In Johnny's first vacation, when she had rushed to Old Chester in June to open the house, she was met by the information that he was going off for the summer on a geological expedition.
Mary's disappointment made her feel a little sick. "What shall I do without you!"
"Oh, if Aunty can do without me, I guess outsiders can," said Johnny, with clumsy amiability.
"We'll be here when you get back in September," she said.
He yawned, and said, "All right." Then he strolled off, and she went upstairs and cried.
Johnny, walking home after this embarrassing interview, striking at the roadside brambles with a switch and whistling loudly, said to himself: "How on earth did Mr. Robertson fall in love with her? He's got brains." A day or two later he went off for his geological summer, leaving in his mother's heart that rankling word, "outsiders." As the weeks dragged along and she counted the days until he would be back, she brooded and brooded over it. It festered so deeply that she could not speak of it to Johnny's father. But once she said: "He's ungrateful! See all we've done for him!"—and Carl realized that bitterness toward Miss Lydia, who had "robbed" her, was extending to the boy himself. And again—it was in August, and Johnny was to be at home in a fortnight—she said, "He ought to be made to come to us!"
Her husband looked at her in surprise. "You can't 'make' anybody love you, Mary. We are just outsiders to him."
She cried out so sharply that he was frightened, not knowing that he had turned a dagger-word in the wound.
Perhaps it was the intolerable pain of knowing that she was helpless that drove her one day, without Carl's knowledge, to the rectory. "I'll put it to Doctor Lavendar as—as somebody else's story—the trouble of a 'friend,' and maybe he can tell me how I can make Johnny feel that we are not outsiders! Oh, he owes it to us to do what we want! I'll tell Doctor Lavendar that the father and mother lived out West and are friends of mine. . . . He'll never put two and two together."
She walked past the rectory twice before she could get her courage to the point of knocking. When she did, it was Willy King who opened the door.