Job's Niece by Grace Livingston Hill

Author:Grace Livingston Hill [NIECE, JOB’S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62029-640-0
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

But Ned Dunbar did not so easily slip out of his lightly assumed obligations into another world. The doctor arrived, and a crisis was tided over for the time. The household settled once more into comparative quiet.

Mrs. Dunbar, by some magic known only to Lawyer Hamilton, had been coerced into going to her room and lying down, and was soon sound asleep.

Milton Page, after brief meditation on the front doorstep, had haughtily taken himself off, concluding that the moment was still unripe for further controversy with his fiancée.

Rose and Jean had retired hurriedly to the kitchen to prepare dinner for an irate nurse who had hinted dire things if she were not regularly and properly fed. Doris had gone up to the sickroom to relieve the nurse for a few minutes while she took a nap.

Sitting there in the darkened, quiet room with the silent white face on the pillow, Doris faced her life again and seemed once more to stand looking into a bank of dark, portentous clouds. Nothing but storms and darkness ahead! Could there be any possible light?

She studied the face of her brother in the shadows and wondered what had come over him. Would he rally to face his ruined life? And how would they all bear it? How could they help him to bear it? For after the experiences of the day before, who could doubt that the lot he had brought upon himself would soon become unbearable? She could not think her way out of the darkness. There seemed no way out. She must just wait till light came.

The experiences of the last hour passed rapidly before her, and Milton’s part in it suddenly forced itself upon her. She found a singular lack of desire to excuse him for his apathy, his unkind criticism of herself. She seemed to be looking at him with new eyes, and the cold, critical tone of his voice began to reecho in her mind. How could she ever have loved him? No, she probably had not, for she had never crossed his wishes before, that she remembered. Now that she recalled, he had often spoken in that tone to strangers, men who got in his way when he was driving, people out in the world where they had gone together who did not instantly jump to wait upon his needs. She had not condemned him then because he had represented the others as wrongdoers. But perhaps she had taken his word and had not thought much about it. She had never realized that Milton Page was cruel, or that he was self-centered. He had always protected her well. Now she wondered if perhaps it were only because she belonged to him that he had done it, and not to save her. She did not enjoy such thoughts. She tried to shake them off. She did not wish to be unjust, and of course she knew that her action in running bareheaded down the street had been against all his formal code of etiquette.

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