The Breaking Point - Page 170/275

There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison

Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had

been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her

father had not been the same since.

He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at

her, however. He was very gentle with her.

And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when

Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there

would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding

and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a

little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and

closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house,

safe and cared for.

That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house

of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone

outside, cold and frightened.

She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.

The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics,

but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however,

avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and

her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a

time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and

she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.

"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,"

she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car

to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.

Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the

day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to

feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin

high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house

on the hill could she drop her pose.

She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison

Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were,

of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had

deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been

any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not

beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the

thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had

there found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when he

talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit

and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.