"Leave it to me," he said. "I will try to talk with her."

The talk didn't seem to go very well. I heard shouting that night, and in the morning my parents barely acknowledged me. If Father couldn't talk sense into my mother then things were much further out of hand than I had thought. I went to school that day distracted. I was reprimanded twice by my teachers for daydreaming. To make matters worse, George had just been told that his father was delaying their next journey so that ...