"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the
house, Minnie."

"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,"
said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's
mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought
she'd known his people."

Mrs. Crosby stood very still.

"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said, after
a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."

Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into
her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less
beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with
them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious
maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war
was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and
darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house
with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of
the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and
increasingly popular.

She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail
old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had chosen
a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or falterings. Just
as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in him as to the
essential rightness of what he was doing. And now--This was what came of
taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan.
That was for God to do, not man.