The Wild Fawn

Mrs. Carter looked up from her breakfast and glanced anxiously at the clock. "I wonder where that postman can be!" she exclaimed fretfully. "He's always late nowadays." "Nonsense!" retorted her husband, unfolding his newspaper. "It's because you want a letter from William. The postman will be along all right." Mrs. Carter sighed. She could not understand the gap in her son's correspondence. William was her eldest and the pride of her heart. At twenty-seven he had been a success in business. He had dominated the family, advising his stout, deliberate father, overwhelming his lame brother Daniel, and bossing the two younger children, Leigh and Emily, until, goaded to frenzy, first one and then the other of the worms turned. As the only girl in the family, Emily reached the limit of her endurance long before Leigh came into the battle as a feeble second. But not even Emily could stem the tide of Mrs. Carter's devotion to her first-born. It had cost her many a sleepless night when, more than a year ago, William Henry Carter had been selected by a well-known mercantile firm to go to Japan. It had been a crowning opportunity for William; to his mother it was a source of mingled pride and anguish. She packed his trunk with unnumbered socks and collar-buttonsshe was sure he couldn't get them in Japanand she smuggled in some jars of strawberry jam, "the kind that dear Willie always loved." Afterward her only solace had been his letters. She overlooked his ungrateful wrath when the jam jars broke into the socks, and fell back on her pride in his continuing success, and on the fact that he had been permitted to come home via the Mediterranean, and was to act for his firm in Paris. Now, after an absence of fourteen months, he might be home at any moment; but there had been a gap in the correspondenceno letters for more than two months. The maternal anxiety would have communicated itself to the family, if it had not been that William's company had heard from the young man in the interim, and could assure the anxious Mr. Carter that his son was well and doing business with eminent talent and success. Mr. Payson, the head of the establishment, lived in town, and he was liberal in his praise. Mrs. Carter's mind dwelt upon this with a feeling of maternal pride, still tempered with anxiety, when she became aware that Emily and Leigh were quarreling openly because of the latter's unfeeling remark that a girl with a snub nose and freckles should never do her hair in a Greek knot.

Dettagli