The minister pushed away the newspaper, which he had been caught reading. It was the Courant day, when all the bottled-up news of the week came to St. Rule’s. He sighed to be obliged to give it up in the middle of his reading, and also because being found in no more serious occupation, he could not pretend to be very busy, even if he had wished to do so.
“I hope it is nothing very urgent,” he said.
“Yes, it is urgent, very urgent! I thought Frank would have seen you yesterday. I thought perhaps you would have paid more attention to him, than you do to me.”
“My dear Mrs. Mowbray! I hope you have not found me deficient in—in interest or in attention,” the minister said.
He had still kept hold of the Courant by one corner. Now he threw it away in a sort of despair. The same old story, he said to himself grievously, with a sigh that came from the bottom of his heart.
“Do you know,” said the visitor, clasping her hands and resting them on his table, “that Frank’s twenty-fifth birthday is on the fifth of next month?”
She looked at him as she had never done before. Her eyes might have been anxious on previous occasions, but they were also full of other things: they had light glances aside, a desire to please and charm, always the consciousness of an effort to secure not only attention, but even admiration, a consciousness of herself, of her fine manners, and elaborate dress, finer than anything else in St. Rule’s. Now there was nothing of all this about her. Her eyes seemed deepened in their sockets, as if a dozen years had passed over her since she last looked thus at the minister. And she asked him that question as if the date of her son’s birthday was the most tragic of facts, a date which she anticipated with nothing less than despair.
“Is it really?” said the perplexed minister. “No, indeed, I did not know.”
“And you don’t seem to care either,” she cried, “you don’t care!”
Mr. Buchanan looked at her with a suspicious glance, as if presaging some further assault upon his peace. But he said: