"Yes!" exclaimed the other, her voice trembling with concentrated anger, "let that be the last word between us, for it is that, and that only which separates us. Yes—that Fran!"
CHAPTER XX
THE ENEMY TRIUMPHS
Sometimes the history of any household progresses rapidly in closely related scenes of action; but, for the most part, months pass by during which life has apparently ceased to act. Everything that had seemed tending toward catastrophe stopped, as it were, with the departure of Grace Noir. Possibly the climax was still ahead; if so, the waters were at present heaped high on this side of ultimate disaster, and on the other side, leaving, between past and future, a dry no-thoroughfare.
Old Mrs. Jefferson would long ago have struck a blow against Grace Noir had she not recognized the fact that when one like Grace wears the helmet of beauty and breastplate of youth, the darts of the very angles of justice, who are neither beautiful nor young, are turned aside. Helplessly Mrs. Jefferson had watched and waited and now, behold! there was no more Dragon. Fran had said she would do it— nothing could have exceeded the confidence of the old lady in the new secretary.
Mrs. Gregory's sense of relief was not so profound as her mother's, because she could not think of Grace's absence except as a reprieve. Surely she would return—but the present was to be placidly enjoyed. To observers, Mrs. Gregory appeared ever placid, not because of indifference, but, as it was supposed, from blindness. Under the calm exterior of the wronged wife, there seemed no smoldering fire awaiting a favorable wind. In truth, she was always fearing that people would discover her husband's sentimental bearing toward his secretary—and always hoping that if they did, they would conclude the wife understood best and felt no alarm.
In the meantime, Grace was gone. Mrs. Gregory's smile once more reminded Fran of the other's half-forgotten youth. When a board has laid too long on the ground, one finds, on its removal, that the grass is withered; all the same, the grass feels the sunshine.
Fran thanked herself that Grace was no longer silhouetted against the horizon, and Gregory, remarking this attitude of self-congratulation, was thrown more than ever out of sympathy with his daughter. Fran was indefatigable in her duties as secretary, but her father felt that it was not the same. She could turn out an immense amount of work because she was strong and playing for high stakes—but she did not have Grace's methodical ways—one never knew how Fran would do anything, only that she would do it. Grace was all method, but more than that she was, as Gregory phrased it to himself—she was all Grace.
Gregory missed her every minute of the day, and the harder Fran tried to fill her place, the more he resented it. He divined that Fran hated the routine, the monotonous forms of charity, the duplicated copies of kind acts, the rows of figures representing so many unfortunates. Instead of acknowledging to himself that his daughter did the work from a yearning for his love, from a resolution to save him from the Grace-infatuation by absent treatment, he perversely rebelled at her secretly rejoicing over a conquered foe. Fran was separated from his sympathies by the chasm in his own soul.
The time came when Gregory felt that he must see Grace again and be alone with her. At first, he had thought they must not meet apart from the world; but by the end of the week, he was wondering what excuse he could offer to induce her to meet him—not at Miss Sapphira's, where she now boarded, not at the grocery where Bob was always hovering about—but somewhere remote, somewhere safe, where they might talk about—but he had no idea of the conversation that might ensue; there was nothing definite in anything save his fixed thought of being with her. As to any harm, there could be none. He had so long regarded Grace as the best woman in the world, that even after the day of kisses, his mind continued in its inertia of faith,—even the gravitation of material facts were unable to check its sublime course.