There were many other locked doors on the corridors and on East Range and West Range. The quadrangle looked deserted. Edward Montague had gone home. The friendly women in the other houses about the campus were too busied in household doings to have time for visiting. Frances was left to herself and to her house.
The Christmas-tide had always been a joyful holiday for her father and for herself, a time of genuine merry-making and of real rest, when Susan's cooking provided all good things, and the professor allowed himself the luxury of lighter reading, and the two of them were free to come and go as they chose. Frances was brave enough and proud enough to leave no part of any preparation neglected; but her close-shut lips and dark-circled eyes and white cheeks smote her father as nothing else could have done.
[Pg 237]
After a few brief words that bitter night there was nothing more he could say to her, and to watch her silent fight was agony.
Christmas day dragged miserably. The professor, watching his daughter furtively, felt he could bear it no longer. He laid down the book Edward Montague had sent him as a holiday gift and which he had been making some pretence of reading. "Frances," he said suddenly, "how would you like to go to Washington?"
Frances looked up astonished. "To Washington?" she repeated.
"I have been wanting to go for a long time," her father went on hurriedly. "There are some books in the Congressional library I want, and I can get them nowhere else, some manuscripts, too. I never seem to find the opportunity to go. Suppose"—with boyish impatience, now that the topic was once broached—"suppose we go to-morrow?"
There were tears in Frances' eyes she did not wish her father to see. She got up and went to the back of his chair and slipped[Pg 238] her arms about his neck, and by and by she laid her cheek on his thick black hair where the gray showed in the waves. Neither spoke.
Then the professor cleared his throat. "Suppose you run up and see about my things and yours; we can take an early train and have part of to-morrow there."
He had much to say of rare books on the journey next day, but when he came back and met his friends and talked of his holiday, it was of picture galleries and concerts and fine new buildings he spoke. The listener would have guessed few hours with rare tomes, and would have guessed correctly. The professor had spent one day in the library he had been longing to visit for two years, and that he spent there because Frances declared she would go nowhere else.
When Edward Montague came from his home visit and brought an offering of a fine old ham from his father, over which Susan gloated in the kitchen, and a box of delicious cake from his mother, and another of geraniums and violets from the cherished plants[Pg 239] in her flower-pit, the professor had so much to say that the young man, lost in the brilliant flow of criticism and description, had no time to notice Frances' quiet, and thought her unwonted pallor no more than the result of the dissipation her father so gayly talked of. Montague found himself in his old position in the household. There was something in Frances he could not understand, but her manner was most kind. There was a new friendliness, too, in her intercourse with others. Her simple content no longer made a shield about her; instead, the careless happiness gone, the fight with sorrow bred no selfishness in her generous nature, but brought a thoughtfulness for others, a gratitude for the human touch and the little unnamable kindnesses that link friendly folk to their kind. She found, too, a pleasure she had not dreamed in the simple neighborliness of other households.
Lawson, back at the University, was an alien, who, failing to find his place amongst them, was again one of the student world. But he was one of the students of whom the[Pg 240] professors were beginning to talk. He resigned from the eleven, doing no practice work now, and settled to grim, hard study that in a month showed good results and promised the brilliancy the Faculty had half suspected and half despaired of. The men who found the way to his room expecting something of the old cheer, found the way out again, and kept it. There was nothing in the reticent, haughty fellow, who had cut athletics and cut the women, too, and settled down to a steady grind, to attract them.
His room lay up the corridor; he changed his dining-hall, there was no duty to take him down the quadrangle, and he kept to his own way.
He avoided Frances, but he saw her oftener than she knew. When he saw what he read rightly as the heart-ache that showed upon her face, the baser part of him cried out with a great temptation. When he saw, later on, the flicker of color in her cheek, the spring in her walk, he thanked God that he had not yielded to that cry. He had never spoken more than a word of greeting. He[Pg 241] had met her father somewhere on the grounds, and, though he had doffed his cap readily, his bow was as cold as the professor's was.
But when he saw Frances going about with something of her old cheerful air he ceased to avoid her. It was not necessary, he told himself, with bitter self-disdain. And when he glimpsed her one day walking in from town through the gates and along the way they had come in the autumn days, he walked straight on, bowed, and passed her. He saw her startled eyes, for she had been looking down and walking slowly, and despite his pride he turned and watched, half longing he might walk by her side along the ribbony path under the arching trees. He knew, with sudden swift memory, that so the skies had looked, primrose on the horizon and in the west clear green and far above the blue, and so the bare branches had rocked against the sky as they walked home together. But Frances' footsteps were quickened. So! he would go his way. And Frances, hurrying faster and faster, fleeing[Pg 242] the very memories he was recalling, and yet carrying them with her, felt her hard-won control gone at a breath. As one who strives and strives, and believes he has at last attained, faces, at some unthought-of trifle, failure,—it is not always failure; it is often fear which shakes him, and which, when it is conquered, leaves the bulwark higher and firmer.
But Frances ran past Susan at the door and up the stair. Her heavy furs were stifling her; she flung them off. What should she do? she was asking herself wildly. Own herself defeated, say to herself there was a voice in her heart stronger than all else? She threw herself face downwards on her bed, and shook with her sobbing; and though her cries were stifled, Susan, in the hall where she had stolen, startled, scared at what she had seen in Frances' face, Susan heard.
Susan went softly back down the stairway. "Lord," she moaned as she wrung her skinny hands, "Lord, what we gwine do now? Dyar's Marse Robert away, an' a good[Pg 243] thing too; dyar'............