He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house,

but long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he

saw the familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the

faint echoes of the orchestra. They were dancing.

Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of

the roadside afresh. "My dear Don Quixote!" With what a look of

motherly amusement and tenderness she had said it. What a woman!

He had never kissed her. He had never even thought of kissing

Clarence Breckenridge's wife.

He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical

shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision

was not to be so easily dismissed. It was said of old Madam

Gregory that she had never been heard to raise her voice in the

course of her sixty honored years. Of the four sons she had borne,

three were dead, and the husband she had loved so faithfully lay

beside them. She was slightly crippled, her outings confined to a

slow drive every day. She was solitary in a retinue of servants.

But that modulated voice and those cool, temperate eyes were still

a power. His mother's displeasure was a very real thing to Warren

Gregory, and the thought of adding another sorrow to the weight on

those thin shoulders was not an easy one for him to entertain.

It would be a sorrow. Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her

life's one prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become

one, too. Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been

undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win

the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable

of men. When her oldest son was born, and given his father's name,

she saw, in her husband's willingness to further plans for the

baptism, definite cause for hope. Another son was born, there was

another christening; it was the father's own hand that gave the

third baby lay-baptism only a few moments before the tiny life

slipped back into the eternity from which it had so lately come.

A year or two later a fourth son was born. Presently the dignified

Mrs. Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to

Sunday-school, watching every phase in the development of their

awakening souls with terror and with hope. What fears she suffered

in spirit during those years no one but herself knew. Outwardly,

the hospitable, gracious life of the great house went on; the

Gregorys were prominent in charities, they opened their mountain

camp for the summer, they travelled abroad, they had an audience

with the Pope. Time went on, and the twelve-year-old George was

taken from them, breaking the father's heart, said the watching

world. But there was a strange calm in the mother's eyes as they

rested on the dead child's serene face: Heaven had her free

offering, now she must have her reward.




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