He carried the memory of words and glance with him all day. Coming home at evening, he found a note from her, stating that Kitty had sent for her.
“There is a dress rehearsal at seven,” she wrote. “I wish you could be there and see how ravishing I can be! If your business meeting is over by ten o’clock, won’t you slip into society toggery and come around in season to see ‘the old lady’ home?”
“The fever has run its course!” thought the husband, with kindling eyes. “I knew I should get her back some day.”
His dinner was less carefully served than in the olden supper days, but he dined as with the gods, and ran briskly upstairs to send Ellen down to her meal while he undressed the children and put them to bed. He had done this often during the winter, pretending to make a joke of the disrobing, but knowing it to be duty and vicarious. According to his ideas the mother should see to it in person. No hireling, whose own the bairns are not, can care for them as those in whose veins runs answering kindred blood. Usually, the task was done in heaviness of spirit. To-night, no effort was required to bring laughter to his lips, lightness to his heart. To-morrow mamma would breakfast with them, and resume her place in the home, so poorly filled by him or anybody else. She had come back to them. He tried to sing one of her lullabies as he rocked the baby to sleep, but failed by reason of a “catch in his throat.” Mamma would warble it like a nightingale to them to-morrow night.
The business meeting was unexpectedly brief—“Thanks,” as the president was pleased to say, “to the admirable epitome of the matter in hand prepared and presented by Mr. Cornell.”
At ten o’clock the husband was in his dressing room, hurrying the process of “slipping into society toggery.” He repeated the phrase aloud while tying his cravat with fingers uncertain from nervous haste. He was thankful beyond expression that he had never cast the shadow of his disapproval over Susie’s spirits, even when they threatened to carry her out of the bounds of reason. She was young and pretty; so affluent of vitality, so richly endowed with talents, that a humdrum fellow like himself could not comprehend the stress of the temptation to plunge into and riot in the mad vortex of social parade.
“If there were any one thing I could do as cleverly as she does everything, I should be doing it all the time,” he confessed in contrite candor.
Yesterday he had thanked Heaven that Lent was close upon the panting racers over the pleasure grounds. Now, he was indifferent to the advance and duration of the penitential season. His darling had returned of her own right-headed, right-hearted self to the sanctuary of home, having detected, unaided by his pessimistic strictures, the miserable vanity and carking vexation of the hollow system. He sewed two buttons upon his shirt before he could put it on, and when he pushed the needle through a hole and the linen beneath into the ball of his thumb, he began to whistle “Annie Laurie.”
Susie had practiced “Annie Laurie” for an hour before dinner yesterday. He wondered if she had sung it last night at the Hitts’. She had been overrun with business of late, getting ready for the chamber concert and private theatricals, and mercy knew what else of frolic and folly gotten up by Mrs. Hitt for the benefit of the “Industrial Home” which was the latest charitable fad in her set. He had paid ten dollars for a reserved seat last week at the behest of the volatile Lady Patroness. She had let him have it “at a bargain because he had the good luck to be Susie’s husband.”
“Mr. Vansittart and Mr. Peltry paid fifty apiece for theirs, and I made Jack give me thirty for his. My rooms will seat comfortably just one hundred and fifty people, and I won’t sell a ticket over that number at any price. None will be for sale at the door, and none are transferable. Of course, the rush for them is fearful!”