← catalogue

The Beloved Woman

by Kathleen Thompson Norris · English · Gutenberg #28301 · 562,164 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Beloved Woman
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Beloved Woman

Author: Kathleen Thompson Norris


        
Release date: March 10, 2009 [eBook #28301]
                Most recently updated: May 26, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28301

Credits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Katherine Ward and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        book was produced from scanned images of public domain
        material from the Google Print project.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELOVED WOMAN ***




Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Katherine Ward and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)





 [Transcriber's Note:
  Hyphenation standardized.
  Archaic and variable spelling was preserved as printed.
  Missing quotation marks were added to standardize usage. Otherwise,
    the editor's punctuation style was preserved.
  Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).]




  THE
  BELOVED WOMAN


  BY KATHLEEN NORRIS


  AUTHOR OF
  _"Harriet and the Piper," etc._


  A. L. BURT COMPANY

  Publishers
  New York

  Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Page & Company
  Printed in U. S. A.


  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
  KATHLEEN NORRIS

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

  COPYRIGHT 1920, 1921, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
  AT
  THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.


  TO
  MARY O'SULLIVAN SUTRO

    For gifts beyond all counting and esteeming,
      For kindness than which Heaven's self is not kinder,
    For the old days of tears, and smiles, and dreaming,
      This in acknowledgment, and in reminder.




CHAPTER I


For forty-eight hours the snow-storm had been raging unabated over New
York. After a wild and windy Thursday night the world had awakened to a
mysterious whirl of white on Friday morning, and to a dark, strange day
of steady snowing. Now, on Saturday, dirty snow was banked and heaped
in great blocks everywhere, and still the clean, new flakes fluttered
and twirled softly down, powdering and feathering every little ledge
and sill, blanketing areas in spotless white, capping and hooding every
unsightly hydrant and rubbish-can with exquisite and lavish beauty.
Shovels had clinked on icy sidewalks all the first day, and even during
the night the sound of shouting and scraping had not ceased for a
moment, and their more and more obvious helplessness in the teeth of
the storm awakened at last in the snow-shovellers, and in the men and
women who gasped and stumbled along the choked thoroughfares, a sort of
heady exhilaration in the emergency, a tendency to be proud of the
storm, and of its effect upon their humdrum lives. They laughed and
shouted as they battled with it, and as Nature's great barrier of snow
threw down the little barriers of convention and shyness. Men held out
their hands to slipping and stumbling women, caught them by their
shoulders, panted to them that this was a storm, all right, this was
the worst yet! Girls, staggering in through the revolving glass doors
of the big department stores, must stand laughing helplessly for a few
seconds in the gush of reviving warmth, while they beat their wet
gloves together, regaining breath and self-possession, and straightened
outraged millinery.

Traffic was congested, deserted trucks and motor-cars lined the side
streets, the subways were jammed, the surface cars helpless. Here and
there long lines of the omnibuses stood blocked in snow, and the press
frantically heralded impending shortages of milk and coal, reiterating
pessimistically: "No relief in sight."

But late in Saturday morning there was a sudden lull. The snow stopped,
the wind fell, and the pure, cold air was motionless and sweet. The city
emerged exhausted from its temporary blanketing, and from the buried
benches of Bowling Green to the virgin sweep of pure white beyond Van
Cortlandt Park, began its usual January fight with the snow.

A handsome, rosy old lady, wrapped regally in furs, and with a maid
picking her way cautiously beside her, was one of the first to take
advantage of the sudden change in the weather. Mrs. Melrose had been
held captive for almost two days, first by Thursday's inclement winds,
and then by the blizzard. Her motor-car was useless, and although at
sixty she was an extremely youthful and vigorous woman, her daughters
and granddaughter had threatened to use force rather than let her risk
the danger of an expedition on foot, at least while the storm continued.

But now the wind was gone, and by the time Mrs. Melrose had been
properly shod, and coated, and hatted, there was even a dull glimmer
toward the southeast that indicated the location of the long-lost sun.
The old lady looked her approval at Fifth Avenue, with all its crudities
veiled and softened by the snowfall, and as she climbed into an omnibus
expressed herself firmly to Regina.

"You mark my words, the sun will be out before we come home!"

Regina, punching the two dimes carefully into the jolting receiver, made
only a respectful murmur for answer. She was, like many a maid, a snob
where her mistress was concerned, and she did not like to have Mrs.
Melrose ride in public omnibuses. For Regina herself it did not matter,
but Mrs. Melrose was one of the city's prominent and wealthy women, and
Regina could not remember that she had ever sunk to the use of a public
conveyance before to-day. The maid was glad when they descended at a
street in the East Sixties. They would probably be sent home, she
reflected, in Mrs. Liggett's car. For Regina noticed that private cars
were beginning to grind and slip over the snow again.

Old Mrs. Melrose was going to see her daughter Alice, who was Mrs.
Christopher Liggett, because Alice was an invalid. It had been only a
few years after Alice's most felicitous marriage, a dozen years ago,
when an accident had laid the lovely and brilliant woman upon the bed of
helplessness that she might never leave again. There was no real reason
why the spine should continue useless, the great specialists said, there
was a hope--even a probability--that as Alice grew rested and strong,
after the serious accident, she might find herself walking again. But
Alice had been a prisoner for ten years now, and the mother and sister
who idolized her feared that she would never again be the old dancing
Alice and feared that she knew it. What Christopher Liggett feared they
did not know. He insisted that Alice's illness was but temporary, and
was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife.
Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's
mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was
sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions.

The young Liggetts had sold the old house of Christopher's father, an
immense brownstone mansion a few squares away, and lived in a modern,
flat-faced gray-stone house that rose five stories from the beautifully
arranged basement entrance. There were stone benches at the entrance,
and a great iron grill, and two potted trees, and the small square
windows were leaded, and showed blossoming plants inside. The three long
windows above gave upon a little-used formal drawing-room, with a Gothic
fireplace of white stone at one end, and a dim jumble of rich colours
and polished surfaces between that and the big piano at the other. The
room at the back, on this floor, was an equally large and formal
dining-room, gleaming with carved mahogany and fretted plate, used only
on the rare occasions of a dinner-party.

But on the floor above the gracious mistress of the house had her
domain, and here there was enough beauty and colour to make the whole
house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and
warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the
furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and
exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there.
The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a
dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray
walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on
the top of one of the low, plain, built-in bookcases, were framed alike.
There were no meaningless vases, no jars or trays or plaques or
ornaments in Alice's room. Her flowers she liked to see in shining glass
bowls; her flat-topped desk was severely bare.

