" But she knew it was there, and it stayed there.
She waited for his father to notice it; but if he ever noticed it,
he never told her: nor did she ever confide her discovery to him.
When vacation came, it brought a request from Rowan that he might
be allowed to spend the summer with college friends farther
north--camping, fishing, hunting, sailing, seeing more of his
country. His father's consent was more ready than her own. The
second session passed and with the second vacation the request was
renewed. "Why does he not come home? Why does he not wish to come
home?" she said, wandering restlessly over the house with his
letter in her hands; going up to his bedroom and sitting down in
the silence of it and looking at his bed--which seemed so strangely
white that day--looking at all the preparations she had made for
his comfort. "Why does he not come?"
Near the close of the third session he came quickly enough,
summoned by his father's short fatal illness.
Some time passed before she observed anything in him but natural
changes after so long an absence and grief over his great loss. He
shut himself in his room for some days, having it out alone with
himself, a young man's first solemn accounting to a father who has
become a memory. Gradually there began to emerge his new care of
her, and tenderness, a boy's no more. And he stepped forward
easily into his place as the head of affairs, as his brother's
guardian. But as time wore on and she grew used to him as so much
older in mere course of nature, and as graver by his loss and his
fresh responsibilities, she made allowances for all these and
brushed them away and beheld constantly beneath them that other
change.
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