Outwardly calm on such occasions, Mrs. Follette was inwardly excited. She had a feeling that the situation smacked of Marie Antoinette at Little Trianon. She was glad she had thought of selling milk—it seemed to link her subtly with royalty.
She had a royal air now as she sat before the fire. She always dressed for dinner. Her shabby black gown showed a round of white neck. She wore a string of jet beads and her satin slippers were adorned with jet buckles. She had pretty feet—and she surveyed them complacently. Then her eyes traveled beyond them to something that lay in a far corner.
She went over to it and picked it up. It was the photograph of Evans which had always stood on the mantel. The broken glass fell from it with a tinkling sound. She had it in her hand when Evans came in.
“How in the world did it happen?”
He set the small tray carefully on the table. “I threw it.”
“But—my dear boy, why?”
He stood looking at her. She saw his paleness. “Oh, well, for a moment I was a—fool.”
She was not an imaginative woman. But she knew what he meant. And her chin quivered. She was no longer royal. She was the mother of a hurt child. “I hoped things might—grow easier——”
“They grow harder——”
He sat down on the rug at her feet as he had sat through the years of little boyhood. Her left hand with its old-fashioned diamond rings hung by her side. He took it in his. “Don’t worry, Mumsie, I told you I was a—fool. And it was all over in a second——”