"Why over there?"
"Your father has secured a place in his old business."
From the few further details offered by her grandmother Milly inferred that it was a very humble place indeed, and that only dire necessity had forced Horatio to accept it,—to sit at the gate in the great establishment where once he had held some authority.
"Poor papa!" Milly sighed.
"It's rather late for you to be sorry, now," the old lady retorted pitilessly. She was of the puritan temper that loves to scatter irrefutable moral logic.
It was not until long afterward that Milly learned all the part the indomitable old lady had played in this crisis of her son's affairs. She had not only gone to see Mr. Baxter, one of the Hopper partners who attended the Second Presbyterian Church, and begged him to give her son employment once more, but she had humbled herself to appeal personally to their enemy Henry Snowden and entreat him, for old friendship's sake, to be magnanimous to a broken man. In these painful interviews she had not spared Milly. She had succeeded.
Sometime during the last hurried weeks of their occupancy of the Acacia Street house, Milly managed to have her lover come to Sunday supper and make formal announcement of their intentions to the old people. For long years afterwards she would remember the final scene of her emotional career in the little front room when her father had to shake hands with the young artist on the exact spot where Clarence's glittering diamond had lain disdained, where the faithful ranchman had received his blow, standing, full in the face.
Little Horatio looked gray and old; his lips trembled and his hand shook as he greeted Bragdon.
"Well, sir, so you and Milly have made up your minds to get married?"