CHAPTER XXII

But there was a rugged practical side to the character of Roger Gale, and the next morning he was ashamed of the brooding thoughts which had come in the night.  He shook them off as morbid, and resolutely set himself to what lay close before him.  There was work to be done on Bruce’s affairs, and the work was a decided relief.  Madge Deering, in the meantime, had offered to go with Edith and the children to the mountains and see them all well settled there.  And a little talk he had with Madge relieved his mind still further.  What a recovery she had made from the tragedy of years ago.  How alert and wide-awake she seemed.  If Edith could only grow like that.

Soon after their departure, one night when he was dining alone, he had a curious consciousness of the mingled presence of Edith and of Judith his wife.  And this feeling grew so strong that several times he looked about in a startled, questioning manner.  All at once his eye was caught by an old mahogany sideboard.  It was Edith’s.  It had been her mother’s.  Edith, when she married, had wanted something from her old home.  Well, now it was back in the family.

The rest of Edith’s furniture, he learned from Deborah that night, had been stored in the top of the house.

“Most of it,” she told him, “Edith will probably want to use in fitting up the children’s rooms.”  With a twinge of foreboding, Roger felt the approaching change in his home.

“When do you plan to be married?” he asked.

“About the end of August.  We couldn’t very well till then, without hurting poor Edith a little, you see.  You know how she feels about such things—­”

“Yes, I guess you’re right,” he agreed.

How everything centered ’round Edith, he thought.  To pay the debts which Bruce had left would take all Roger had on hand; and from this time on his expenses, with five growing children here, would be a fast increasing drain.  He would have to be careful and husband his strength, a thing he had always hated to do.

In the next few weeks, he worked hard in his office.  He cut down his smoking, stayed home every evening and went to bed at ten o’clock.  He tried to shut Deborah out of his mind.  As for Laura, he barely gave her a thought.  She dropped in one evening to bid him good-bye, for this summer again she was going abroad.  She and her husband, she told him, were to motor through the Balkans and down into Italy.  Her father gruffly answered that he hoped she would enjoy herself.  It seemed infernally unfair that it should not be Deborah who was sailing the next morning.  But when he felt himself growing annoyed, abruptly he put a check on himself.  It was Edith he must think of now.

But curiously it happened, in this narrowing of his attention, that while he shut out two of his daughters, a mere outsider edged closer in.