“She has her mission,” Mrs. Anderson said, with firmness. “You are eating nothing yourself, Randolph.” Presently she looked at her son with an inscrutable expression. “Are the Carrolls all gone?” she asked.
Anderson cut himself a bit of beefsteak carefully before replying. “Some of them, I believe,” said he.
“I heard Mrs. Carroll and her sister and daughter and the boy all went yesterday morning. Josie Eggleston came in about the Rainy Day Club meeting, this morning, and she told me.” There was something so interrogative in his mother's tone that Anderson was obliged to say something.
“They all went except the daughter, I believe,” he said.
“The girl who was here?”
“Yes.”
“Then she didn't go?”
“She went as far as Lancaster, but she came back?”
“Came back?”
“Yes. She didn't want to leave her father alone, and—under a cloud, as he seems to be, and she knew if she declared she was not going there would be opposition—that, in fact, her mother would not go.”