But the cretonne that dressed her big comfortable chairs and her couch
was bright with roses and parrots and hollyhocks, and the same cretonne,
with plain net undercurtaining, hung at her four front windows. The room
was big enough to accommodate besides, even with an air of space and
simplicity, the little grand piano that Christopher played for her
almost every night. A great Persian tortoise-shell cat was at home here,
and sometimes Alice had her magnificent parrot besides, hanging himself
upside down on his gaily-painted stand, and veiling the beady, sharp eye
with which he watched her. The indulgent extravagance of her mother had
bound all the books that Alice loved in the same tone of stony-blue
vellum, the countless cushions with which the aching back was so
skillfully packed were of the same dull tone, and it pleased the persons
who loved her to amuse the prisoner sometimes with a ring in which her
favourite note was repeated, or a chain of old lapis-lazuli that made
Alice's appreciative blue eyes more blue.

Back of Alice's room was a den in which Christopher could conduct much
of his personal business, and beyond that was the luxurious bathroom, a
modern miracle of enamel tiling and shining glass. Across the
sun-flooded back of the house were Alice's little bedroom, nunlike in
its rigid austerity, her nurse's room adjoining, and a square sun-room,
giving glimpses of roofs and trim back-gardens, full of flowers, with a
little fountain and goldfish, a floor of dull pink tiling, and plants in
great jars of Chinese enamel. Christopher had planned this delightful
addition to Alice's domain only a few years ago, and, with that
knowledge of her secret heart that only Christopher could claim, had let
her share the pleasure of designing and arranging it. It stretched out
across the west side of the spacious backyard, almost touching the
branches of the great plane tree, and when, after the painful move to
her mother's house, and the necessary absence during the building of it,
Alice had been brought back to this new evidence of their love and
goodness, she had buried her face against Christopher's shoulder, and
told him that she didn't think people with all the world to wander in
had ever had anything lovelier than this!

One of the paintings that Alice might look at idly, in the silence of
the winter noon, was of a daisied meadow, stretching between walls of
heavy summer woodland to the roof of a half-buried farmhouse in the
valley below. The other picture was of the very mother who was coming
toward Alice now, in the jolting omnibus. But it was a younger mother,
and a younger Alice, that had been captured by the painter's genius. It
was a stout, imperious, magnificently gowned woman, of not much more
than thirty, in whose spreading silk lap a fair little girl was sitting.
This little earnest-eyed child was Alice at seven. The splendid,
dark-eyed, proud-looking boy of about fourteen, who stood beside the
mother, was Teddy, her only son, dead now for many years, and perhaps
mercifully dead. The fourth and last person pictured was the elder
daughter, Annie, who had been about nine years old then, Alice
remembered. Annie and Alice had been unusually alike, even for sisters,
but even then Annie's fair, aristocratic type of blonde prettiness had
been definite where Alice's was vague, and Annie's expression had been
just a trifle haughty and discontented where Alice's was always grave
and sweet. Annie had almost been a beauty, she was extremely and
conspicuously good-looking even now, when as Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens,
wife of a son of an old and wealthy Knickerbocker family, she was
supreme in the very holy of holies of the city's social life.

Mrs. Melrose came unannounced upon her daughter to-day, and Alice's
colourless warm cheek flushed with happiness under her mother's fresh,
cold kiss.

"Mummy--you darling! But how did you get here? Miss Slater says that the
streets are absolutely impassable!"

"I came in the 'bus, dear," Mrs. Melrose said, very much pleased with
herself. "How warm and comfy you are in here, darling. But what did I
interrupt?"

"You didn't interrupt anything," Alice said, quickly. "Chris telephoned,
and he's bringing Henrici--the Frenchman who wrote that play I loved
so--to tea. Isn't that fun? I'm so excited--and I think Chris was such a
duck to get hold of him. I was translating it, you know, and Bowditch,
who was here for dinner last night, told me he'd place it, if I finished
it. And now I can talk it over with Henrici himself--thanks to Chris!
Chris met my man at the club, and told him about me, and he said he
would be charmed. So I telephoned several persons, and I tried to get
hold of Annie----"

"Annie has a lunch--and a board meeting at the hospital at four,"
Annie's mother remembered, "and Leslie is at a girls' luncheon
somewhere. Annie had breakfast with me, and was rushing off afterward.
She's quite wonderfully faithful about those things."

"Well, but you'll stay for lunch and tea, too, Mummy?" Alice pleaded.
She was lying back in her pillows, feasting her eyes upon her mother's
face with that peculiarly tense devotion that was part of her nature.
Rarely did a day pass without their meeting, and no detail touching
Annie's life, Annie's boys or husband, was too small to interest Alice.
She was especially interested, too, in Leslie, the eighteen-year-old
daughter that her brother Theodore had left to his mother's care; in
fact, between the mother and daughters, the one granddaughter and two
little grandsons, and the two sons-in-law of the Melrose family, a deep
bond existed, a bond of pride as well as affection. It was one of their
favourite boasts that to the Melroses the unity and honour of the family
was the first consideration in the world.

But to-day Mrs. Melrose could not stay. At one o'clock she left Alice to
be put into her prettiest robe by the devoted Miss Slater, saw with
satisfaction that preparations for tea were noiselessly under way,
called Regina, odorous of tea and mutton chops, from the pantry, and
went out into the quiet cold of the winter noon.

The old Melrose house was a substantial, roomy, brownstone building in
Madison Avenue, inconspicuous perhaps among several notoriously handsome
homes, but irreproachably dignified none the less. A few blocks below it
the commercial current of East Thirty-fourth Street ebbed and flowed; a
few blocks north the great façade of the Grand Central Station shut off
the street completely. Third Avenue, behind it, swarmed and rattled
alarmingly close, and Broadway flared its impudent signs only five
minutes' walk in the other direction, but here, in a little oasis of
quiet street, two score of old families serenely held their place
against the rising tide, and among them the Melroses confidently felt
themselves valued and significant.

Mrs. Melrose mounted her steps with the householder's secret
complacency. They were scrupulously brushed of the last trace of snow,
and the heavy door at the top swung noiselessly open to admit her. She
suddenly realized that she was very tired, that her fur coat was heavy,
and her back ached. She swept straight to the dark old curving stairway,
and mounted slowly.

"Joseph," she said over her shoulder, "send luncheon upstairs, please.
And when Miss Leslie comes in, tell her I should like to see her, if it
isn't too late. Anybody coming to-night?"

