"There is now," said her father. He was in no mood for tomfoolery. His daughter saw it and smiled a little.
"What is it?" she inquired. And then he let her have it!
"Laura wants to get married," he snapped.
Deborah caught her breath at that, and an eager excited expression swept over her attractive face. She had leaned forward suddenly.
"Father! No! Which one?" she asked. "Tell me! Is it Harold Sloane?"
"It is."
"Oh, dad." She sank back in her chair. "Oh, dad," she repeated.
"What's the matter with Sloane?" he demanded.
"Oh, nothing, nothing—it's all right—"
"It is, eh? How do you know it is?" His anxious eyes were still upon hers, and he saw she was thinking fast and hard and shutting him completely out. And it irritated him. "What do you know of this fellow Sloane?"
"Oh, nothing—nothing—"
"Nothing! Humph! Then why do you sit here and say it's all right? Don't talk like a fool!" he exclaimed. He waited, but she said no more, and Roger's exasperation increased. "He has money enough apparently—and they'll spend it like March hares!"
Deborah looked up at him:
"What did Laura tell you, dear?"
"Not very much. I'm only her father. She had a dinner and dance on her mind."
But Deborah pressed her questions and he gave her brief replies.
"Well, what shall we do about it?" he asked.
"Nothing—until we know something more." Roger regarded her fiercely.
"Why don't you go up and talk to her, then?"
"She's asleep yet—"
"Never mind if she is! If she's going to marry a chap like that and ruin her life it's high time she was up for her breakfast!"
While he scanned his Sunday paper he heard Deborah in the pantry. She emerged with a breakfast tray and he saw her start up to Laura's room. She was there for over an hour. And when she returned to his study, he saw her eyes were shining. How women's eyes will shine at such times, he told himself in annoyance.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Better leave her alone to-day," she advised. "Harold is coming some night soon."
"What for?"
"To have a talk with you."
Her father smote his paper. "What did she tell you about him?" he asked.
"Not much more than she told you. His parents are dead—but he has a rich widowed aunt in Bridgeport who adores him. They mean to be married the end of May. She wants a church wedding, bridesmaids, ushers—the wedding reception here, of course—"
"Oh, Lord," breathed Roger dismally.
"We won't bother you much, father dear—"
"You will bother me much," he retorted. "I propose to be bothered—bothered a lot! I'm going to look up this fellow Sloane—"
"But let's leave him alone for to-day." She bent over her father compassionately. "What a night you must have had, poor dear." Roger looked up in grim reproach.
"You like all this," he grunted. "You, a grown woman, a teacher too."
"I wonder if I do," she said. "I guess I'm a queer person, dad, a curious family mixture—of Laura and Edith and mother and you, with a good deal of myself thrown in. But it feels rather good to be mixed, don't you think? Let's stay mixed as long as we can—and keep together the family."
That afternoon, to distract him, Deborah took her father to a concert in Carnegie Hall. She had often urged him to go of late, but despite his liking for music Roger had refused before, simply because it was a change. But why balk at going anywhere now, when Laura was up to such antics at home?
"Do you mind climbing up to the gallery?" Deborah asked as they entered the hall.
"Not at all," he curtly answered. He did mind it very much!
"Then we'll go to the very top," she said. "It's a long climb but I want you to see it. It's so different up there."
"I don't doubt it," he replied. And as they made the slow ascent, pettishly he wondered why Deborah must always be so eager for queer places. Galleries, zoo schools, tenement slums—why not take a two dollar seat in life?
Deborah seated him far down in the front of the great gallery, over at the extreme right, and from here they could look back and up at a huge dim arena of faces.
"Now watch them close," she whispered. "See what the music does to them."
As the symphony began below the faces all grew motionless. And as the music cast its spell, the anxious ruffled feelings which had been with Roger all that day little by little were dispelled, and soon his imagination began to work upon this scene. He saw many familiar American types. He felt he knew what they had been doing on Sundays only a few years before. After church they had eaten large Sunday dinners. Then some had napped and some had walked and some had gone to Sunday school. At night they had had cold suppers, and afterwards some had gone back to church; while others, as in Roger's house in the days when Judith was alive, had gathered around the piano for hymns. Young men callers, friends of their daughters, had joined in the family singing. Yes, some of these people had been like that. To them, a few short years ago, a concert on the Sabbath would have seemed a sacrilege. He could almost hear from somewhere the echo of "Abide With Me."
But over this memory of a song rose now the surging music of Tschaikovsky's "Pathetique." And the yearnings and fierce hungers in this tumultuous music swept all the hymns from Roger's mind. Once more he watched the gallery, and this time he became aware that more than half were foreigners. Out of the mass from every side individual faces emerged, swarthy, weird, and staring hungrily into space. And to Roger the whole shadowy place, the very air, grew pregnant, charged with all these inner lives bound together in this mood, this mystery that had swept over them all, immense and formless, baffling, this furious demanding and this blind wistful groping which he himself had known so well, ever since his wife had died and he had lost his faith in God. What was the meaning of it all if life were nothing but a start, and there were nothing but the grave?
"You will live on in our children's lives."
He glanced around at Deborah. Was she so certain, so serene? "What do I know of her?" he asked. "Little or nothing," he sadly replied. And he tried to piece together from things she had told him her life as it had passed him by. Had there been no questionings, no sharp disillusionments? There must have been. He recalled irritabilities, small acts and exclamations of impatience, boredom, "blues." And as he watched her he grew sure that his daughter's existence had been like his own. Despite its different setting, its other aims and visions, it had been a mere beginning, a feeling for a foothold, a search for light and happiness. And Deborah seemed to him still a child. "How far will you go?" he wondered.
Although he was still watching her even after the music had ceased, she did not notice him for a time. Then she turned to him slowly with a smile.
"Well? What did you see?" she asked.
"I wasn't looking," he replied.
"Why, dearie," she retorted. "Where's that imagination of yours?"
"It