Her eyes snapped. “Millard!” she repeated. “I’ll tell Millard a few things when I get him alone. You needn’t worry about that.”
CHAPTER IX
HUMBLE pie is not a tasty dish even to the palate accustomed to it. Foster Townsend’s palate was distinctly not of that kind. Even to himself he seldom acknowledged that his judgment had been wrong, almost never to another person. Reliance Clark alone, of all his friends and acquaintances, dared tell him that he had behaved foolishly. He bore her blunt criticisms and tart reproofs with a patience the reasons for which he could scarcely have supplied under cross-examination. Her advice concerning Esther had, in previous instances, been good. In this case, although it was neither flattering nor agreeable, it seemed to at least promise a temporary way out and he resolved to take it. If it worked it was worth the brief humiliation. If it did not then he would try something else. That he would not gain his own way in the end was, of course, an impossibility. He always gained it.
Reliance had prescribed the “humble pie.” That very evening, after supper, he ate it in his niece’s presence. He called her into the parlor and, as he would have said, “got down on his knees.” He frankly begged her pardon for losing his temper, for speaking to her as he had done about her visiting Bob Griffin’s studio. He explained how he had learned of her doing so.
“I don’t suppose I should have minded so much if you had told me about it, yourself,” he said. “Of course the idea of your picking out ’Lisha Cook’s grandson to be a friend of yours might have stuck in my craw. Naturally I can’t help but be prejudiced against any of that scamp’s kith and kin. But I realize—I do now that I have had time to think it over—that it was natural enough you should want to see the picture this young Griffin is making of you. I don’t blame you for that. If you had only told me about it. That was the thing that hurt most. It did hurt me, Esther. Yes, it did! I would have sworn you and I didn’t have any secrets from each other. Seems to me we shouldn’t have.”
This was the right touch, just as he meant it to be. Esther’s resentment melted under it. The tears sprang to her eyes and this time they were not tears of anger or wounded pride. She stammered a confession of her own consciousness of guilt at having kept the secret from him.
“I am so sorry I didn’t tell you, Uncle Foster,” she declared. “I was going to—I meant to—and then—oh, I guess I was afraid. I know it was wrong. But the portrait is so good—really, it is wonderful. And—and we thought—I thought if I gave it to you for a birthday surprise you might—you might forgive me for letting him paint it.”
He held out his arms. She ran to them and with her head upon his shoulder, sobbed repentantly. He stroked her hair.
“There, there!” he said, soothingly. “It’s all right now. We won’t fret any more about it, will we? And you must take me down to the shanty, or studio, or whatever you call it, and let me see the thing for myself. Will you do that sometime? Sometime pretty soon, eh?”
She lifted her head to look at him.