"Name it, and it is yours," Dicky spoke grandiloquently. "Take me home. We can see the harbor another time. I really feel too tired to do any more today." Dicky opened his mouth, evidently to remind me that my fatigue was of sudden development, but closed it again, and turned in silence toward the railroad station. We had a silent journey back. Neither Dicky nor I spoke, except to exchange the veriest commonplaces. We reached home about 5 o'clock to Katie's surprise. "I'll hurry, get dinner," she said, evidently much flurried. "We're not very hungry, Katie," I said. "Some cold meat and bread and butter, those little potato cakes you make so nicely, some sliced bananas for Mr. Graham and some coffee--that will be sufficient." For my own part I felt that I never wished to see or hear of food again. The silent journey home, added to the events of the day, had brought on one of my ugly morbid moods. XI "I OWE YOU TOO MUCH" "Bad news, Dicky?" We were seated at the breakfast table, Dicky and I, the morning after our trip to Marvin, from which I had returned weary of body and sick of mind. Tacitly we had avoided all discussion of Grace Draper, the beautiful girl Dicky had discovered there and engaged as a model for his drawings, promising to help her with her art studies. But because of my feeling toward Dicky's plans breakfast had been a formal affair. Then had come a special delivery letter for Dicky. He had read it twice, and was turning back for a third perusal when my query made him raise his eyes. "In a way, yes," he said slowly. Then after a pause. "Read it." He held out the letter. It was postmarked Detroit. The writing reminded me of my mother; it was the hand of a woman of the older generation. I, too, read the letter twice before making any comment upon it. I wondered if Dicky's second reading had been for the same purpose as mine--to gain time to think. I was stunned by the letter. I had never contemplated the possibility of Dicky's mother living with us, and here she was calmly inviting herself to make her home with us. For years she had made her home with her childless daughter and namesake, Harriet, whose husband was one of the most brilliant surgeons of the middle West. I knew that Dicky's mother and sister had spoiled him terribly when they all had a home together before Dicky's father died. The first thought that came to me was that Dicky's whims alone were hard enough to humor, but when I had both him and his mother to consider our home life would hardly be worth the living. I knew and resented also the fact that Dicky's mother and sisters disapproved of his marriage to me. In one of Dicky's careless confidences I had gleaned that his mother's choice for him had been made long ago, and that he had disappointed her by not marrying a friend of his sister.