"Mr. von Behrens telephoned that he and Mr. Liggett might come in for a
moment, on his way to the banquet at the Waldorf, Madam. But that was
all."

"I may have dinner upstairs, too, if Leslie is going anywhere," Mrs.
Melrose said to herself, mounting slowly. And it seemed to her fatigue
very restful to find her big room warm and orderly, her coal fire
burning behind the old-fashioned steel rods, all the homely,
comfortable treasures of her busy years awaiting her. She sank into a
chair, and Regina flew noiselessly about with slippers and a loose silk
robe. Presently a maid was serving smoking-hot bouillon, and Mrs.
Melrose felt herself relaxed and soothed; it was good to be home.

Yet there was trace of uneasiness, of something almost like
apprehension, in the look that wandered thoughtfully about the
overcrowded room. Presently she reached a plump, well-groomed hand
toward the bell. But when Regina came to stand expectantly near her,
Mrs. Melrose roused herself from a profound abstraction to assure her
that she had not rung--it must have been a mistake.

"Miss Leslie hasn't come in?"

"Not yet, Madam, Miss Melrose is at Miss Higgins's luncheon."

"Yes; but it was an early luncheon," the grandmother said,
discontentedly. "She was playing squash, or tennis, or something!
Regina----"

"Yes, Madam?"

But Mrs. Melrose was musing again.

"Regina, I am expecting a caller at four o'clock, a Mrs. Sheridan.
Please see that she is shown up at once. I want to see her here. And
please----"

A pause. Regina waited.

"That's all!" her mistress announced, suddenly.

Alone again, the old lady stirred her tea, ruminated for a few moments
with narrowed eyes fixed on space, recalled herself to her surroundings,
and finished her cup.

Her room was large, filled with chairs and tables, lamps and cushions,
silver trays and lacquer boxes, vases and jars and bowls, gift books
and current magazines. There was not an unbroken inch of surface
anywhere, the walls were closely set with pictures of all sorts. Along
the old-fashioned mantel, a scalloped, narrow shelf of marble, was a
crowding line of photographs in silver frames, and there were other
framed photographs all about the room. There were the young mothers of
the late eighties, seated to best display their bustles and their French
twists, with heavy-headed infants in their tightly cased arms, and there
were children's pictures, babes in shells, in swings, or leaning on
gates. There were three Annies: one in ringlets, plaid silk, and
tasselled boots, at eight; one magnificent in drawing-room plumes; and a
recent one, a cloudy study of the severely superb mother, with a
sleek-headed, wide-collared boy on each side of her. There was a
photograph of the son Theodore, handsome, sullen, dressed in the fashion
of the opening century, and there was more than one of Theodore's
daughter, the last of the Melroses. Leslie had been a wide-eyed, sturdy
little girl who carried a perpetually surprised, even a babyish
expression into her teens, but her last pictures showed the débutante,
the piquant and charming eighteen-year-old, whose knowingly tipped hat
and high fur collar left only a glimpse of pretty and pouting face
between.

Leslie came in upon her grandmother at about three o'clock. She was
genuinely tired, after an athletic morning at the club, a luncheon amid
a group of chattering intimates, and a walk with the young man whose
attentions to her were thrilling not only her grandmother and aunts, but
the cool-blooded little Leslie herself. Acton Liggett was Christopher's
only brother, only relative indeed, and promised already to be as great
a favourite as the irresistible Chris himself. Both were rich, both
fine-looking, straightforward, honourable men, proud of their own
integrity, their long-established family, and their old firm. Acton was
pleasantly at home in the Melrose, Liggett, and Von Behrens houses, the
very maids loved him, and his quiet singling out of Leslie for his
devotion had satisfied everyone's sense of what was fitting and
delightful. Pretty Leslie, back from a summer's idling with Aunt Annie
and the little boys, in California and Hawaii, had found Acton's
admiration waiting for her, with all the other joys of her débutante
winter.

And even the critical Aunt Annie had to admit that the little minx was
managing the whole matter with consummate skill. Leslie was not in the
least self-conscious with Acton; she turned to him with all the artless
confidence of a little sister. She asked him about her dancing partners,
and about her gowns, and she discussed with him all the various bits of
small gossip that concerned their own friends.

"Should I have said that, Acton?" she would ask, trustfully. "Shall I be
Marion's bridesmaid? Would you?--after I refused Linda Fox, you know. I
don't like to dance with Louis Davis, after what you told me; what shall
I do when he comes up to me?"

Acton was twenty-five, seven years her senior. He advised her earnestly,
over many a confidential cup of tea. And just lately, the grandmother
noticed exultantly, hardly a day passed that did not find the young
couple together.

"How did Acton happen to meet you, lovey?" she asked to-day, _apropos_
of the walk.

"Why, he telephoned Vesta Higgins's, and asked me how I was going to get
home. I said, walk. There was no use trying motor-cars, anyway, for they
were slipping and bumping terribly! He said he was in the neighbourhood,
and he came up. Granny----"

She paused, and her grandmother was conscious of a quickened heart-beat.
The thoughtful almost tremulous tone was not like giddy little Leslie.

"Granny," the girl repeated, presently, "how old was my mother when she
got married?"

"About twenty-two," the old woman said.

"And how old was Aunt Annie when she did?"

"Annie's about thirty-seven," her mother considered. "She was about
twenty-five. But why, dear?"

"Nothing," said Leslie, and fell silent.

She was still in the silk blouse and short homespun skirt that she had
worn at the athletic club luncheon, but she had thrown aside her loose
woolly coat, and the narrow furs that were no softer than her own fair
skin. Flung back into a deep chair, and relaxed after her vigorous day,
she looked peculiarly childish and charming, her grandmother thought.
She was like both her aunts, with Annie's fair, almost ashen hair and
Alice's full, pretty mouth. But she was more squarely built than either,
and a hint of a tip, at the end of her nose, gave her an expression at
once infantile and astonished. When Leslie opened her blue eyes widely,
and stared at anything, she looked like an amazed baby, and the effect
of her round eyes and tilted nose was augmented by her very fair skin,
and by just a sixteenth of an inch shortness in her upper lip. Of course
she knew all this. Her acquaintance with her own good and bad points had
begun in school days, and while through her grandmother's care her
teeth were being straightened, and her eyes and throat subjected to mild
forms of surgery, her Aunt Annie had seen to it that her masses of fair
hair had been burnished and groomed, her hands scraped and polished into
beauty, and finally that her weight was watched with scrupulous care.
Nature had perhaps intended Leslie to be plump and ruddy, but modern
fashion had decreed otherwise, and, with half the girls of her own age
and set, Leslie took saccharine in her tea, rarely touched sweets or
fried food, and had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that she was
actually too slim and too willowy for her height, and interestingly
colourless into the bargain.

