CHAPTER IV
AFTER Mr. Smith's death the Robertsons stayed on in Old Chester to close the house. Mary hardly left it, even to walk in the garden behind the circling brick wall. But she sent her husband on innumerable errands into Old Chester, and when he came back she would say, "Did you see—him?"
And sometimes Johnny's father would say, "Yes."
"You didn't speak to him?" she would ask, in a panic.
"Of course not! But he's an attractive boy." Once he added, "Why don't you go and call on Miss Lydia—and see him yourself?"
She caught her soft hands together in terror. "Go to Miss Lydia's? I? Oh, I couldn't! Oh, Carl, don't you see—I might like him!"
"You couldn't help it if you saw him."
"That's just it! I don't want to like him. Nothing would induce me to see him."
Yet there came a moment when the urge of maternity was greater than the instinct of secrecy, greater even than the fear of awakening in herself that "liking" which would inevitably mean pain. She and Johnny's father were to leave Old Chester the next day; for a week she had been counting the hours until they would start, and she could turn her back on this gnawing temptation! But when that last day came, she vacillated: "I'll just walk down and look at Miss Lydia's; he might be going in or coming out. . . . No! I won't; he might see me, and think— . . . I must—I must. . . . Oh, I can't, I won't!" Yet in the late afternoon she slipped out of the house and went stealthily down the carriage road, and, standing in the shadow of one of the great stone gateposts, stared over at Miss Lydia's open door. As she stood there she heard a sound. Her heart leaped—and fell, shuddering. Just once in her life had she felt that elemental pang; it was when another sound, the little, thin cry of birth pierced her ears. Now the sound was of laughter, the shrill, cracking laughter of an adolescent boy. She crept back to the big house, so exhausted that she said to old Alfred, "Tell Mr. Robertson that I have a headache, and am lying down."