“One should be most punctilious in one’s own family. Oh, yes. It is no laughing matter, my son, and since you have come home and regained your common sense, you must regard all these seeming trifles. Half the disagreements and discomforts of life are due to the fact that even well-bred people treat their own households with a rudeness they would not dare show strangers. Now that you have given up your careless habits I shall take care to remind you of all these details, and expect to see you a finished society man within a twelvemonth.”
“No, indeed!”
“Adrian! How can you trifle so? Now when you’ve so lately been restored to me?”
“Dearest mother, I am not trifling. I should be, though, if I meant to shine nowhere else than at a fashionable dinner-table. There, don’t look worried. I’ll try not to disgrace you, yet—— Well, I’ve learned a higher view of life than that. But can you hear me now? That was Margot—woodland Margot—who saved my life!”
“Nonsense. It couldn’t be.”
“It surely was; and I’m going to ask you to excuse me from this one visit so that I can go back and find her.”
“Find her? If it were she, and I’m positive you are mistaken, of course she is not in the city alone. Her uncle must be with her, and your sister will be deeply hurt if you fail her this first time. At a dinner, you know, there are a certain and limited number of guests. The failure of one leaves his or her partner in an awkward position. You must keep your engagement, even if—— But, Adrian?”
“Yes, mother.”
“You must not exaggerate your obligations to those people. They did for you only what anybody would do for a man lost in the woods. By their own admission you were worth a great deal to that farmer. Else he never would have parted with eighty dollars, as he did. I shall always prize the gold piece you brought me; indeed, I mean to have it set in a pin and wear it. But this Maine farmer, or lumberman, or whatever he is, just drop him out of mind. His very name is objectionable to me, and you must never mention it before your father. Years ago there was a—well, something unpleasant with some people; and, please oblige me by—by not being disagreeable now. After all my anxiety while you were gone and about your father’s health, I think—I really——”
Adrian slipped his arm across the back of the lady’s chair and smiled upon her, lovingly. He was trying his utmost to make up to her and all his family for whatever they had suffered because of his former “misdeeds.” He had come home full of high resolves and had had his sincerity immediately tested by his father’s demanding that: