"Yes," replied Clyde.
"Well, what is to be will be," she said resignedly. "You haven't mentioned it to Frank or Julia, have you?"
"No," replied Clyde, thoughtfully, thinking of what a failure his mother had made of her attempt to be secretive. She was no one to deceive any one, or his father, either. He thought himself far, far shrewder.
"Well, you mustn't," cautioned his mother solemnly. "It isn't best for them to know, I think. It's bad enough as it is this way," she added with a kind of wry twist to her mouth, the while Clyde thought of himself and Hortense.
"And to think," she added, after a moment, her eyes filling with a sad, all-enveloping gray mist, "she should have brought all this on herself and on us. And when we have so little to do with, as it is. And after all the instruction she has had—the training. 'The way of the transgressor——'"
She shook her head and put her two large hands together and gripped them firmly, while Clyde stared, thinking of the situation and all that it might mean to him.
She sat there, quite reduced and bewildered by her own peculiar part in all this. She had been as deceiving as any one, really. And here was Clyde, now, fully informed as to her falsehoods and strategy, and herself looking foolish and untrue. But had she not been trying to save him from all this—him and the others? And he was old enough to understand that now. Yet she now proceeded to explain why, and to say how dreadful she felt it all to be. At the same time, as she also explained, now she was compelled to come to him for aid in connection with it.
"Esta's about to be very sick," she went on suddenly and stiffly, not being able, or at least willing, apparently, to look at Clyde as she said it, and yet determined to be as frank as possible. "She'll need a doctor very shortly and some one to be with her all the time when I'm not there. I must get money somewhere—at least fifty dollars. You couldn't get me that much in some way, from some of your young men friends, could you, just a loan for a few weeks? You could pay it back, you know, soon, if you would. You wouldn't need to pay me anything for your room until you had."
She looked at Clyde so tensely, so urgently, that he felt quite shaken by the force and the cogency of the request. And before he could add anything to the nervous gloom which shadowed her face, she added: "That other money was for her, you know, to bring her back here after her—her"—she hesitated over the appropriate word but finally added—"husband left her there in Pittsburgh. I suppose she told you that."
"Yes, she did," replied Clyde, heavily and sadly. For after all, Esta's condition was plainly critical, which was something that he had not stopped to meditate on before.