“Then shall I wait till I hear from you?”
“If you will.”
“Good-by, Doctor Mosely.”
“Good-by, Mrs.—Charity—my child!”
He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was trembling. He was like a priest at bay before the altar while the arrows of the infidel rain upon him. These arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He was more afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or steel.
Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. She had accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor Mosely's excellent start on an optimistic discourse in the prevailing fashion of the enormously popular “Pollyanna” stories: it was to be a “glad” sermon, an inexorably glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach it now in the face of this ugly fact.
Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which only emphasized her defeat.
She found at home a mass of details pressing for immediate action if the big moving-picture project were not to lapse into inanity. The mere toil of such a task ought to have been welcomed, at least as a diversion. But her heart was as if dead in her.
She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with his portion of the task. He had not reported to her. She wondered why.
She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, but did not lift the receiver from the hook. She began to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She began to think strange thoughts of him. If she had married him she might not have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course, she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, but the wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and meets a wolf upon it does not believe that a lion was waiting on the other.