and when Mother Carey went to her room that evening she felt conscious of a lassitude, and a sense of anxiety, deeper than for months.  As Gilbert went by to his own room, he glanced in at her door, finding it slightly ajar.  She sat before her dressing table, her long hair flowing over her shoulders, her head bent over her two hands.  His father’s picture was in its accustomed place, and he heard her say as she looked at it:  “Oh, my dear, my dear!  I am so careworn, so troubled, so discouraged!  Gilbert needs you, and so do I, more than tongue can tell!” The voice was so low that it was almost a whisper, but it reached Gilbert’s ears, and there was a sob strangled in it that touched his heart.

The boy tiptoed softly into his room and sat down on his bed in the moonlight.

“Dear old Mater!” he thought.  “It’s no go!  I’ve got to give up Eastover and college and all and settle down into a country bumpkin!  No fellow could see his mother look like that, and speak like that, and go his own gait; he’s just got to go hers!”

Meantime Mrs. Carey had put out the lamp and lay quietly thinking.  The last words that floated through her mind as she sank to sleep were those of a half-forgotten verse, learned, she could not say how many years before:—­

  You can glad your child or grieve it! 
  You can trust it or deceive it;
    When all’s done
    Beneath God’s sun
  You can only love and leave it.

XXIII

NEARING SHINY WALL

Another person presumably on the way to Shiny Wall and Peacepool, but putting small energy into the journey, was that mass of positively glaring virtues, Julia Carey.  More than one fairy must have been forgotten when Julia’s christening party came off.  No heart-to-heart talk in the twilight had thus far produced any obvious effect.  She had never, even when very young, experienced a desire to sit at the feet of superior wisdom, always greatly preferring a chair of her own.  She seldom did wrong, in her own opinion, because the moment she entertained an idea it at once became right, her vanity serving as a pair of blinders to keep her from seeing the truth.  The doctors did not permit any one to write to poor Allan Carey, so that Julia’s heart could not be softened by continual communication with her invalid father, who, with Gladys Ferguson, constituted the only tribunal she was willing to recognize.  Her consciousness of superiority to the conditions that surrounded her, her love of luxury, the silken selfishness with which she squirmed out of unpleasant duties, these made her an unlikable and undesirable housemate, and that these faults could exist with what Nancy called her “everlasting stained-glass attitude” made it difficult for Mother Carey to maintain a harmonious family circle.  It was an outburst of Nancy’s impetuous temper that Mrs. Carey had always secretly dreaded, but after all it was poor Kathleen who precipitated an unforgettable scene which left an influence behind it for many months.