AT BUD'S
Supper was over when Jeff arrived. He came straight into the room where the colored girl had just finished clearing the table. Nan was returning a few odds and ends to their places. Bud had already lit his evening pipe preparatory to settling down for the brief interim before turning in for the night.
There was no preamble. There was no sign of emotion, even at the moment of his arrival. Jeff launched his request at father and daughter in a voice such as he might have used in the most commonplace of affairs.
It was a request to be put up for the night.
But both Bud and Nan were startled. Nan's cheeks paled, and imagination gripped her. She said nothing. With Bud to be startled was to instantly resort to verbal expression.
"Wot's wrong?" he demanded.
Then the storm broke. It broke almost immoderately before these two who were the intimates of Jeff's life. All that had been withheld before Dug McFarlane, all which he had refused to display before the wife he had set up for his worship, Jeff had no scruples in laying before these two. It was the sure token of the relations between them, relations of perfect trust and sympathy.
Bud sat gazing at the outward sign of the passionate fires he had always known to lie smouldering in the depths of this man's soul. Nan stood paralyzed before such violence. Both knew that hell was raging under the storm of emotion. Both knew that the wounds inflicted upon this man's strong heart were well-nigh mortal.
The whole story was told, broken, disjointed. For the first time Nan learned the result of the search for an erring twin brother, and her horror was unbounded. A heart full of tenderness bled for the man whose sufferings she was witnessing. The story of Elvine's own actions filled her with revolting, yet with pity. It was not in her to condemn easily. She felt that such acts were beyond her powers of judgment.
The man's grief, his bitter, passionate resentment smote her beyond any sufferings she had ever known herself. Elvine absorbed all the anger she could bestow, but even so it was infinitesimal beside the harvest of grief which the sight of this man's suffering yielded her. That was the paramount emotion of the moment with her. That, and the injustice she deemed to have been meted out to him.