"You're late, Gwynne," said old Steven, fierce-eyed under his shaggy brows.
"I know it," said Gwynne, in a harsh voice. "I had to go out to the country this morning, and that put me back with everything."
"You mean to the house? You've been out to the house?" Steven asked eagerly. "You've talked to Pall——?"
Gwynne looked at him steadily. "No, I haven't. I've been out to see Sam. Will you please let me have my chair, Cousin Steven? I want to make a note of this for Judge Lewis."
"It's no matter," said Archie hurriedly, anxious to escape as much on the Gwynnes' account as on his own. ("I was afraid they were in for a regular family-row and I wanted to get out," he said. "Why, you might have known something was wrong with Gwynne, by his coming out about Sam that way. That was the first time I ever knew him to do anything like that!") "Never mind, Gwynne—father said you could keep them as long as you wanted. I'll stop in some other time. You're—you're busy now."
"I wish you'd stay, Arch," said Gwynne desperately. The others sat in a ghastly silence, even the old man. He got up and surrendered the chair to Gwynne without a word. The sisters hardly dared look at each other, in the trepidation produced by the mere mention of Sam's name. Thus carelessly or rashly to flaunt Sam in the public view, and invite attention to him seemed to them nothing less than a profane assault on the temple of the Gwynne reputation—that edifice propped and shored through so many years by what profitless sacrifices, what wrong-headed devotion, what pitiful and heroic subterfuge! At this rate Gwynne might say something about his Aunt Caroline, they thought in quaking panic. The veil of the sanctum was rent in twain—what would he do or say next?
He did nothing; and after Archie had taken his leave, it was Eleanor who quavered, frightened, yet with a real sympathy for him stirring at her elderly maiden heart: "Is anything the matter, Gwynne? With—with Sam, I mean?"
"Yes, Dr. Sheckard sent for me. They think he'll have to be taken away—sent to some other place. He's—well, restless, you know."
"That'll take money, Gwynne," said Steven abruptly. Now that Archie's restraining presence had been removed, he was eager to get to the business in hand, and designed by one or two tactful remarks of this nature to lead up to it. Eleanor and Mollie shrank a little; they were genuinely and self-forgetfully interested in their unfortunate kinsman.
"I'll manage it, somehow," said Gwynne briefly. He put aside his domestic tragedy without much effort; to the observant mind the facility with which we get used to our lives is the one great everyday miracle. Let them visit us with what trials they will, we defeat the gods by our submission. Gwynne addressed himself to the task of the moment with no further thought of Sam. "You wanted to see me about something, Cousin Eleanor?" he asked, foreseeing drearily what the answer would be. But in spite of all their preparation, the direct question startled them; the neat and perfectly ladylike speeches in which Eleanor and Mollie had coached each other for days vanished from their minds—from their one mind, I might almost say. They looked at him with stricken faces. "There is something you wanted to see me about, Cousin Mollie?" repeated Gwynne—and could have cried "For shame!" at the forbidding coldness of his own voice.