“But, Johnny—”
“I am going to ring for Hines to pack. Of course you start at once. When I join you in the family circle, I hope you will have impressed them with the fact that you cannot go without me.”
She recalled—perhaps it was his cool steady gaze above the sudden pallor of his face that evoked the memory—that however she may have managed this son of hers, she had never governed him; shrugging her shoulders, she went up to inform Mrs. Cutting and Mabel as volubly as a French woman of her terrible upset over the telegram, and her insistence to Johnny, whom she had providentially met as he was leaving the house, that he should go with her.
He had changed his clothes for a travelling suit and was giving his final directions to the distracted Hines when there was a tap at his door. He opened it himself, and seeing his mother-in-law, stepped out and closed it behind him. Mrs. Cutting’s face was pale and there was fear in her eyes.
“You are not really going!” she exclaimed.
“Has not my mother explained?”
“Your mother can take Stanley with her. It is not possible that you will leave Mabel now—when—almost any minute—”
“Oh, I shall be gone but a few days. Surely—”
“Mabel, poor child, is persuading herself that you ought to go, but she overrates her power of endurance. I know—I know—that after you are gone there will be a reaction—she will break down. I would not answer for the consequences.”
Ordham sighed. He was hardly aware of the woman’s presence, save in so far as she forced him to talk when he would have preferred not to open his mouth for twenty-four hours. “Surely you and the doctor—”