Could Acton possibly have said anything definite to start this unusual
train of thought, the grandmother speculated. With Leslie so
felicitously married, she would have felt ready for her _nunc dimittis_.
She watched Leslie expectantly. But the girl was apparently dreaming,
and was staring absently at the tip of one sturdy oxford above which a
stretch of thick white woollen stocking was visible almost to her knee.

"How can they fall in love with them, dressed like Welsh peasants!" the
grandmother said to herself, in mild disapproval. And aloud she said:
"Ah, don't, lovey!"

For Leslie had taken out a small gold case, and was regarding it
thoughtfully.

"My first to-day, on my honour!" Leslie said, as she lazily lighted a
sweet-scented cigarette. It never occurred to her to pay any attention
to her grandmother's protest, for Grandmother had been regularly
protesting against everything Leslie had done since her adored and
despotic childhood. She had fainted when Leslie had dived off the dock
at Newport, and had wept when Leslie had galloped through the big iron
gates on her own roan stallion; she had called in Christopher, as
Leslie's guardian, when Leslie, at fifteen, had calmly climbed into one
of the big cars, and driven it seven miles, alone and unadvised, and
totally without instruction or experience. Leslie knew that this
half-scandalized and wholly-admiring opposition was one of her
grandmother's secret satisfactions, and she combatted it only
mechanically.

"Have one, Grandma?"

"Have one--you wild girl you! I'd like to know what a nice young man
thinks when a refined girl offers him----"

"All the nice young men are smoking themselves, like chimneys!"

"Ah, but that's a very different thing. No, my dear, no man, whether he
smokes himself or not, likes to have a sweet, womanly girl descend----"

"Darling, didn't you ever do anything that my revered great-grandmother
Murison disapproved of?" Leslie teased, dropping on her knees before her
grandmother, and resting her arms on her lap.

"Smoke----! My mother would have fainted," said Mrs. Melrose. "And don't
blow that nasty-smelling stuff in my face!"

But she could not resist the pleasure that the lovely young face, so
near her own, gave her, and she patted it with her soft, wrinkled hand.
Suddenly Leslie jumped up eagerly, listening to the sound of voices in
the hall.

"There's Aunt Annie--oh, goody! I wanted to ask her----"

But it was Regina who opened the door, showing in two callers. The first
was a splendid-looking woman of perhaps forty-five, with a rosy,
cheerful face, and wide, shrewd gray eyes shining under a somewhat
shabby mourning veil. With her was a pretty girl of eighteen, or perhaps
a little more.

Leslie glanced astonished at her grandmother. It was extremely unusual
to have callers shown in in this unceremonious fashion, even if she had
been rather unprepossessed by these particular callers. The younger
woman's clothing, indeed, if plain, was smart and simple; her severe
tailor-made had a collar of beaver fur to relieve its dark blue, and her
little hat of blue beaver felt was trimmed only by a band of the same
fur. She had attractive dark-blue eyes and a flashing smile.

But her companion's comfortable dowdiness, her black cotton gloves, her
squarely built figure, and worn shoes, all awakened a certain contempt
in the granddaughter of the house, and caused Leslie shrewdly to surmise
that these humble strangers were pensioners of her grandmother, the
older one probably an old servant.

"Kate Sheridan!" Old Mrs. Melrose had gotten to her feet, and had put
her arm about the visitor. "Well, my dear, my dear, I've not seen you
these----What is it? Don't tell me how many years it is! And which
daughter is this?"

"This is my niece, Norma," the older woman said, in a delightful rich
voice that was full of easy confidence and friendliness. "This is Mrs.
Melrose, Norma, darling, that was such a good friend to me and mine
years ago!"

"No warmer friend than you were to me, Kate," the old lady said,
quickly, still keeping an arm about the sturdy figure. "This is my
granddaughter, Theodore's little girl," Mrs. Melrose added, catching
Leslie with her free hand.

Leslie was not more of a snob than is natural to a girl of her age and
upbringing, but she could not but give Mrs. Sheridan a pretty cool
glance. Grandmother's old friends were all very well----

But Mrs. Sheridan was studying her with affectionate freedom.

"And isn't she Miss Alice's image! But she's like you all--she's like
Mr. Theodore, too, especially through the eyes!"

And she turned back to her hostess, interested, animated, and as
oblivious to Leslie's hostile look as if the girl were her own picture
on the wall.

"And you and my Norma must know each other," she said, presently,
watching the girls as they shook hands, with a world of love and
solicitude in her eyes.

"Sit down, both you two," Mrs. Melrose said. Leslie glanced at the
strapped watch at her wrist.

"Grandmother, I really----" she began.

"No, you don't really!" her grandmother smiled. "Talk to Miss Sheridan
while I talk"--she turned smiling to her old friend--"to Kate! Tell me,
how are you all, Kate? And where are you all--you were in Detroit?"

"We've been in New York more than two years now, and why I haven't been
to see you before, perhaps _you_ can tell me, for _I_ can't!" Kate
Sheridan said. "But my boy is a great big fellow now; Wolf's
twenty-four, and Rose is twenty-one, and this one," she nodded toward
Norma, who was exchanging comments on the great storm with Leslie, "this
one is nearly nineteen! And you see they're all working: Wolf's doing
wonderfully with a firm of machine manufacturers, in Newark, and Rose
has been with one real estate firm since we came. And Norma here works
in a bookstore, up the Avenue a bit, Biretta's."

"Why, I go in there nearly every week!" the old lady said.

"She told me the other night that she had been selling some books to Mr.
Christopher Liggett, and that's Miss Alice's husband, I hear," said Mrs.
Sheridan. "She's in what they call the Old Book Room," she added,
lowering her voice. "She's wonderful about books, reads them, and knows
them as if they were children--they think the world of her in there! And
I keep house for the three of them, and what with this and that--I never
have any time!"

"But you have someone to help you, Kate?" the old lady asked, with her
amused and affectionate eyes on the other's wholesome face.

