your father in you," her mother said, with her arms about her and kissing her once. "I know he considered that he was sparing me by keeping that serious trouble hidden so long and then going off by himself to look death in the face. He always wishes to spare me, doesn't he, dear?"
"Yes, mother," Marjorie said again, wretchedly.
"He is quite, quite safe, Marjorie—Doctor Grantham assures me. Doctor will take me down to see him now. Of course, I understand your father's motives for wishing to keep his operation secret even from his friends. I realize I must not let my own feelings stand in the way of his business future. Kiss me, Marjorie.—There now, I'll go with Doctor Grantham; you mustn't think of going, child. You've been through too much already."
Marjorie was glad not to argue against her; Marjorie scarcely trusted herself to be with her mother yet. Her mother went to her own room and Doctor Grantham came up.
"How are we this morning?" he asked, in his cheery, impersonal voice. He was at the age of slow, imperceptible physical change and except for his bearing, which was naturally more assured, and his clothes, which were better, he seemed to Marjorie exactly the same as she first remembered him, coming in and asking her that same question, in that same voice, every morning of those weeks when she was in bed with scarlet fever when she was ten years old. That was when the Hales inhabited the seven-room clapboard house on the fifty-foot lot in Irving Park, and Marjorie's father took care of the furnace, and Doctor Grantham had his office above the drug store on the Montrose Avenue corner. Of course, long ago, he too had moved away
