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Authors: Grace Livingston Hill
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keep a kind of resentment out of her thoughts as she worked.
Yet when she caught sight of her father’s white face again as the doctor helped him up the stairs, while she stood in the darkened back hall and watched, her heart failed her. Poor Dad! Poor Chester! He had always been such a good sport! Perhaps he would pull out of it! He had to. He would have to borrow money or something till times got all right again. Of course, that was it. He would borrow money. Everybody did nowadays anyway. It was old-fashioned to worry because you couldn’t pay your bills right on the dot. Oh, Chester would pull out, of course. She couldn’t think of them as settling down to be poor . Of course not. It wasn’t to be tolerated!
And so, comforting herself, she crept back to her bed, and having heard the doctor go down stairs and out the front door, she composed herself to sleep.
Mrs. Thornton tiptoed around her room putting things in order for rest, laying her slippers and warm robe on a chair by the bed for possible sudden need in the night, switching on a night-light in the hall just outside her bedroom door, switching off the brighter light. She slipped softly into bed, making the least movement possible that she might not disturb her husband.
She curled down gratefully under the blankets, let her tired head sink into the pillow and closed her eyes, for the evening had been a long, hard one and the culmination had been appalling. She had done a good deal of weeping, which was always exhausting, and her senses were almost benumbed with the various shocks they had received. But the things that had happened during the last hour had left the earlier events somewhat in the background. The unpleasant scene at the dinner table, and the incidents of Jane and Betty seemed comparatively unimportant in the light of later developments.
What, for example, had been the meaning of Chris’s strange actions and his father’s unprecedented treatment? Could it be possible that Chris was growing wild? She could not get away from the memory of the smell of liquor about him when he came into the house. She shuddered involuntarily as she thought of his unsteady step and incoherent speech! Chris! Her first little son, Chris, scarcely grown out of childhood, just coming into strength and beauty. Chris of whom she had always been so proud! Her first son! Chris gone wrong so early! And gambling! Could it be true? Surely it was someone else’s fault, not Chris’s. Why, Chris had been brought up to respect himself and his family! And that family had always stood for temperance and right living! His father an elder in the Presbyterian church, too! Surely Chris would not have knowingly disgraced his family!
She tried to think who Chris could have been going with that she might have someone else beside her son to shoulder the blame. That Harold Griswold, very likely. He had an expensive sports car and all the pocket money he wanted, and Chris had been determined to be in that car every waking minute out of school. They tore by the house forty times a day like a mad torpedo bound for destruction, and Eleanor had formed the habit of catching her breath and closing her eyes in a quick prayer whenever she heard the screech of the junior Griswold’s car, for she was always certain that her own son was clinging somewhere about its rigging, if he was not actually driving it. She fully expected to see him flung white and lifeless across the pavement sometime, from mere momentum, as the reckless bunch of wild youths hurled by. Several times she had been on the point of appealing to Chris’s father about it, only she knew that her husband was already overburdened with anxiety, and she kept hoping that Chris would find some new attraction, and it would not be necessary to worry his father with it. She did so hate to have Chester blame Chris for anything. He seemed at times so hard on the boy. As if he did not remember being a boy himself.
But now, surely, this
Yet when she caught sight of her father’s white face again as the doctor helped him up the stairs, while she stood in the darkened back hall and watched, her heart failed her. Poor Dad! Poor Chester! He had always been such a good sport! Perhaps he would pull out of it! He had to. He would have to borrow money or something till times got all right again. Of course, that was it. He would borrow money. Everybody did nowadays anyway. It was old-fashioned to worry because you couldn’t pay your bills right on the dot. Oh, Chester would pull out, of course. She couldn’t think of them as settling down to be poor . Of course not. It wasn’t to be tolerated!
And so, comforting herself, she crept back to her bed, and having heard the doctor go down stairs and out the front door, she composed herself to sleep.
Mrs. Thornton tiptoed around her room putting things in order for rest, laying her slippers and warm robe on a chair by the bed for possible sudden need in the night, switching on a night-light in the hall just outside her bedroom door, switching off the brighter light. She slipped softly into bed, making the least movement possible that she might not disturb her husband.
She curled down gratefully under the blankets, let her tired head sink into the pillow and closed her eyes, for the evening had been a long, hard one and the culmination had been appalling. She had done a good deal of weeping, which was always exhausting, and her senses were almost benumbed with the various shocks they had received. But the things that had happened during the last hour had left the earlier events somewhat in the background. The unpleasant scene at the dinner table, and the incidents of Jane and Betty seemed comparatively unimportant in the light of later developments.
What, for example, had been the meaning of Chris’s strange actions and his father’s unprecedented treatment? Could it be possible that Chris was growing wild? She could not get away from the memory of the smell of liquor about him when he came into the house. She shuddered involuntarily as she thought of his unsteady step and incoherent speech! Chris! Her first little son, Chris, scarcely grown out of childhood, just coming into strength and beauty. Chris of whom she had always been so proud! Her first son! Chris gone wrong so early! And gambling! Could it be true? Surely it was someone else’s fault, not Chris’s. Why, Chris had been brought up to respect himself and his family! And that family had always stood for temperance and right living! His father an elder in the Presbyterian church, too! Surely Chris would not have knowingly disgraced his family!
She tried to think who Chris could have been going with that she might have someone else beside her son to shoulder the blame. That Harold Griswold, very likely. He had an expensive sports car and all the pocket money he wanted, and Chris had been determined to be in that car every waking minute out of school. They tore by the house forty times a day like a mad torpedo bound for destruction, and Eleanor had formed the habit of catching her breath and closing her eyes in a quick prayer whenever she heard the screech of the junior Griswold’s car, for she was always certain that her own son was clinging somewhere about its rigging, if he was not actually driving it. She fully expected to see him flung white and lifeless across the pavement sometime, from mere momentum, as the reckless bunch of wild youths hurled by. Several times she had been on the point of appealing to Chris’s father about it, only she knew that her husband was already overburdened with anxiety, and she kept hoping that Chris would find some new attraction, and it would not be necessary to worry his father with it. She did so hate to have Chester blame Chris for anything. He seemed at times so hard on the boy. As if he did not remember being a boy himself.
But now, surely, this
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