"Please don't be so unhappy just
now--"
"I've a right to be!" said Roger. "I see my house agog with this--in a
turmoil--in a turmoil!"
* * * * *
But again he was mistaken. It was in fact astonishing how the old house
quieted down. There came again one of those peaceful times, when his home
to Roger's senses seemed to settle deep, grow still, and gather itself
together. Day by day he felt more sure that Deborah was succeeding in
making her work fit into her swiftly deepening passion for a full happy
woman's life. And why shouldn't they live here, Allan and she? The thought
of this dispelled the cloud which hung over the years he saw ahead. How
smoothly things were working out. The monstrous new buildings around his
house seemed to him to draw back as though balked of their prey.
On the mantle in Roger's study, for many years a bronze figure there, "The
Thinker," huge and naked, forbidding in its crouching pose, the heavy chin
on one clenched fist, had brooded down upon him. And in the years that had
been so dark, it had been a figure of despair. Often he had looked up from
his chair and grimly met its frowning gaze. But Roger seldom looked at it
now, and even when it caught his eye it had little effect upon him. It
appeared to brood less darkly. For though he did not think it out, there
was this feeling in his mind:
"There is to be nothing startling in this quiet home of mine, no crashing
deep calamity here.
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