"Charles! How plebeian!" exclaimed his wife. "Have you forgotten that every newspaper in this region will have Gloria's picture in it? Yes, and yours too if one could judge from the way the cameras were crowded nearby yesterday. People will recognize you wherever you go, and what would they think to see you eating sandwiches by the roadside? A picnic right after a funeral!"
"Nobody is going to recognize us where we're going, Adelaide. Run along, child, and get ready as soon as you can! Vanna, can you take care of your mother for a while?" There was eagerness in his eyes and voice. His wife looked at him as if he were insane.
"Charles! You simply can't do a thing like that to us all! It is preposterous. Why, you're crazy! Gloria owes a debt to her fellow townspeople! A social debt."
"I don't see for what!" said her husband, drinking the last swallow of his coffee and beginning to fold his napkin.
"Why, all those wedding presents for one thing. They'll have to be sent back, of course, and she'll have to be here to attend to them and write notes and everything."
"Yes? Well, that's all the more reason why I mean to get her away right off this morning. That child is not going through any more harrowing scenes for a while. She'll have a nervous breakdown before another week if she does. Do you know she hasn't cried a tear yet? Do you know that's a dangerous state to be in?"
"Oh, I don't think so," said the mother complacently. "It's just that Gloria is a very self-controlled girl. I brought her up not to cry over things!"
But Gloria was up in her room working fast. She did not even wait for a maid to help her. She was getting out her overnight bag and suitcase, flinging in a few necessities, toiletries, accessories, plain sports clothes, rooting out old favorites that she had not been wearing lately since her engagement was announced because her mother had said she was too much in the public eye to go around in clothes that were out-of-date. She didn't put in a single black dress. White and yellow and brown, a couple of knit dresses for cool days, a coat, and a plain little hat.
When her mother, having lost her argument with her husband and having given her orders for the day to the cook and her social secretary, finally hurried upstairs to deal with her recalcitrant daughter, she found Gloria cloaked and hatted and gloved, sitting by her window with her two bags on the floor at her feet, watching for her father's car to come around.
"Gloria, you're hurting me very much by your strange actions," began her mother, sitting down and surveying the rebel.
"I'm sorry, Mother, but I have to get away right off. I have to get away from people!"
"You're a strange child! One would suppose you would want to be with your own mother and sister! Now, while you're in trouble, one would suppose you would confide in your own mother!"
Gloria turned despairing eyes on her parent. "Mother, you just don't understand!" she said desperately. "I've got to get somewhere away from everything. I'll come back sometime when I get my bearings, but I won't go to Europe nor into society. I've got to get away from those things and find out what it all means!"
"What do you mean, ‘what it all means'?"
"I don't know what I mean, but I've got to. I've stood this horror as long as I can. It's been terrible!"
"Gloria, do you think Stan would like you to do a strange thing like this? Wouldn't he expect you to stay here for a few days at least and help comfort his mother and keep up appearances?"
Gloria's eyes narrowed. "Mother, Stan isn't to be considered anymore! That's over!"
"Why, Gloria, what a terrible thing to say. When you just adored Stan and wanted to do everything you could to please him! Why look how hard you worked on your father to get him to build a bar in your new house just because Stan wanted one."
Gloria's face hardened. "Yes, and now I wish I hadn't," she said half fiercely. "If Stan hadn't been so fond of drinking, he might not be dead to-day!"
"Glory! What a shocking thing to say! Stan never drank to excess. I always felt he was very abstemious. And surely you want to comport yourself as he would want you to do!"
"No," said Gloria, "I don't! I don't think he has any right over my actions now. I think he forfeited his right by going up to New York and taking that dancing girl out to dinner the very week before we were to be married! He has made me feel that nothing he ever said to me was really mine anymore."
"Why, you silly child! What a perfectly extravagant idea! You poor child, you take after your father! He's always getting such ridiculous notions in his head! But Gloria dear, you mustn't make so much of that incident. Even if it were all true what the papers said, which of course it isn't, why, that isn't a great thing. Most men have been a little wild before they settle down to get married and had little affairs with girls that they wouldn't have married, for a fortune."
"Mother! You don't mean that! You know Father never was a man like that!"
"Well, no," said the mother with a half-contemptuous smile. "Your father of course is an exception. He always had a puritanical conscience, and his bringing up was purely Victorian of course."
Gloria lifted her chin a bit haughtily. "Well, if you don't mind, Mother, I think I'll be Victorian after this like Dad! You know it makes a difference when it really happens to you, Mother! You've always had a wonderful husband and lived a sheltered life, Mother, and you don't understand, I–Mother, I know! It's happened to me, and it makes all the difference in the world!"
Then Gloria heard her father's voice calling from the hall to know if she was ready, and she jumped up and flung her arms around her bewildered, indignant mother's neck.
"Dear Mother!" she said, kissing her fervently. "I'm dreadfully sorry to hurt you, but I really have to go now and find out how to stand things. You don't understand, but I love you!"
"But what shall I tell Stan's mother?" asked the still-indignant mother.
"Tell her I was about to get sick and Dad had to take me away for a few days. Good-bye, Mother!" And with a little wave of her hand and a faint attempt at a smile, she, without waiting for a servant, seized her two bags and was gone down the stairs and out the door.
Down near the gateway, Vanna stepped out of the shrubbery, her face swollen with crying. She stopped them long enough to kiss her sister.
"I understand, Glory darling!" she whispered.
Then they were gone, down the highway, out into a world that the father used to know and hadn't seen for a long, long time.
CHAPTER III
Mrs. Sutherland had managed to quash the sandwich idea from the day's scheme of things, so about one o'clock the travelers began to get very hungry, for breakfast had been but a sketchy affair for both of them.
They lunched at a quiet little roadside place the like of which Gloria had never entered before, so plain and quiet that it wasn't even a tearoom. It was just a little cottage by the roadside with a sign out by the white gate: Homemade bread sandwiches, fried egg or chicken.
It was a revelation to Gloria to enter that tiny cottage. It seemed scarcely big enough to be a bird cage, yet she discovered that it housed five people, a man and his wife, a little girl of eight years, another of three with gold curls almost the color of Gloria's, and a boy of ten who came whistling in from the barn with a basket of eggs.
The cold chicken was delicious, great flaky slices, and the bread was a dream. Mr. Sutherland said it tasted just like his mother's, the fried eggs were cooked just right, and the butter was something to be remembered. The little eight-year-old girl proudly said that she had helped to churn it. There was a pitcher of creamy milk. It didn't somehow taste like city milk, though the Sutherland