled for the effect upon him. She had feared for weeks that his very nature had been affected by his illness and that he would remain a sort of dependent child instead of becoming a man. But what she had heard to-day threw another light on his condition. Could it be that it was an inherited weakness, the result of the shame which their mother must have felt? Their mother had been a woman of strong will, but might it not have been that her grief and anxiety had affected Herbert? She must have felt her father’s act to be a disgrace—it could not be otherwise. It was from that poor mother that Elizabeth had learned to love her country!
But not even the word of a Colonel Thomas and the printed statement of a book could in an hour or two alter the conscious and unconscious convictions of Elizabeth’s life. The belief that one has been “well-born” is not easily yielded, even though one may have hitherto felt no conscious satisfaction. When, at last, she turned a weary Joe in upon the grassy drive, her lips were set.