“Mother, surely I am humbling myself now?”
“True; but how long have I waited for this confession? Night after night I have said to myself, ‘Surely Grace will come and tell me that she feels herself in the wrong!’ But no such words came. At last I ceased to hope for them; and now at this eleventh hour you can hardly expect me to show much joy at hearing them spoken.”
Then Grace’s head drooped, and she was silent. She knew 277 she deserved all these hard words, bitter as they were to bear; but Mrs. Drummond had said her say.
“Well, well, better late than never; and we will say no more about it. Next time you will understand me better, Grace.”
Then, as her mother kissed her, Grace knew that her sin was condoned. Nevertheless, as she left the room a few minutes later, her heart was not quite so light in her bosom; she felt that her mother had been just, but hardly generous.
“I thought mothers forgave more easily,” she said to herself, in somewhat aggrieved fashion. She had no idea that her mother was equally disappointed.
Mrs. Drummond was a hard, but not an unloving woman; and she would have liked more demonstration from her daughters. If Grace, for example, instead of all these words, had thrown herself into her arms and owned herself in the wrong, with a child-like pleading for forgiveness, Mrs. Drummond would have felt herself satisfied, and would have pressed her to her bosom with a loving word or two that Grace would have remembered when her mother was in her grave. But such outward forms of tenderness were not possible to Mrs. Drummond’s daughters: for in such matters we must reap as we sow; and Mrs. Drummond’s manner hardly merited softness. For there are mothers and mothers; and the world must produce its Drummonds and its Challoners until the end of time.