"I did it because I detest the thing and all that goes with it. I have hated that table all my life."
"What did you think your mother would do?"
"I didn't stop to think. I only wanted to get the brute out of sight. I wanted to end the whole trade at once."
"You've got to be careful or you'll end your mother's earth-life. Let me tell you, boy, if you want to keep her on this plane with you you must be gentle with her. Any shock, especially when she is in trance, is very dangerous to her."
Victor began to feel his helplessness in the midst of the intangible entangling threads of his mother's faith. He now saw the folly of his action, and took an unexpected way of showing his contrition.
"If you'll forgive me, mother, I'll go with you to Mrs. Joyce's dinner. Come, let's get away from here for a little while; I feel stifled."
This pleased and comforted her amazingly. She rose and placed one frail, cold hand about his neck. "Dear boy! I forgive you. You didn't realize what you were doing."
Releasing himself he gathered up the fragments of the table and tenderly examined them. "It can be mended," he reported. "I'll do it the first thing in the morning."
A faint smile came back to his mother's face. "I don't mind, Victor. I feel already that this has brought us closer together. Your father is here--he is smiling--and I am happier than I've been for weeks."
Victor dressed for his party with trembling limbs. It seemed as if he had passed through a tremendous battle wherein he had been defeated--and yet his heart was strangely light.
Mrs. Joyce's house was a stone structure of rather characterless design which stood at the intersection of a wide boulevard and one of the narrower crosstown streets, but it seemed very palatial to Victor as he wonderingly entered its looming granite portal. His mother tripped up the stairs with the air of one who feels very much at home.
A man in snuff-colored livery took his hat and coat and ushered him into a large reception-room on the left, and there his hostess found him some ten minutes later. "Come and meet my brother from California," she said, and led the way across the hall into the library, where a tall man with gray hair and mustache was talking with a dark, alert and smoothly shaven man of middle age. The one Mrs. Joyce introduced as her brother, Mr. Wood, and the other as Mr. Carew.