John Harcourt had asked Bess for a drive—a farewell view, he told her, of Capitol Vista, Rock Creek Park, the Zoo, and all the rest. He said it so cheerfully and with such unchecked flow of spirits that Bess, smothering an inward sob, summoned her woman's pride and matched his exhilaration with her own. But if the truth were known, and the truth is never known under just these circumstances to anybody or anything but the girl's inmost soul, she was feeling far from gay.
Life seemed to be disintegrating. Margaret and Philip were on the ocean; Rosalie, in Oak Hill Cemetery; the little boy given into her grandmother's keeping until the house on Massachusetts Avenue should be re-opened; and—after all this was the worst—they were going home to Missouri. Her life in Washington was over! Well,—it had been a beautiful time that she had had, she thought with a tightening of the throat, and he, more than anybody else, had made it so. She should always feel grateful to him and love him for that—as a friend. Of course she was nothing to him but a child. And the tightness grew to a lump.
She was putting into her trunk a book of views he had brought her—"to remember him by," he had said. She turned the pages listlessly. It did seem too hard that they should have to go home just now! Washington was so beautiful in May, everybody said. A drop fell on the classic columns of the Treasury Building—another—and another. She really could not tell now though she was looking at it so hard whether the pillars were Corinthian or Ionic. She was thinking, "It was on these steps we stood that day—"
Strange! strange! how little architecture, art, affairs of State or Nation are to a young girl whose heart is saying, "And I must leave him."
From that ride she came back to her grandmother with softly shining eyes and the sweet tale that has been told and told and told again since Time was young.... And—would her grandma be willing to give her to him?
"But, Bess, I thought you felt that you could never trust yourself to any man after Margaret's experience?"
Bess answered earnestly.
"Grandma! I wouldn't to anybody in the world but Mr. Harcourt. But it is different with him, you know."
When she was gone Mrs. Pennybacker took off her glasses and wiped them.
"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end," she said reverently, "Amen."