She stepped into the vestibule and watched him striding through the shrubbery toward the gate. She pressed her face to the glass of the vestibule doors, shielding her eyes from the overhead light with her hands as she looked after him. She always made a point of sending him away happy when she could; and now he had left her in anger. She still watched him after he had left the grounds and passed into the street, walking slower than was his wont, and with his head bowed. The curious mood in which he was accepting his father’s marriage still distressed her; and his declaration that he had given up drink had carried no real conviction, now that she pondered his words and manner. She waited until an opening through the trees gave her a last glimpse of him across the hedge under the electric light at the corner, then with a deep sigh she turned into the house.
When, a little later, he called her on the telephone and begged her not to mind anything he had said on leaving—his usual way of making peace after their occasional tiffs—she was only half relieved.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COMING OF MRS. CRAIGHILL
“MY promptness deserves a better cause!” exclaimed Mrs. Blair as she stepped from her motor at the entrance to the railway station, where Wayne in his father’s car had arrived but a moment earlier. Mrs. Blair had brought down her two children, and these in their smart fall coats were still protesting against the haste with which they had been snatched from their beds and dressed in their Sunday clothes; but their faces brightened at the sight of their uncle, upon whom they fell clamorously with a demand to be taken into the train sheds to see the locomotives. Wayne was more amiable than his sister had seen him since their father gave the first warning of his marriage. He chaffed the children and promised to take them to a football game the next Saturday if they would let him off as to the engines; and when they were appeased he held up for his sister’s inspection the morning papers, with their first-page account of the marriage in New York the preceding day.
“‘Simplicity marked all the arrangements,’” he read. “‘Only the bride’s mother and the necessary witnesses were present—dined very quietly at Sherry’s—scarce noted in the fashionable throng of the great dining room—Colonel Craighill’s private car attached to the Pittsburg Flyer’—and so on,” and Wayne shook out the paper to display the portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Craighill and a view of the Craighill home.
The picture of the house evoked an exclamation of disgust from Mrs. Blair.
“Oh, Wayne, they might have spared us that! The house—it hurts worse than anything else. It’s sacrilege—it isn’t fair.”
Wayne folded the paper and thrust it into his pocket to get it out of her sight.
“Now, Sis, you’ve got to cheer up. You’re looking bullier than ever this morning. Those clothes must have eaten a hole in John’s check-book. It’s rather nasty of John not to come down and face the music with you.”
“John couldn’t; he simply couldn’t,” she declared defensively.