“But Mr. O’Valley came like a regular–––”
“Don’t you think you ought to get to bed?” Mary changed the subject. “Sleep in the room next to mine if you like.”
“When are you coming upstairs?”
“Soon. I want to look over the letters.”
Luke rose and pretended a nonchalant stretching.
“Are you going to the office right away?”
“Not until New Year’s.”
Something in the tired way she spoke evoked Luke’s pity and sent him away to smother his boy-man’s grief by promises of a glorious future in which his sister should live in the lap of luxury.
With its customary shock death had for the time being given Mary a false estimate of her mother and herself, the usual neurasthenic experience people undergo at such a time. It seemed, as she sat alone by the fire, that she must have been a strangely selfish and ungrateful child who misunderstood, neglected, and underestimated her mother, and she would be forced to live with reproachful memories the rest of her days. Each difference of opinion––and there had been little else––which had risen between them was magnified into brutal injustice on Mary’s part and righteous indignation on her mother’s. This state of mind would find a proper readjustment in time but that did not comfort Mary at the present moment. Her mother was dead, and when a mother is gone so is the home unless someone bravely slips into the absent one’s place without delay and assumes its responsibilities and credits. For Luke’s sake this was what Mary had resolved to do.