"Why would I?" demanded Mrs. Sheridan, roundly. "The girls are a great
help----"

"She always assumes a terrific brogue the minute you ask her why we
don't have someone in to help her," Norma contributed, with a sort of
shy and loving audacity. "She'll tell you in a minute that faith, she
and her sister used to run barefoot over the primroses, and they
blooming beyond anything the Lord ever created, and the spring on
them----"

Leslie Melrose laughed out suddenly, in delighted appreciation, and the
tension between the two girls was over. They had not quite known how to
talk to each other; Norma naturally assuming that Leslie looked down
upon a seller of books, and anxious to show her that she was unconscious
of either envy or inferiority, and Leslie at a loss because her usual
social chatter was as foreign here as a strange tongue would be. But no
type is quicker to grasp upon amusement, and to appreciate the amuser,
than Leslie's, unable to amuse itself, and skilled in seeking for
entertainment. She was too shy to ask Norma to imitate her aunt again,
but her stiffness relaxed, and she asked Norma if it was not great "fun"
to sell things--especially at Christmas, for instance. Norma asked in
turn if Mr. Liggett was not Leslie's uncle, and said that she had sold
him hundreds of beautiful books for his wife, and had even had a note
from Leslie's Aunt Alice, thanking her for some little courtesy.

"But isn't that funny!" Leslie said, with her childish widening of the
eyes. "That you should know Chris!"

"Well, now," said Mrs. Sheridan's voice, cutting across both
conversations, "where can these girls go for about fifteen minutes? I'll
tell you my little bit of business, Mrs. Melrose, and then Norma and I
will go along. It won't take me fifteen minutes, for there's nothing to
decide to-day," the girls heard her add, comfortably, as they went into
the hall.

"Leslie!" her grandmother called after her. "If you must change,
dear--but wait a minute, is that Aunt Annie out there?"

"No, Grandma, just ourselves. What were you going to say?"

"I was going to say, lovey, that you could ask Miss Sheridan to wait in
the library; her aunt tells me she is fond of books." Mrs. Melrose did
not quite like to commit Leslie to entertaining the strange girl for
perhaps half an hour. She was pleasantly reassured by Leslie's answering
voice:

"We'll have tea in my room, Grandma. Marion and Doris may come in!"

"That's right, have a good time!" her grandmother answered. And then
settling back comfortably, she added with her kind, fussy superiority,
"Well, Kate, I've wondered where you were hiding yourself all this time!
Let's have the business. But first I want to say that I appreciate your
turning to me. If it's money--I've got it. If it's something else, Chris
Liggett is one of the cleverest men in New York, and we'll consult him."

"It's not money, thank God!" Mrs. Sheridan said, in her forthright
voice. "Lord knows where it all comes from, these days, but the children
always have plenty," she added, glad of a diversion. "They bought
themselves a car two years ago, and if it isn't a Victrola this week,
it's a thermos bottle, or a pair of white buckskin shoes! Rose told me
she paid eight dollars for her corsets. 'Eight dollars for what,' I
said, 'a dozen?' But then I've the two houses in Brooklyn, you know----"

"You still have those?"

"I have, indeed. And even the baby--we call Norma the baby--is earning
good money now."

"She has your name, Kate--Sheridan. Had your husband a brother?"

Kate Sheridan's face grew a trifle pale. She glanced at the door to see
that it was shut, and at the one to the adjoining room to make sure
that it was closed also. Then she turned to Mrs. Melrose, and it was an
anxious glance she directed at the older woman.

"Well, now, there's no hurry about this," she began, "and you may say
that it's all nonsense, and send me packing--and God knows I hope you
will! But it just began to get on my mind--and I've never been a great
one to worry! I'll begin at the beginning----"




CHAPTER II


Marion Duer and Doris Alexander duly arrived for tea with Leslie, and
Norma was introduced. They all sat in Leslie's room, and laughed as they
reached for crumpets, and marvelled at the storm. Norma found them
rather younger than their years, and shyly anxious to be gracious. On
her part she realized with some surprise that they were not really
unapproachable, and that Leslie was genuinely anxious to take her to tea
with Aunt Alice some day, and have them "talk books and things." The
barriers between such girls as this one and herself, Norma was honest
enough to admit, were largely of her own imagining. They were neither so
contemptibly helpless nor so scornfully clever as she had fancied them;
they were just laughing girls, absorbed in thoughts of gowns and
admirers and good times, like her cousin Rose and herself.

There had been perhaps one chance in one hundred that she and Leslie
Melrose might at once become friends, but by fortunate accident that
chance had favoured them. Leslie's spontaneous laugh in Mrs. Melrose's
room, her casual mention of tea, her appreciative little phrases as she
introduced to Marion and Doris the young lady who picked out books for
Aunt Alice, had all helped to crush out the vaguely hostile impulse
Norma Sheridan had toward rich little members of a society she only knew
by hearsay. Norma had found herself sitting on Leslie's big velvet
couch laughing and chatting quite naturally, and where Norma chatted
naturally the day was won. She could be all friendliness, and all
sparkle and fun, and presently Leslie was listening to her in actual
fascination.

The butler announced a motor-car, a maid came up; Doris and Marion had
to go. Leslie and Norma went into Leslie's dressing-room, and Leslie's
maid went obsequiously to and fro, and the girls talked almost
intimately as they washed their hands and brushed their hair. Neither
cared that the time was passing.

But the time was passing none the less. Five o'clock came with a pale
and uncertain sunset, and a cold twilight began to settle over the snowy
city. Leslie and Norma came back to the fire, and were standing there, a
trifle uncertainly, but still talking hard and fast, when there was an
interruption.

They looked at each other, paling. What was that?

There was utter silence in the old house. Leslie, with a frightened look
at Norma, ran to the hall door. As she opened it Mrs. Sheridan opened
the door of her grandmother's room opposite, and called, quite loudly:

"It's nothing, dear! Get hold of your grandmother's maid--somebody! She
feels a little--but she's quite all right!"

Leslie and Norma ran across the hall, and into Mrs. Melrose's room. By
this time Regina had come flying in, and two of the younger maids, and
Joseph had run upstairs. Leslie had only one glimpse of her grandmother,
leaning against Regina's arm, and drinking from a glass of water that
shook in the maid's hands. Then Mrs. Sheridan guided both herself and
Norma firmly into the hall, and reassured them cheerfully:

"The room was very hot, dear, and your grandmother said that she had
gotten tired, walking in the wind. She's quite all right--you can go in
immediately. No; she didn't faint--she just had a moment of dizziness,
and called out."

Regina came out, too evidently convinced that she had to deal with a
murderess, and coldly asked that Mrs. Sheridan would please step back
for a minute. Mrs. Sheridan immediately complied, but it was hardly more
than a minute when she joined the girls again.

"She wants to see you, dear," she said to Leslie, whose first frightened
tears had dried from bewilderment and curiosity, "and we must hurry on.
Come, Norma, we'll say good-night!"

"Good-night, Miss Melrose," Norma said.

"Good-night," Leslie answered, hesitating over the name. Her wide
babyish smile, the more appealing because of her wet lashes, made a
sudden impression upon Norma's heart. Leslie hung childishly on the
upstairs balustrade, in the dim wide upper hall, and watched them go.
"I--I almost called you Norma!" she confessed, mischievously.

"I wish you had!" Norma called up from below. She was in great spirits
as they went out into the deepening cold blue of the street, and almost
persuaded her aunt to take the omnibus up the Avenue. But Mrs. Sheridan
protested rather absent-mindedly against this extravagance. They were
close to the subway and that was quicker.

Norma could not talk in the packed and swaying train, and when they
emerged at Sixty-fifth Street they had only one slippery, cold, dark
block to walk. But when they had reached the flat, and snapped on
lights everywhere, and cast off outer garments, aproned and busy, in the
kitchen, she burst out:

"What on earth was the matter with that old lady, Aunt Kate?"

"Oh, I suppose they all eat too much, and sleep too much, and pamper
themselves as if they were babies," her aunt returned, composedly, "and
so it doesn't take much to upset 'em!"

"Oh, come now!" the girl said, stopping with arrested knife. "That
wasn't what made her let out a yell like that!"

Mrs. Sheridan, kneeling at the oven of the gas stove, laughed uneasily.

"Oh, you could hear that, could you?"

"Hear it! They heard it in Yonkers."

"Well," Mrs. Sheridan said, "she has always been high-strung, that one.
I remember years ago she'd be going into crying and raving fits. She's
got very deep affections, Mrs. Melrose, and when she gets thinking of
Theodore, and of Alice's accident, and this and that, she'll go right
off the handle. She had been crying, poor soul, and suddenly she began
this moaning and rocking. I told her I'd call someone if she didn't
stop, for she'd go from bad to worse, with me."

"But why with you, Aunt Kate? Do you know her so well?"

"Do I know them?" Mrs. Sheridan dug an opener into a can of corn with a
vigorous hand. "I know them all!"

"But how was that?" Norma persisted, now dropping her peeled potatoes
into dancing hot water.

"I've told you five thousand times, but you and Rose would likely have
one of your giggling fits on, and not a word would you remember!" her
aunt said. "I've told you that years ago, when your Uncle Tom died, and
I was left with two babies, and not much money, a friend of mine, a
milliner she was, told me that she knew a lady that wanted someone to
help manage her affairs--household affairs. Well, I'd often helped your
Uncle Tom with his books, and my mother was with me, to look out for the
children----"

"Where was I, Aunt Kate?"

"You! Wolf wasn't but three, and Rose a year old--where would you be?"

"I was minus two years," Norma said, sententiously. "I was part of the
cosmic all----"

"You be very careful how you talk about such things until you're a
married woman!" her aunt said. "Salt those potatoes, darling. Norma, can
you remember what I did with the corn that Rose liked so?"

Norma was attentive.

"You beat it up with eggs, and it came out a sort of puff," she
recalled. "I know--you put a little cornstarch in, to give it body!
Listen, Aunt Kate, how long did you stay with Mrs. Melrose?"

"Well, first I just watched her help for her, and paid the bills, and
went to market. And then I got gradually managing more and more; I'd go
to pay her interest, or deposit money, or talk to tenants; I liked it
and she liked me. And then she talked me into going to France with her,
but I cried all the way for my children, and I was glad enough to come
home again! She and Miss Annie spent some time over there, but I came
back. Miss Alice was in school, and Theodore--dear knows where he
was--into some mischief somewhere! But I'd saved money, and she'd given
me the Brooklyn houses, and I took a boarder or two, and that was the
last I ever worked for any one but my own!"

"Well, that's a nice girl, that Leslie," Norma said, "if her father
_was_ wild!"

"Her mother was a good girl," Kate said, "I knew her. But the old lady
was proud, Baby--God save any one of us from pride like that! You'd
never know it, to see her now, but she was very proud. Theodore's wife
was a good girl, but she was Miss Annie's maid, and what Mrs. Melrose
never could forgive was that when she ordered the girl out of the house,
she showed her her wedding certificate. She was Mrs. Theodore Melrose,
fast enough--though his mother never would see her or acknowledge her in
any way."

"They must think the Lord has made a special arrangement for
them--people like that!" Norma commented, turning a lovely flushed face
from the pan where she was dexterously crisping bacon. "What business is
it of hers if her son marries a working girl? That gives me a feeling
akin to pain--just because she happens to have a lot of money! What does
Miss Leslie Melrose think of that?"

"I don't know what she thinks--she loves her grandmother, I suppose.
Mrs. Melrose took her in when she was only a tiny girl, and she's been
the apple of her eye ever since. Theodore and his wife were divorced,
and when Leslie was about four or five he came back to his mother to
die--poor fellow! It was a terrible sorrow to the old lady--she'd had
her share, one way and another! My goodness, Norma," Mrs. Sheridan
interrupted herself to say, in half-reproachful appreciation, "I wish
you'd always help me like this, my dear! You can be as useful as ten
girls, when you've a mind to! And then perhaps to-morrow you'll be as
contrary----!"

"Oh, Aunt Kate, aren't you ashamed! When I ironed all your dish-towels
last night, when you were setting bread, and I made the popovers
Sunday!" Norma kissed her aunt, brushed a dab of cornstarch from the
older woman's firm cheek, and performed a sort of erratic dance about
the protestant and solid figure. "I'm a poor working girl," she said,
"and I get dragged out with my long, hard day!"

"Well, God knows that's true, too," her aunt said, with a sudden look of
compunction; "you may make a joke of it, but it's no life for a girl. My
dear," she added, seriously, holding Norma with a firm arm, and looking
into her eyes, "I hope I did no harm by what I did to-day! I did it for
the best, whatever comes of it."

"You mean stirring up the whole thing?" Norma asked, frowning a little
in curiosity and bewilderment. "Going to see her?"

"That--yes." Mrs. Sheridan rubbed her forehead with her hand, a fashion
she had when puzzled or troubled, and suddenly resumed, with a great
rattling of pans and hissing of water, her operations at the sink.
"Well, nothing may come of it--we'll see!" she added, briskly. Norma,
who was watching her expectantly, sighed disappointedly; the subject was
too evidently closed. But a second later she was happily distracted by
the slamming of the front door; Wolf and Rose Sheridan had come in
together, and dinner was immediately served.

