Pip completing the party. Then another
play, another supper, another ride home with Eve, and in the morning in
quiet contrast to all this, his mother's letter.

"Dear Boy," she said, "I am glad you spoke to me frankly of what you
feel. I want no secrets between us, no reservations, no sacrifices which
in the end may mean a barrier between us.

"Our sojourn at Crossroads has been an experiment. And it has failed. I
had hoped that as the days went on, you might find happiness. Indeed, I
had been deceiving myself with the thought that you were happy. But now I
know that you are not, and I know, too, what it must mean to you to feel
that from among all the others you have been chosen to help a great man
like Dr. Austin, who was the friend of my father, and my friend through
everything.

"But Richard, I can't go back. I literally crawled to Crossroads, after
my years in New York, as a wounded animal seeks its lair. And I have a
morbid shrinking from it all, unworthy of me, perhaps, but none the less
impossible to overcome. I feel that the very stones of the streets would
speak of the tragedy and dishonor of the past: houses would stare at me,
the crowds would shun me.

"And now I have this to propose. That I stay here at Crossroads, keeping
the old house open for you. David is near me, and any one of Cousin Mary
Tyson's daughters would be glad to come to me. And you shall run down at
week-ends, and tell me all about it, and I shall live in your letters and
in the things which you have to tell. We can be one in spirit, even
though there are miles between us. This is the only solution which seems
possible to me at this moment. I cannot hold you back from what may be
your destiny. I can only pray here in my old home for the happiness and
success that must come to you--my boy--my little--boy----"

The letter broke off there. Richard, high up in the room of the big
hotel, found himself pacing the floor. Back of the carefully penned lines
of his mother's letter he could see her slender tense figure, the
whiteness of her face, the shadow in her eyes. How often he had seen it
when a boy, how often he had sworn that when he was the master of the
house he would make her happy.

The telephone rang. It was Eve. "I was afraid you might have left for the
hospital."

"I am leaving in a few minutes."

"Can you go for a ride with me?"

"In the afternoon. There's to be another operation--it may be very late
before I am through."