“Oh, Roy!” Mrs. Durland moaned, her face white.
Mr. Durland coughed, took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses and began slowly rubbing them with the corner of the linen table cover. He desisted suddenly, remembering that Ethel had once rebuked him for mussing the cover.
“I guess that’s all there is to say about it,” Grace concluded when she had told everything, not omitting their financial obligation to Moore. “We’ve all got to make the best of it.”
Grace picked up the fallen stocking and handed it to her mother, who made a pretense of carefully inspecting a hole in the heel.
“What time’s the first train down in the morning?” she asked. “I must see Roy—and——”
Ethel, who had sunk back helplessly in her chair, jumped to her feet, her eyes blazing.
“You shan’t go one step mother! It’s enough that Roy’s brought this disgrace on the family without you going down there to pet him. It’s your spoiling him that’s made him what he is. John Moore had no business meddling in our affairs. What Roy should have done was to go away and never show his face to any of us again. Father, you tell mother to keep away from Roy!”
The appeal to Durland, who had so rarely found himself a court of last resort in the whole course of his life, was not without its humor and Grace smiled bitterly as she watched her sister, who stood before her, white, her lips set in hard lines, her hands clenched at her sides. Durland cleared his throat and recrossed his legs.
“I guess your mother’ll do the right thing, Ethel,” he said.
“I think you’re all crazy!” Ethel flared. “What will Osgood think of me, with my brother forced to marry a girl off the street.”