He adored her and he adored her son.
"It is just you and me, Derry," the old man had said in the first
moment of bereavement; "we've got to stick it out together--"
And they had stuck it out until the war had come, and patriotism had
flared, and the staunch old soldier had spurned this--changeling.
It seemed to Derry that if his mother could only step down from the
picture she might make things right for him. But she would not step
down. She would go on smiling her gentle painted smile as if nothing
really mattered in the whole wide world.
Thus, with his father asleep in the lacquered bed, and his mother
smiling in her gilded frame, the son stood alone in the great shell of
a house which had in it no beating heart, no throbbing soul to answer
his need.
Derry's rooms were furnished in a lower key than those in which his
father's taste had been followed. There were gray rugs and gray walls,
some old mahogany, the snuff-box picture of Napoleon over his desk, a
dog-basket of brown wicker in a corner.
Muffin, Derry's Airedale, stood at attention as his master came in. He
knew that the length of his sojourn depended on his manners.
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