“You mean you will disinherit him?” Mildred asked, and he replied:
“Yes, just that; and I have told him so, and given him the summer in which to make up his mind. He has some Quixotic idea of studying law with McGregor, which will of course keep him here after we have gone. I don’t intend to live in a quarrel, and shall say no more to him on the subject, or try to control his actions in any way. If he goes with us to New York, all right; and if he chooses to stay here, I shall know what to do.”
A slight inclination of Mildred’s head was her only reply, until her husband said:
“Do you think Bessie would marry him if she knew he was penniless?”
And then she answered proudly: “I do,” and left the room, saying to herself as she went out into the beautiful grounds, whose beauty she did not see: “What will he do when he hears of Alice and Tom? Three Leaches instead of one. Poor Tom! Poor Bessie! And I am powerless to help them.”
CHAPTER X.
IN THE CEMETERY.
As Mr. Thornton had said, he did not like to live in a quarrel, and after his interview with his son, he tried to appear just as he had done before, and when Bessie came to the Park, as she often did, he treated her civilly, and insensibly found himself admiring her beauty and grace, and thinking to himself, “If she had money she might do.”
Upon Mildred he laid no restrictions with regard to her intercourse with her family, feeling intuitively that they would not be heeded. And thus she was free to see her mother as often as she liked, and it was remarked by the villagers that the proud mistress of Thornton Park went more frequently to the farm house than anywhere else. Many a morning she spent in the pleasant room, listening while her mother talked, mostly of Mildred, whose long silence was beginning to trouble her.
“It is weeks since I heard from her. She said in her last letter it might be some time before she wrote again, but I am getting anxious,” she would say, while Mildred comforted her with the assurance that no news was good news, and that perhaps her daughter was intending to surprise her by coming upon her unexpectedly some day.
“I am certain of it; I am something of a prophet, and I know Milly will come,” she would say, as she smoothed her mother’s snowy hair, or caressed her worn face, which always lighted up with gladness when she came, and grew sadder when she went away.