The high semi-formal room in which she sat seemed no part of her. She looked as though she had stepped in here as into the waiting-room of one of the more pretentious hotels. In spite of the luxuriousness and the fairly good taste which she had forced upon her surroundings, she rose superior to them. They were too new to match the centuries which still lingered in her eyes; they were too obvious to match the quiet reserve of her own manner.
She lifted her eyes from the brass-trimmed touring car which slid by on the street below and raised them to the stark blue sky above. The strong family resemblance to her son was then obvious. Her eyes were the same which Barnes had raised to the cotton-blossom clouds. In them there was the same yearning for expression. But the mouth was different; there was no trace here of that shrewd humor which characterized Richard’s; nothing but the set capacity for infinite endurance. It was the mouth of a warrior mother. But as the sky gave her imaginings the freedom to roam a world common to her son, her lips grew tender.
She wondered what the boy might be doing at that moment. Perhaps he was sitting by the roadside sketching; perhaps admiring the work of other sketchers in that gallery of which he had spoken in one letter. She wondered if the money she sent him, had safely reached him. It might be as well to send him more if she didn’t hear from him by to-morrow. She might even make a flying trip down there to see what he was about. But there was Horatio. She realized that her husband’s sole pleasure at the end of those hot days lay in finding her waiting for him here. He had not seemed as well as usual during this last week. Though he never spoke of it, she suspected that he was missing the boy. At night he tossed uneasily and once she had heard him murmur “Richard” in his troubled dreams.
It was too bad that in spite of his disappointment at losing an heir to his business throne, that he could not understand. Not all men were created with the same ambitions. He himself had left the farm in which his father had taken such pride. If then her boy wished to paint pictures—
She started as she felt a pair of arms about her neck. Looking around she found a brown face next to hers.
“Dick,” she cried breathless.
“Home again, mother,” he assured her.
“Home,” she exclaimed. “I haven’t heard you say home for years, Dick.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At the office,” she answered sadly. “He has missed you, Dick.”