“I’ve warned you,” replied his mother, not choosing to repeat her statement. “If you go after Bessy any more you can take the consequences.”
She drew her shawl About her pale, malicious face and left him with a parting glance of contempt.
“I guess that’ll settle him,” she thought grimly. “Bessy Houghton turned up her nose at George, but she shan’t make a fool of Lawrence, too.”
Alone in the stable Lawrence stood staring out at the dull red ball of the winter sun with unseeing eyes. He had implicit faith in his mother, and the stab had gone straight to his heart. Bessy Houghton listened in vain that night for his well-known footfall on the veranda.
The next night Lawrence went home with Milly Fiske from prayer meeting, taking her out from a crowd of other girls under Bessy Houghton’s very eyes as she came down the steps of the little church.
Bessy walked home alone. The light burned low in her sitting room, and in the mirror over the mantel she saw her own pale face, with its tragic, pain-stricken eyes. Annie Hillis, her “help,” was out. She was alone in the big house with her misery and despair.
She went dizzily upstairs to her own room and flung herself on the bed in the chill moonlight.
“It is all over,” she said, dully. All night she lay there, fighting with her pain. In the wan, gray morning she looked at her mirrored self with pitying scorn—at the pallid face, the lifeless features, the dispirited eyes with their bluish circles.
“What a fool I have been to imagine he could care for me!” she said, bitterly. “He has only been amusing himself with my folly. And to think that I let him kiss me the other night!”
She thought of that kiss with a pitiful shame. She hated herself for the weakness that could not check her tears. Her lonely life had been brightened by the companionship of her young lover. The youth and girlhood of which fate had cheated her had come to her with love; the future had looked rosy with promise; now it had darkened with dourness and grayness.