“Then you have spoiled him by getting him all the playthings he wanted,” Meg said dryly. “A little denial earlier in life would have been morally beneficial. You should have let him cry for the moon, and he would have learned the futility of tears.”
“Margie, dear,—” Mrs. Malloy leaned forward, and her tone was pleading,—“don’t talk like that. It breaks my heart. I have blundered, but only through love of my boy and you. Can’t you forgive a foolish old woman?”
Meg smiled, but there was no warmth in the smile. “Certainly I will forgive you. But Rob—your son: does he know you have sent for me?”
“No, he has no idea of it. And now that I see how you regard it, I fear to meet his contempt when he knows that I have interfered, fruitlessly, with his affairs.”
“But he need never know it,” Meg said quickly; “I will take the first train back, and he need not know I was here.”
Robert’s convalescence had reached the stage where he longed to prove to his loving mother that she had been needlessly alarmed about him. Therefore, slipping out of his easy-chair in the library, he started into the hall to find and surprise her. Following the direction of her voice and that other low-toned one, which was so strangely familiar, he pulled aside the heavy draperies, and stood framed in the doorway.
“Margie!” he cried, steadying himself by the curtains.
At the sound of that cry, and at sight of his thin, white face, she half started toward him with an inarticulate exclamation. But suddenly she remembered, and advancing formally, gave him her hand to shake, and said in a conventional tone, as though they had met the day before: “Good afternoon, Mr. Malloy. I hope you are improving in health.”
Robert dropped weakly into a chair, and with his eyes still fixed on her face, said to Mrs. Malloy: “Mother, is it a cruel hallucination? Or is it really my Margie, standing there?”
Meg flushed deeply, but before she could say anything Mrs. Malloy interposed: “Let me explain, dear. I have been a foolish meddler. I wired Margie that I needed her, and she came, thinking you had gone into the monastery.”