By this time grandma had gone to his side, giving great thumps with her cane and making it fly so that I feared for the dishes, and Cyrus got a whack upon his knee. She hung upon Dave’s arm—she was so tiny a body that it seemed as if he might almost put her into his pocket—and she stroked his large hand with her two small ones.
“If they have treated you badly they shall answer for it! The best boy, always, and Deacon Partridge’s grandson! Some evil-minded, envious person has done you harm. Cyrus will see to it! Cyrus will set it right!”—for by this time Cyrus had become the Grand Mogul to grandma.
She stood there, stroking and patting his hand and saying comforting words. It was a little absurd, of course, and a deep flush had swept over Dave’s pale face, but I saw Alice Yorke’s beautiful eyes fill with tears.
“You are mistaken, grandma. The college authorities are quite right, from their point of view. What I did was against the rules.” It looked like a flush of shame that now so deeply dyed Dave’s face—such a boyish face in spite of the moustache!
Grandma’s sweet face blanched under his look. Its childish expression seemed to vanish and the old, serious dignity to come back.
“Was it against—against God’s rules, Davy?” she asked, and although her voice was firm I could see her small frame tremble as she awaited his answer.
“I—I can’t say, grandma.” He said this hesitatingly and after a moment of dead silence.
Cyrus drew a long hard breath and the gleam of hope faded out of his face; it had been hope and my heart warmed to Cyrus. Nothing could deepen the cynical certainty that had appeared in Uncle Horace’s face, from the first, but he glowered at Dave now in an annihilating way from under his shaggy eyebrows. There was neither consideration nor mercy for Dave to be expected from him. He would not have shown them to his son, for whom it was evident that he had a strong feeling in his own hard way.
“You will know all about it from the President,” Dave continued, with an effort that made his young voice hard and cold like Uncle Horace’s own. “There is no appeal to be made. Nothing can be said that will do any good. I am simply expelled and disgraced.”
“And ruined for life!” broke in Uncle Horace bitterly. He was looking moodily into his plate and he seemed unconscious of the presence of others; in fact, Uncle Horace never cared before whom he spoke his mind.