“Are you happy, dear?” she asked, laying her hand for a moment on the girl’s forehead.
“Yes, mother. Thank you so much for coming in!”
With an access of emotion she sat up and flung her arms about her mother’s neck and kissed her.
“You are happy, Grace?” Mrs. Durland repeated solicitously.
“Yes, mother; very happy.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
The morning paper’s account of Mrs. Trenton’s lecture came in for discussion at the breakfast table and Mrs. Durland read aloud the society column’s report of Miss Reynolds’s dinner. The names of the guests were not given, an omission which Mrs. Durland thought singular, but which evoked from Ethel the comment that the people who had countenanced Mrs. Trenton merely to please Miss Reynolds probably had asked to have their names suppressed. Durland, deprived of his paper, which Mrs. Durland and Ethel were clinging to in violation of his long-established rights, asked Grace whether Trenton was in town.
“Mrs. Trenton said she had hoped to see him here, but I don’t know anything about it, daddy,” she replied carelessly, though the possibility of Trenton’s coming to Indianapolis in response to his wife’s summons was now uppermost in her thoughts.
She eagerly opened the letter from him which awaited her at the store. It was a hasty lead-pencil scrawl and said that he was leaving that night for Indianapolis to see Mrs. Trenton, who was lecturing there and had asked for a meeting. The summons was most inopportune as his work in Syracuse was not completed and it would be necessary for him to return as quickly as possible. “But I’ll see you, of course, if only for a moment,” he concluded.