Norma recounted, with her own spirited embellishments, her adventures of
the afternoon as the meal progressed. She had had "fun" getting to the
office in the first place, a man had helped her, and they had both
skidded into another man, and bing!--they had all gone down on the ice
together. And then at the shop nobody had come in, and the lights had
been lighted, and the clerks had all gathered together and talked. Then
Aunt Kate had come in to have lunch, and to have Norma go with her to
the gas company's office about the disputed charge, and they had decided
to make, at last, that long-planned call on the Melroses. There followed
a description of the big house and the spoiled, pretty girl, and the
impressive yet friendly old lady.

"And Aunt Kate--I'm sorry to say!--talked her into a nervous convulsion.
You did, Aunt Kate--the poor old lady gave one piercing yell----"

"You awful girl, there'll be a judgment on you for your impudence!" her
aunt said, fondly. But Rose looked solicitously at her mother, and said:

"Mother looks as if she had had a nervous convulsion, too. You look
terribly tired, Mother!"

"Well, I had a little business to discuss with Mrs. Melrose," Mrs.
Sheridan said, "and I'm no hand for business!"

"You know it!" Wolf Sheridan concurred, with his ready laugh. "Why
didn't you send me?"

"It was her business, lovey," his mother said, mildly, over her second
heartening cup of strong black tea.

The Sheridan apartment was, in exterior at least, exactly like one
hundred thousand others that line the side streets of New York. It faced
the familiar grimy street, fringed on the great arteries each side by
cigarette stands and saloons, and it was entered by the usual flight of
stained and shabby steps, its doorway showing a set of some dozen
letter-boxes, and looking down upon a basement entrance frequently
embellished with ash-cans and milk-bottles, and, just at present, with
banks of soiled and sooty snow. The Sheridans climbed three long flights
inside, to their own rooms, but as this gained them a glimpse of river,
and a sense in summer of airiness and height, to say nothing of pleasant
nearness to the roof, they rarely complained of the stairs--in fact,
rarely thought of them at all.

With the opening of their own door, however, all likeness to their
neighbours ceased. Even in a class where home ties and home comforts are
far more common than is generally suspected, Kate Sheridan was
exceptional, and her young persons fortunate among their kind. Her
training had been, she used to tell them, "old country" training, but it
was not only in fresh linen and hot, good food that their advantage lay.
It was in the great heart that held family love a divine gift, that had
stood between them and life's cold realities for some twenty courageous
years. Kate idolized her own two children and her foster-child with a
passion that is the purest and the strongest in the world. In possessing
them, she thought herself the most blessed of women. To keep a roof over
their heads, to watch them progress triumphantly through long division
and measles and skates, to see milk glasses emptied and plates scraped,
to realize that Wolf was as strong morally as he was physically, and
that all her teachers called Rose an angel, to spoil and adore the
beautiful, mischievous, and amusing "Baby"; this made a life full to the
brim, for Kate, of pride and happiness. Kate had never had a servant,
or a fur coat; for long intervals she had not had a night's unbroken
rest; and there had been times, when Wolf's fractured arm necessitated a
doctor's bill, or when coal for the little Detroit house had made a
disproportionate hole in her bank account, in which even the thrifty
Kate had known biting financial worry.

But the children never knew it. They knew only her law of service and
love. They must love each other, whatever happened. There was no
quarrelling at meals at Kate's house. Rose must of course oblige her
brother, sew on the button, or take his book to the library; Wolf must
always protect the girls, and consider them. Wolf firmly believed his
sister and cousin to be the sweetest girls in the world; Rose and Norma
regarded Wolf as perfection in human form. They rarely met without
embraces, never without brightening eyes and light hearts.

That this attitude toward each other was only the result of the healthy
bodies and honest souls that Kate had given them they would hardly have
believed. That her resolute training had literally forced them to love
and depend upon themselves in a world where brothers and sisters as
habitually teased and annoyed each other, would have struck them as
fantastic. Perhaps Kate herself hardly knew the power of her own will
upon them. Her commands in their babyhood had not been couched in the
language of modern child-analysts, nor had she given, or been able to
give, any particular reason for her law. But the instinct by which she
drew Wolf's attention to his sister's goodness, or noted Wolf's
cleverness for Rose's benefit, was better than any reason. She summed
the situation up simply for the few friends she had, with the phrase:

"They're all crazy about each other, every one of them!"

Kate's parlour would have caused Annie von Behrens actual faintness. But
it was a delightful place to Rose and Wolf and their friends. The
cushioned divan on Sunday nights customarily held a row of them, the
upright ebony piano sifted popular music impartially upon the taboret,
the patent rocker, and the Rover rug. They laughed, gossiped, munched
candy, and experimented in love-making quite as happily as did Leslie
and her own intimates. They streamed out into the streets, and sauntered
along under the lights to the moving pictures, or on hot summer nights
they perched like tiers of birds on the steps, and the world and youth
seemed sweet to them. In Kate's dining-room, finished in black wood and
red paper, they made Welsh rarebits and fudge, and in Kate's spotless
kitchen odours of toast and coffee rose at unseemly hours.

Lately, Rose and Norma had been talking of changes. Rose was employed in
an office whose severe and beautiful interior decoration had cost
thousands of dollars, and Norma's Old Book Room was a study in dull
carved woods, Oriental rugs, dull bronzes, and flawless glass. The girls
began to feel that a plain cartridge paper and net curtains might well
replace the parlour's florid green scrolling and Nottingham lace. But
they did not worry about it; it served as a topic to amuse their leisure
hours. The subject was generally routed by a shrewd allusion, from Norma
or Wolf, to the sort of parlour people would like if they got married,
married to someone who was doing very well in the shoe business, for
example.

These allusions deepened the colour in Rose's happy face; she had been
"going" for some three months with an attractive young man who exactly
met these specifications--not her first admirer, not noticeable for any
especial quality, yet Rose and Norma, and Kate, too, felt in their souls
that Rose's hour had come. Young Harry Redding was a big, broad, rather
inarticulate fellow, whose humble calling was not the more attractive to
the average young woman because he supported his mother by it. But he
suited Rose, more, he seemed wonderful to Rose, and because her dreams
had always been humble and self-sacrificing, Harry was a thousand times
more than she had dreamed. She felt herself the luckiest girl in the
world.

Kate sat at the head of her table, and Wolf at the foot. Rose, a gentle,
quiet copy of her handsome mother, was nearest the kitchen door, to
which she made constant flying trips. Norma was opposite Rose, and by
falling back heavily could tip her entire chair against the sideboard,
from which she extracted forks or salt or candy, as the case might be.
The telephone was in the dining-room, Wolf's especial responsibility,
and Mrs. Sheridan herself occasionally left the table for calls to the
front door or the dumb-waiter.

