"If you wish."
"He must know. And I couldn't stand any more of this, just yet--any more mistake."
"I will tell him," said Mrs. Corey; and it was naturally the next thing for a woman who dwelt so much on decencies to propose: "We must go to call on her--your sisters and I. They have never seen her even; and she mustn't be allowed to think we're indifferent to her, especially under the circumstances."
"Oh no! Don't go--not yet," cried Corey, with an instinctive perception that nothing could be worse for him. "We must wait--we must be patient. I'm afraid it would be painful to her now."
He turned away without speaking further; and his mother's eyes followed him wistfully to the door. There were some questions that she would have liked to ask him; but she had to content herself with trying to answer them when her husband put them to her.
There was this comfort for her always in Bromfield Corey, that he never was much surprised at anything, however shocking or painful. His standpoint in regard to most matters was that of the sympathetic humorist who would be glad to have the victim of circumstance laugh with him, but was not too much vexed when the victim could not. He laughed now when his wife, with careful preparation, got the facts of his son's predicament fully under his eye.
"Really, Bromfield," she said, "I don't see how you can laugh. Do you see any way out of it?"
"It seems to me that the way has been found already. Tom has told his love to the right one, and the wrong one knows it. Time will do the rest."
"If I had so low an opinion of them all as that, it would make me very unhappy. It's shocking to think of it."
"It is upon the theory of ladies and all young people," said her husband, with a shrug, feeling his way to the matches on the mantel, and then dropping them with a sign, as if recollecting that he must not smoke there. "I've no doubt Tom feels himself an awful sinner. But apparently he's resigned to his sin; he isn't going to give her up."