April Showers

  "That you'd gone to Boston? Well, I rather thought you had."

  They walked on slowly, and presently he added, "You see, you left the Home Circle lying in your room."

  How she blessed the darkness and the muffled sky! She could not have borne the scrutiny of the tiniest star.

  "Then mother wasn't very much frightened?"

  "Why, no, she didn't appear to be. She's been busy all day over some toggery of Bertha's."

  Theodora choked. "Father, I'll--" She groped for words, but they eluded her. "I'll do things--differently; I haven't meant--" Suddenly she heard herself bursting out: "It was all a mistake, you know--about my story. They didn't want it; they won't have it!" and she shrank back involuntarily from his impending mirth.

  She felt the pressure of his arm, but he didn't speak, and she figured his mute hilarity. They moved on in silence. Presently he said:

  "It hurts a bit just at first, doesn't it?"

  "O father!"

  He stood still, and the gleam of his cigar showed a face of unexpected participation.

  "You see I've been through it myself."

  "You, father? You?"

  "Why, yes. Didn't I ever tell you? I wrote a novel once. I was just out of college, and I didn't want to be a doctor. No; I wanted to be a genius. So I wrote a novel."

  The doctor paused, and Theodora clung to him in a mute passion of commiseration. It was as if a drowning creature caught a live hand through the murderous fury of the waves.

  "Father--O father!"

  "It took me a year--a whole year's hard work; and when I'd finished it the publishers wouldn't have it, either; not at any price. And that's why I came down to meet you, because I remembered my walk home."