“Then what you goin’ to do wid me?” asked Susan, seeing her worst fears about to be realized. “Leave me here?”
“I will send for y’u, Sue,” Tom answered, “if I get a job. But I don’t know what is goin’ to happen. . . . It’s all your fault.”
This was so true that the rebuke was accepted in silence. But Susan did not wish to be left behind, for Maria and her mother to triumph over her downfall.
“Tom,” she pleaded, “take me with you! I can work, an’ there is plenty o’ work in Colon.”
“We all can work,” said her father anxiously, though why he should have included himself was something of a mystery. “I have always wanted to go oversea like me son. The fambily could makes you very happy, Mister Tom.” He paused, for he saw that nobody was paying any attention to him.
Tom, in fact, was explaining to Susan how impossible it was for him to take her to Colon with him, and was mingling his explanations with weak reproaches. Susan listened dumbly. She was thinking how few of her friends and acquaintances would sympathize with her; how the front house would have to be given up, and perhaps some of her furniture sold. Nor was that all. For if Tom did not send for her, as he promised, the old life might have to be resumed; and that would be more intolerable now than before. She would miss all that she had become accustomed to. She might have to face actual want—she who had for one full year enjoyed what she considered luxury. . . .
“When you goin’?” she asked at length, after Tom had said his say.
“Saturday.”
This was Wednesday night: three days more and he would be gone.
She cried, this time in real distress. Tom was touched, or he thought, erroneously, that she was crying because he was going to a foreign land where he would be far away from her.