"Never mind," she said softly to herself, "he will tell me all about her
when he is ready. Meanwhile, I'll wait, and not get in his way,--that is
what mothers are for." But by some strange impulse she loosened the
string that bound the roses, and placed them in one of her few treasures,
a silver bowl, in the centre of the supper table, and going to her
bedchamber, which was, country fashion, back of the sitting room, arrayed
herself in Horace's gifts,--the silk gown and fichu, with the onyx bar
and butterflies to fasten it,--and then returned to the porch to watch
the twilight gently veil sunset.
Upstairs, Horace unpacked his trunks in a rebellious mood. In the morning
he had felt in the proper sense self-sufficient and contented,--the
position, which a few months before he thought perhaps ten years ahead of
him, had suddenly dropped at his feet, and he felt a natural elation,
though it stopped quite short of self-conceit. He could afford to relax
the grip with which he had been holding himself in check, and face the
knowledge that he loved Sylvia; while the fact that fate had brought her
to summer in his vicinity seemed but another proof that fortune was
smiling upon him.
Now everything, though outwardly the same, was changed by the new point
of view, which he realized that he had already tried to conceal from his
mother, by his scanty account of the festival. He had been suddenly
confronted by conditions that he never expected to meet outside of the
pages of fiction, and felt himself utterly unable to combat them.
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