“Of course you will,” said his mother reassuringly; “and I’ll go with you and we’ll see to it that he attends strictly to his own affairs.”
Donald burst out laughing, exactly as his mother in her heart had hoped that he would.
“Yes, I’ve got a hand-painted picture of myself starting to Lilac Valley to fight a man who is butting in with my girl, and taking my mother along to help me beat him up,” he said.
Mrs. Whiting put her arms around her boy, kissed him tenderly, and smoothed his hair, and then turned out the lights and slipped from the room. But in the clear moonlight as she closed the door she could see that a boyish grin was twisting his lips, and she went down to tell the Judge that he need not worry. If his boy were irreparably hurt anywhere, it was in his foot.
CHAPTER XXXII
How the Wasp Built Her Nest
The following weeks were very happy for Linda. When the cast was removed from Donald’s foot and it was found that a year or two of care would put him even on the athletic fields and the dancing floor again, she was greatly relieved.
She lacked words in which to express her joy that Marian was rapidly coming into happiness. She was so very busy with her school work, with doing all she could to help Donald with his, with her “Jane Meredith” articles, with hunting and working out material for her book, that she never had many minutes at a time for introspection. When she did have a few she sometimes pondered deeply as to whether Marian had been altogether sincere in the last letter she had written her in their correspondence, but she was so delighted in the outcome that if she did at times have the same doubt in a fleeting form that had not been in the least fleeting with Peter Morrison, she dismissed it as rapidly as possible. When things were so very good as they were at that time, why try to improve them?
One evening as she came from school, thinking that she would take Katy for a short run in the Bear-cat before dinner, she noticed a red head prominent in the front yard as she neared home. When she turned in at the front walk and crossed the lawn she would have been willing to wager quite a sum that Katy had been crying.
“Why, old dear,” said Linda, putting her arms around her, “if anything has gone wrong with you I will certainly take to the war-path, instanter. I can’t even imagine what could be troubling you.” Linda lowered her voice. “Nothing has come up about Oka Sayye?”