We had come to February, 1914. During the intervening months the conditions in which I lived and worked underwent little change. My days and nights were passed between the library and the Mary Chilton, with few social distractions, though I had some. Larry Strangways's sister, Mrs. Applegate, had called on me, and her house, a headquarters of New York philanthropies, had opened to me its kindly doors. Through Mrs. Applegate one or two other women came to relieve my loneliness, and now and then old Halifax friends visiting New York took me to theaters and to dinners at hotels. Ethel Rossiter was as friendly as fear of her father and of social conventions permitted her to be, and once or twice when she was quite alone I lunched with her. On each of these occasions she had something new to tell me.
The first was that Hugh had met his father accidentally face to face, and that the parent had cut the son. Of that Hugh had told me nothing. According to Ethel, he was more affected by the incident than by anything else since the beginning of his cares. He felt it too deeply to speak of it even to me, to whom he spoke of everything.
It happened, I believe at the foot of the steps of a club. Hugh, who was passing, saw his father coming down, and waited. Howard Brokenshire brought into play his faculty of seeing without seeing, and went on majestically, while Hugh stared after him with tears of vexation in his eyes.
"He felt it the more," Mrs. Rossiter stated in her impartial way, "because I doubt if he had the price of his dinner in his pocket."
It was then that she gave me to understand that if it were not that Mildred was lending him money he would have nothing to subsist on at all. Mildred had a little from her grandfather Brew, being privileged in this respect because she was the only one of the first Mrs. Brokenshire's children born at the time of the grandfather's demise. The legacy had been a trifle, but from this fund, which had never been his father's, Hugh consented to take loans.
"Hugh, darling," I said to him the next time I had speech with him, "don't you see now that he's irreconcilable? He'll either starve you into surrender--"
"Never," he cried, thumping the table with his hand.