Thereupon she closed and locked the door and came back quite serious. "They've been coming almost every hour, determined to see your mother. I would have taken her away, only she persisted in saying she must remain here till you returned."
"Have you been here all day?" he asked, moved by the thought of her loyalty.
His mother answered. "Louise came about ten this morning--and except for an hour at lunch we've both been here waiting, listening."
This devotion on the part of a rich and busy woman was deeply revealing. The youth was being educated swiftly into new conceptions of human nature. His mother was neither beautiful nor wise nor witty. Why should she attract and hold a lady like Mrs. Joyce? He wondered if she had been quite honest with him. Would her interest be the same if The Voices had not enriched her?
She returned to her invitations. "Now put on your dinner-suit and come with us," she insisted. "My niece, Leo, will be there--surely you will respond to that lure?"
His mother laid her small hand upon his arm. "Let us go, Victor. I am in terror here."
"Why did you stay? Why didn't you go before?" he demanded.
"Because The Voices said '_Wait!_'--and besides, I wanted to be here when you came."
He rose. "You go. I will come after dinner and bring you home."
Mrs. Joyce was quick on the trail of his intent. "You refuse to eat my bread! You _are_ rigorous. Very well. Let it be so. Come, Lucy, let us go."
Mrs. Ollnee seemed to listen a moment, then rose. "You'll surely come after dinner, Victor?"
"Yes, I'll come about nine," he replied, in a tone that was hard and cold. And she went away deeply hurt.
Left alone, he walked about the "ghost-room" with bitterness deepening into fury. What were these invisible, intangible barriers which confined him? He stood beside the old brown table which he had hated and feared in his boyhood. What silliness it represented. The pile of slates, some of them still bearing messages in pencil or colored crayon, offered themselves to his hand. He took up one of these and read its oracular statement: "_He will come to see the glory of the faith. His neck will bow. It is discipline. Do not worry. FATHER._" Here was the source of his troubles!
He dashed the slate to the floor and ground it under his heel. Catching the table by the side and up-ending it, he wrenched its legs off as he would have wrung the neck of a vulture. He breathed upon it a blast of contempt and hate, and, gathering it up in fragments, was starting to throw it into the alley when the door burst open and his mother reappeared, white, breathless, appalled.
