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Gussie was overcome with grief when she realized that her father was dying, but Louie's loving arm was thrown around her, and she restrained her sobs to hear her father's last few words. It was a sad scene. The dying father, supported in the arms of Guy Traverse, was looking for the last time on the faces of his family.
David made every possible arrangement telegraphed to Louie that she was coming; and to John directing him to meet her at Warrington and take her on; wrote out the times of her journey; the address of a pension in the Avenue Friedland, kept by an English lady, to which he happened to be able to direct her; and the name of the English lawyer in Paris who had advised him at the time of Louie's marriage, had done various things for him since, and would, he knew, be a friend in need.
Hannah would think they were going now to be poorer still, but he meant to prove to her that what with Louie's departure and the restoration of their whole income to its natural channels, there would not be so much difference. He conned his figures eagerly, rehearsing what he would say. For the rest he walked lightly and briskly.
But Louie's suspense was of no long duration, as time goes, though to her it was a lifetime. A week covered it a week full of stings and fevered restlessness when her father came in one day and said bitterly, thinking it best to make an end of all at once: "So I hear that a friend of ours has been paid off at last.
The sister's license of speech and behaviour towards the men who became her acquaintances provoked in the brother what often seemed to Ancrum who, of course, remembered Reuben, and had heard many tales of old James Grieve, the lad's grandfather a sort of Puritan reaction, the reaction of his race and stock against 'lewdness. Louie's complete independence, however, and the distance she preserved between his amusements and hers, left David no other weapon than sarcasm, which he employed freely.
Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort. "I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man. "I need you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know. You are worth three a day to me. Do you care to think it over?" Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold. They were that now.
She grew tired of dressing and patronising Lucy; her sharp eyes and tongue found out all her sister-in-law's weak points; the two children were a fruitful source of jarring and jealousy between the mothers; and by the end of the week their relation was so much strained, and David had so much difficulty in keeping the peace, that he could only pine for the Monday morning which was to see Louie's departure.
When her husband's body was brought home for burial, the result of a distressing accident, there seemed nothing else left to do but to return to the home of her childhood, reaching it in time to hear her mother's last request with respect to Louie's future. Aunt Annie promised to consider the child as her own if she could get the parents' sanction as well as Louie's free consent.
David, on the other side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness. All her resources were for the moment at an end.
She had suffered many things in much patience all these weeks. Louie's clear, hard mind, her sensuous temperament, her apparent lack of all maidenly reserve, all girlish softness, made her incomprehensible to one for whom life was an iridescent web of ideal aims and obligations.
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