“Wait a minute, Grant, till I take this to father, and I’ll go with you.”
As Laura Van Dorn turned her car around the club house, she stopped it under the veranda overlooking the golf course and the rolling prairie furrowed by the slowly winding stream. The afternoon sun slanting upon the landscape brought out all its beauty–its gay greens, its somber, contrasting browns, and its splashing of color from the fruit trees across the valley that blushed pink and went white in the first unsure ecstasies of new life. Then she saw Kenyon and Lila slowly walking up the knoll to the road. 483The mother noted with quick instinct the way their hands jostled together as they walked. The look that flashed from their eyes when their hands touched–the look of proprietorship in each other–told Laura Van Dorn that her life’s work with Lila was finished. The daughter’s day of choice had come; and whatever of honesty, whatever of sense, and sentiment, whatever of courage or conscience the mother had put into the daughter’s heart and mind was ready for its lifelong test. Lila had embarked on her own journey; and motherhood was ended for Laura Van Dorn.
As she looked at the girl, the mother saw herself, but she was not embittered at the sad ending of her own journey along the road which her daughter was taking. For years she had accepted as the fortunes of war, what had come to her with her marriage, and because she had the daughter, the mother knew that she was gainer after all. For to realize motherhood even with one child, was to taste the best that life held. So her face reflected, as a cloud reflects the glory of the dawn, something of the radiance that shone in the two young faces before her; and in her faith she laid small stress upon the particular one beside her daughter. Not his growing fame, not his probable good fortune, inspired her satisfaction. When she considered him at all as her daughter’s lover, she only reflected on the fact that all she knew of Kenyon was honest and frank and kind. Then she dismissed him from her thoughts.
The mother standing on the hillock looking at the youth and maiden sauntering toward her, felt the serene reliance in the order of things that one has who knows that the worst life can do to a brave, wise, kind heart, is not bad. For she had felt the ruthless wrenches of the senseless wheels of fate upon her own flesh. Yet she had come from the wheels bruised, and in agony, but not broken, not beaten. Her peace of mind was not passive. It amounted to a militant pride in the strength and beauty of the soul she had equipped for the voyage. Laura Van Dorn was sure of Lila and was happy. Her eyes filled with grateful tears as she looked down upon her daughter.
Her father, toddling ahead of Mrs. Nesbit a hundred paces, reached the car first. She nodded at the young people 484trudging up the slope. “Yes,” said the Doctor, “we have been watching them for half an hour. Seems like the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.”
The daughter alighted from the runabout, her father got in and waited for his wife. The three turned their backs on the approaching lovers and pretended not to see them. As Laura walked around the corner of the house, she found Grant waiting for her at the car station, and the two having missed the car that the other carpenters had taken, stood under the shed waiting.
“Well–Laura,” he asked, “are you leaving the idle rich for the worthy poor?” She laughed and explained:
“The electric was for father and mother, and so long as I have to go down to my girls’ class in South Harvey this evening for their picnic, I’m going to ride in your car, if you don’t mind?”
The street car came wailing down on them and when they had taken a rear seat on the trailer together, Grant began: “I’m glad you’ve come just now–just to-night. I’ve been anxious to see you. I’ve got some things to talk over–mighty big things–for me. In the first place–”
“In the first place and before I forget it, let me tell you the good news. A telegram has just come from the capital to father, saying that the State supreme court had upheld his labor bill–his and your bill that went through the referendum.