"Good-bye—dear," she murmured.
A moment later the waiter was enveloping Hendrie in his light traveling coat.
With a nod and a wave of the hand he hastily followed the man, and made his way through the revolving door, which was the hotel entrance to the railroad depot.
Monica looked after him, feeling a little depressed. It was the first time since her marriage that her husband had left her with a formal parting. She knew it could not have been otherwise in the vestibule of a busy hotel. It would have been different had they supped in private—ah, well, soon there would be no such partings as these.
In contrast to the brilliant surroundings of the Strathmore Hotel the humble homestead over which Phyllis Raysun reigned was a crude, even squalid affair. Poverty was stamped all over it, that is, if lack of worldly possessions and general dilapidation must be taken as the hallmark of poverty.
Phyllis did not admit such to be the case. She claimed a wealth which she would not have exchanged for the lot of a royal princess. She was a healthy, happy girl, loving and beloved, and she admitted she could ask no more of the perfect life in the midst of which she found herself.
For her mother's occasional grumbles she would adapt her mental attitude to a different focus. That weak but amiable creature had different views. She had lived through that life Phyllis was only just beginning, and therefore the golden focus of youth was dimmed, and the buoyant hope of younger life had resolved itself into a yearning for all those bodily comforts which had somehow passed her by.
At such times when her mother's bitterness and complaint found expression, Phyllis, with her ready understanding, sought to comfort her, to encourage her. Some such desire stirred her on a morning when a neighbor brought her a letter from Frank. It was a letter passed on from hand to hand, across country, without the service of the mail. Frank would be over at the midday meal, and Mrs. Raysun was deploring the poverty of their larder, as she prepared a stew at the cook stove in their only living-room.
"It makes me fair ashamed, Phyl," the old woman cried in distress, as she cut up the mixture of vegetables for the simmering pot. "It surely does. To think of your beau comin' over to a meal like this. And him a college-bred boy, with elegant manners, and with a ma with thousands o' dollars. I kind o' feel the shame's all on me—your mother."
Phyllis laughed in her buoyant fashion.