Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/189

Rh raised foreﬁnger of reproval. “Now, Johnny, I won’t answer a single question till you smooth out those lines between your eyes.”

Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. “Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your share—” His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion of warmth.

He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore, and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which her son’s wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difﬁcult years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his life’s confused total of proﬁt and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy’s share in [ 173 ]