Ernestine
was glad of that, for she had been dreading the evening. Their talk of
the afternoon had made it more clear and more hard than it had ever been
before.
Her mothering instinct had been supreme that summer. It had dominated her
so completely as to blur slightly the clearness of her intellectual
vision. To be doing things for him, making him as comfortable as
possible, to find occupation for him as one does for the convalescent, to
hover about him, showering him with manifestations of her love and
woman's protectiveness--it had stirred the mother in her, and in the
depths of her sorrow there had been a sublime joy.
Now she could not see her way ahead. It was her constant doing things to
"make it up to him" had made the summer bearable at all. With the
clearing of her vision her sustaining power seemed taken from her.
"And how has it gone with you this summer?" Professor Hastings asked,
holding both of her hands for a minute in fatherly fashion as she met him
in the hall.
He scarcely heard her reply, for the thought came to him: "If he could
only see her now!"
It was her pride and her wistfulness, her courage and her appeal, the
union of defiance and tenderness which held one strangely in the face of
Ernestine.
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