"Cecilia," said Father McGowan, "there's a doctor to whom your father is playing God. I don't want to bother you about it, but to-day, coming here, I somehow felt as if I ought to." Father McGowan settled on the edge of a chair, and he told Cecilia the dry facts of the ruin of Doctor Van Dorn. "Try to make your father see that it's better not to tamper with the works," he ended; "to leave that to whoever or whatever is pushing the old ball around.... Well, good-bye, dear child. Oh, I can get out without the help of his Royal Buttons, thank you."
After he left Cecilia again settled in front of the fire to think of her new problem. Her brain eluded it with a maddening persistency. She thought of a new frock, the Girls' Club, a dance. Then again of the really horrible revelation, and the unexpected obstinacy of her father.
She looked up at a softly coloured painting above the mantel, which she'd had painted in Paris. It had been marvellously done, and especially since the only model had been a small tintype.
"Dearest," said Cecilia, "you would not want him punished, would you? And,—is there any punishment more cruel than life?"
The painting smiled down gently.
"Pink roses," it seemed to say. "There are always pink roses, but youth must hold them to see their beauty.... Seeing no loveliness in dreams denied, no heights in greatest depths...."
"Come in!" said John. "Please!" K. Stuyvesant hesitated. He wanted to, for just a glimpse of Cecilia was everything to him; but, she—she had not wanted to see him. "I am out a great deal," she said in that memorable 'phone message,—also, "I have quite forgotten the little episode of the boat." Those two sentences had made things cruelly plain.
"Come on," begged John, "you must be cold!"
K. Stuyvesant got out of his machine, and went with John into the long-waisted house.
"Fire in the library," said John; "wood, you know. Bully, aren't they?" John, ahead, stopped with his hand on the drapery which softened the broad doorway into the library. He put the other, silencingly, on K. Stuyvesant's arm. Cecilia sat in front of the fire. She held a framed picture in her hands, standing upright on her knees. Looking,—looking,—looking, she was. They stood there for what seemed to Stuyvesant many minutes. He felt himself grow hot, cold, then he longed to shake John,—again, hug him.