Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/156

 and quiet. Once get her away from those impossible parents, into a decent home …!

Her heart was rippling full with joy to feel Jean-Pierre there beside her. At times it overflowed, and she all but opened her lips to tell him she would sacrifice anything for him, that she would put no obstacle in his way. But for the moment a prudent thought restrained her. She would wait and see whether perhaps Jean-Pierre had not forgotten that curious infatuation with a mere child. There was no use putting the idea back in his head, if his exile and two years' time had blotted it out.

They sat in a decorous silence, waiting for the beginning of the program. Madame Garnier moved nearer to Jean-Pierre, for the pleasure of feeling his arm, a man's arm now, inside a very well-cut masculine coat-sleeve. She remembered what it had been, the rosy translucent flesh of her first baby, then the little thin, white arm of his long ailing boyhood—how she had fought with ill-health to keep him—all those years, never an instant's relaxation of her care, her prayers, her piercing anxiety! Oh, well, it was all over now. There he sat, a splendid young man, still a little delicate, but sound and well. Her reward had come. How goldenly the years stretched out before her! Perhaps it was just as well to have him marry young, to have his wife come to him intact in the first bloom of her early girlhood. He himself was so unworldly, he would never be able to manage an older woman. A fleeting picture came to her of a rosy baby's face—Jean-Pierre's first child. The thought flooded over her, rich with pride and joy.

She continued to gaze at a certain spot in the curtain, her face framed in her heavy velvet hat, composed in decorous vacancy.

Beside her Jean-Pierre also fixed his eyes on a certain spot in the curtain, and composed his face to quiet. But he was afraid of the silence. He wished his mother had gone on chatting, or that they had sat down near acquaintances with whom he would have been forced to talk. Then he would not have been so conscious of the dryness of his mouth, of the