第32章

"Mother will look after Bella," Grace replied, too meek again to resent the implication. After a pause, "Oh, Louise," she added beseechingly, "I've suffered so much from my own wrong-headedness and obstinacy that I couldn't bear to see you taking the same risk, and I'm so glad that you are going to meet your husband in the right spirit."

"What right spirit?" croaked Mrs. Maynard.

"The wish to please him, to"--"I don't choose to have him say that his child disgraces him," replied Mrs. Maynard, in the low, husky, monotonous murmur in which she was obliged to utter everything.

"But, dear Louise!" cried the other, "you choose something else too, don't you? You wish to meet him as if no unkindness had parted you, and as if you were to be always together after this? I hope you do! Then I should feel that all this suffering and, trouble was a mercy."

"Other people's misery is always a mercy to them," hoarsely suggested Mrs. Maynard.

"Yes, I know that," Grace submitted, with meek conviction. "But, Louise," she pleaded, "you will make up with your husband, won't you?

Whatever he has done, that will surely be best. I know that you love him, and that he must love you, yet. It's the only way. If you were finally separated from him, and you and he could be happy apart, what would become of that poor child ? Who will take a father's place with her? That's the worst about it. Oh, Louise, I feel so badly for you--for what you have lost, and may lose. Marriage must change people so that unless they live to each other, their lives will be maimed and useless. It ought to be so much easier to forgive any wrong your husband does you than to punish it; for that perpetuates the wrong, and forgiveness ends it, and it's the only thing that can end a wrong. I am sure that your husband will be ready to do or say anything you wish; but if he shouldn't, Louise, you will receive him forgivingly, and make the first advance? It's a woman's right to make the advances in forgiving."

Mrs. Maynard lay with her hands stretched at her side under the covering, and only her face visible above it. She now turned her head a little, so as to pierce the earnest speaker with a gleam from her dull eye. "Have you accepted Walter Libby?" she asked.

"Louise!" cried Grace, with a blush that burned like fire.

"That's the way I used to talk when I was first engaged. Wait till you're married a while. I want Bella to have on her pique, and her pink sash,--not the cherry one. I should think you would have studied to be a minister instead of a doctor. But you need n't preach to me; I shall know how to behave to George Maynard when he comes,--if he ever does come. And now I should think you had made me talk enough!"

"Yes, Yes," said Grace, recalled to her more immediate duty in alarm.