Van Tassel took an eight o’clock train back to Boston that night. He walked to the station with a lighter step than the one that had carried him from it. Some subtle influence had softened him; some poisoned rankling dart had been drawn away. A crescent moon hung in the sky. The quiet snowclad village suggested more than ever the idea of a Christmas picture, and the song that the angels once sang, as they floated through the starry heavens, seemed now to fall like a benediction from above: "Peace on earth, good will to men."
Gorham Page thought he perceived a change for the better in the spirits of his cousin, after that visit to Pearfield, but Jack said little about the event. It was well into the New Year, when the two happened to be alone in the office one afternoon, that Jack mentioned his father’s widow voluntarily for the first time since his return.
"Did I understand you to say, Gorham, that Clover sent word to me that she should not return to the Hyde Park house?"
"Do you think it was because she felt enmity, or because she feared it?"
"Why, it is your house," said Page. "It was left to you, as it turns out."
"Yes, but what difference does that make?" returned the other, with a tinge of impatience, the unreasonableness of which made his cousin smile.
"She wished you to feel full liberty in coming back," said the latter. "She broke down when she spoke of it, I remember."
"I don’t like that," asserted Jack, turning over the pages of Blackstone. "I don’t like to have Clover exiled from a comfortable place, where she would like to be. It is a dog-in-the-manger business that doesn’t suit me in the least."
"I guess you needn’t worry about the matter," remarked Page. "Mrs. Van Tassel is in no condition to bear a Chicago winter."
"Do you mean she is ill?" asked the other, shutting the heavy book suddenly.
"I don’t know. She looks like alabaster, or something that would be easily broken. Miss Bryant was evidently much distressed about her."
Jack fell into a brown study. It sounded strange to hear his cousin speak of these old schoolmates by such names. The idea of Clover, jolly, laughing Clover, with her sunburned cheeks and dancing blue eyes,—the idea that any one should speak of her as looking like alabaster. And Miss Bryant! It was a jest in itself to hear his serious cousin refer in that tone, and by such a dignified title, to Mildred. It was more than two years since Jack had seen the romping girl, whose heavy hair would never remain in its braid, and who, it seemed, would never cease outgrowing her clothes.