“It is my own fault! My own fault!” she wailed. “I have not been truthful. I have done the worst thing a person can do—I have lied to myself. I have known all the time that Grandpa Jim was not himself and I have refused to admit it. I have wronged him and I have wronged Danny. Now I will suffer all my life for having been so blind, so blind because I would not see.”
She composed herself and went on with the letter. Danny was going away—going far away, and to be gone for several months. His firm had been talking to him about going to China to establish an agency there and he had, up to this time, refused, feeling he could not part from Mary Louise, nor could he ask her to leave her grandfather and go with him. Now, it seemed wiser for him to go. There was a big advancement in it and he would prosper financially by the change. Colonel Hathaway had spoken of him as being such a dead beat, which was hard in that he had wanted from the beginning to do what he could in the matter of paying board for himself and his wife, but the proposition had been laughed at by Colonel Hathaway as absurd considering his own wealth. Now of course, he realized his mistake in letting the matter drop, although, at the time, if he had insisted upon paying board, he would have been guilty of very bad taste. He was taking the train for Chicago that very evening where he would see the president of the company and then would go on to San Francisco, from there to sail for China. He gave her an address in San Francisco and hoped to find a letter awaiting him there. That was all.
CHAPTER VI
THE DOCTOR CALLS
Gone! Gone without seeing her! Gone without waiting for an explanation! But what explanation was there to make? He had tried to talk the matter over with her and she had refused, refused because she was so afraid of being disloyal to her grandfather—afraid of having to admit that the old gentleman was in the wrong—afraid of having to admit that his mind was failing and he was obsessed by a strange dislike for a man to whom, in the past, he had been as devoted as though he had been of his own flesh and blood.
“Well, what now?” she asked herself. “What must I do?” She looked around the pretty room. There was little in it to remind her of Danny. It had been designed for a young girl’s room and had remained so. Those pretty pink hangings and pastel shaded rugs did not look very mannish. There was the high-boy, in the drawers of which he kept his belongings; there was the man’s wardrobe, that Grandpa Jim had given him on his birthday. She opened it and looked at his suits hanging in a neat row.
“He has taken his tweed and the blue serge,” she said, passing her hand over the row. “He left his dinner coat. I wonder if he won’t need it.” She pressed her cheek against the khaki uniform that hung there among the civilian clothes.
“Oh Danny! Danny! If you were only back!”
She closed the door of the wardrobe and turned, looking at the room again, the pretty pink room with all of its feminine touches.
“I never did realize how little this was really your home, Danny dear,” she said to his photograph which stood on her dressing table. “This was all the time just my room—this was all the time just Grandpa Jim’s house. It hasn’t been fair—it hasn’t been right! But what must I do now?” The question kept on dinging at her senses.