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A Fountain Sealed by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
page 43 of 358 (12%)

"I hope that she won't mind my being here, in the way, after a fashion,"
said Jack.

"She won't mind," said Imogen.

He knew the significance of her voice; displeasure was in its gentleness,
a quiet endurance of distress. It struck him then, in a moment, that it
was rather out of place for Mrs. Upton to smile so radiantly at such a
home-coming. Not that the smile had been a gay one. It had shone out after
her search for her daughter's face; for the finding of it and for him it
had continued to shine. It was like sunlight on a sad white day of mist; it
did not dispel mournfulness, it seemed only to irradiate it. But--to have
smiled at all. With Imogen's eyes he saw, suddenly, that tears would have
been the more appropriate greeting and, in looking back at the girl once
more, he saw that her own, as if in vicarious atonement, were running down
her cheeks. She, then, felt a doubled suffering and his heart hardened
against the woman who had caused it.

The two travelers had disappeared and the decks were filled with the
jostling hurry of final departure. Jack and Imogen moved to take their
places by the long gangway that slanted up from the dock.

He said nothing to her of her tears, silent before this subtle grief;
perhaps, for all his love and sympathy, a little disconcerted by its
demonstration, and it was Imogen who spoke, murmuring, as they stood
together, looking up, "Poor, poor papa."

Yes, that had been the hurt, to see her dead put aside, almost forgotten,
in the mother's over-facile smile.
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