“Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland serenely, “If you’ve got nothing better to do you might help me with the darning. I don’t like to go away without clearing it up.”
V
The visit to Bloomington was not particularly heartening. Roy was in a sullen humor when they talked to him in the hotel parlor. He wanted to drop the law course and go West, and they argued the matter most of the day, Grace alternating between despair at Roy’s stubborn indifference to every attempt to arouse his pride and ambition and admiration for her mother’s courage and forbearance in the most poignant sorrow of her life.
Grace finally left them together and took a walk that led her far from the campus. She had no heart for looking upon the familiar scenes or meeting the friends she had left there only a few months earlier. When she returned to the hotel Roy had been won to a more tractable humor; and when he left them it was in a spirit of submission, at least, to what he considered an ungenerous ordering of fate. Mrs. Durland insisted on carrying out the plan, with which she had left Indianapolis, of visiting the young woman who was now her daughter-in-law.
“She’s Roy’s wife,” she said when Grace tried to dissuade her. “I’ll feel better to see her. And it’s only right I should.”
She took the train for Louisville and Grace went home.
Grace’s thoughts were given a new direction early the next morning when Miss Beulah Reynolds appeared at Shipley’s shortly after the doors were opened.
“My dear child, the most astounding thing has happened!” the little woman declared immediately.
“Your house hasn’t burned down!” exclaimed Grace, amused by the little woman’s agitation.
“Worse! I’m to have a visitor,—that Mary Graham Trenton whose book we once talked about. I’ve just had a letter from an old friend in Boston warning me of the lady’s approach, and asking me to see the Indians don’t get her. I’ve wired her at Cleveland asking her to stay at my house—I could hardly do less.”