“Oh, it will break mother’s heart! She’s counted everything on Roy.”
“Well, everything isn’t lost yet,” he replied. “I hope you think I did right.”
“It was the only thing, of course, John. It was just like you to see it straight and do the right thing.”
She wormed from him the fact that he had given Roy a hundred dollars, and that certain payments for the support of Roy’s wife had been agreed on.
“You’re certainly a friend, John. We’ll return the money at once; that’s the least we can do.”
When he protested that he did not need the money immediately she explained that her father’s affairs were looking brighter and that the return of the sum advanced would work no hardship.
The bad news having been delivered, Moore exerted himself to cheer her, but a vast gloom had settled upon her. As he shook hands at the gate her sense of his tolerance, kindness and wisdom brought tears to her eyes but, left alone, her only emotion was one of fury against Roy. She stood on the doorstep pondering. Again, as after Roy’s appeal for money to cover his share of the expense of his automobile escapade, she thought of her own weakness in yielding to temptation. But for John’s advice that it would be better for the rest of the family to know at once of Roy’s tragedy—this being the only word that fitly described this new and discouraging blight upon her brother’s future—she would have lacked the courage to communicate the evil tidings to the household.
It was not until they had all settled in the living room after supper that she broke the news. Her father sat at the table, reading a technical journal, with Ethel near by preparing her Sunday-school lesson. Mrs. Durland had established herself by the grate with the family darning in her lap. Since Durland’s removal to Kemp’s establishment a new cheer and hope had lightened the atmosphere of the home, and Grace, moving restlessly about the room, dreaded to launch her thunderbolt upon the tranquil scene.
“I have something to tell you; please listen,—you too, father,” she began quietly.
She used much the same blunt phrases in which Moore had condensed the story, watching with a kind of fascination a long black stocking slip from her mother’s hand, pause at her knee and then crawl in a slow serpentine fashion down her apron to her feet.