To-night, after supper, the girls flew through their share of
clearing-up. It never weighed very heavily upon them; they usually began
the process of piling and scraping dishes before they left the table,
Rose whisking the tablecloth into its drawer as Norma bumped through the
swinging door with the last dishes, and Kate halfway through the washing
even then. Chattering and busy, they hustled the hot plates onto their
shelves, rattled the hot plated ware into its basket, clanked saucepans,
and splashed water. Not fifteen minutes after the serving of the dessert
the last signs of the meal had been obliterated, and Kate was guilty of
what the girls called "making excuses" to linger in the kitchen. She was
mixing cereal, storing cold potatoes and cut bread, soaking dish-towels.
But these things did not belong to the duties of Norma and Rose, and the
younger girl could flash with a free conscience to the little room she
shared with Rose. Wolf had called out for a companion, they were going
to take a walk and see what the blizzard had done!

Norma washed her face, the velvety skin emerging with its bloom
untouched, the lips crimson, the blue eyes blazing. She pressed a great
wave of silky dark hair across her white forehead, and put the
fur-trimmed hat at a dashing angle. The lace blouse, the pearl beads,
her fur-collared coat again, and Norma was ready to dance out beside
Wolf as if fatigue and labours did not exist.

"Where's Rose?" he said, as they went downstairs.

"Oh, Wolf--Saturday night! Harry's coming, of course!" Norma slipped her
little hand, in its shabby glove, through his big arm. "She and Aunt
Kate were gossiping!"

"Suits me!" Wolf said, contentedly. He held her firmly on the slippery
lumps of packed snow. The sidewalks were almost impassable, yet hundreds
of other happy persons were stumbling and scrambling over them in the
mild winter darkness. Stars were out; and whether Norma was blinking up
at them, or staring into lighted windows of candy stores and fruit
markets, her own eyes danced and twinkled. The elevated trains thundered
above their heads, and the subway roared under their feet; great
advertising signs, with thousands of coloured lights, fanned up and down
in a haze of pink and blue; the air was full of voices, laughing and
shouting, and the screaming of coasting children.

"I have my pearls on," Norma told her companion. They stopped for some
molasses peppermints, and their pungent odour mingled for Norma in the
impression of this happy hour. "Wolf, how do they do that?" the girl
asked, watching an electric sign on which a maid mopped a dirty floor
with some prepared cleaner, leaving the floor clean after her mop. Wolf,
interested, explained, and Norma listened. They stopped at a drug store,
and studied a picture that subtly altered from Roosevelt's face to
Lincoln's, and thence to Wilson's face, and Wolf explained that, too.
Norma knew that he understood everything of that nature, but she liked
to impress him, too, and did so far more often than she realized, with
her book-lore. When Norma spoke lightly of a full calf edition de luxe
of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, she might almost have been speaking
in that language for all she conveyed to Wolf, but he watched the
animated face proudly just the same. Rose had always been good and
steady and thoughtful, but Wolf knew that Norma was clever, taking his
big-brotherly patronage with admiring awe, but daring where he
hesitated, and boldly at home where he was ill at ease. When she said
that when she got married she wanted Dedham china, and just a plain,
glass bowl for goldfish, Wolf nodded, but he would have nodded just as
placidly if she had wanted a Turkish corner and bead portières. And
to-night when she asserted that she wouldn't be Leslie Melrose for
anything in the world, Wolf asked in simple wonderment why she should
be.

"Imagine, a maid came to take those big girls home, Wolf! They can speak
French," Norma confided. Wolf did not look for coherence from her, and
took the two statements on their face value. "Now, I know I'm not
pretty," she continued, following, as was usual with her, some obscure
line of thought, "but I'm prettier than Doris Alexander, and she had her
picture in the paper!"

"Who broke it to you that you're not pretty?" Wolf asked.

"Well, I _know_ I'm not!" Norma jumped along at his side for a few
minutes, eyeing him expectantly, but Wolf's mind was honestly busy with
this assertion, and he did not speak. Wasn't she pretty? Girls had funny
standards. "You know," she resumed, "you'd hate a girl like Leslie
Melrose, Wolf!"

"Would I?"

"Oh, you'd loathe her. But I'll tell you who you _would_ like," Norma
added, in a sudden burst. "You'd love Mr. Liggett!"

"Why should I?" Wolf asked, in some surprise.

"Oh, because he's nice--he's very good-looking, and he has such a
pleasant voice, as if he knew everything, but wasn't a bit conceited!"
Norma said. "And he picks out books for his wife, and when I try to tell
him something about them, he always knows lots more. You know, in a
pleasant, careless sort of way, not a bit as if he was showing off. And
I'll tell you what he did. Miss Drake was showing him a pottery bowl
one day, and she dropped it, and she told me he sort of caught at it
with his hand, and he said to Mr. Biretta, 'I've very stupidly broken
this--just put it on my bill, will you?' Of course," Norma added,
vivaciously, "old B. G. immediately said that it was nothing at all, but
_you know_ what Miss Drake would have caught, if _she'd_ broken it!"

Perhaps Wolf did, but he was thinking at the moment that the family baby
was very cunning, with her bright eyes and indignant mouth. He stopped
her before a vaudeville house, in a flare of bright light.

"Want to go in?"

"Oh, Wolf! Would Aunt Kate care? Oh, Wolf, _let's_!"

There was absolute ecstasy in her eyes as they went through the
enchanted doorway and up the rising empty foyer toward the house. It was
nine o'clock; the performance was fairly under way. Norma rustled into a
seat beside her companion without moving her eyes from the coloured
comedian on the stage; she could remove hat and gloves and jacket
without losing an instant of him.

When the lights went up Wolf approved the dark hair and the pearls, and
bent toward her to hear the unending confidences. Norma thought she had
never seen anything better, and even Wolf admitted that it was a good
show. They finished the peppermints, and were very happy.

They had seen the big film, and so could cut the last third of the
programme, and reach home at ten o'clock. There was no comment from Aunt
Kate, who was yawning over the evening paper in the dining-room. Rose
and Harry were murmuring in the dimly lighted parlour. Wolf, who was of
the slow-thinking, intense type that discovers a new world every time it
reads a new book, was halfway through a shabby library copy of "War and
Peace," and went off to his room with the second volume under his arm.
Norma went to her room, too, but she sat dreaming before the mirror,
thinking of that Melrose house, and of Leslie's friendliness, until Rose
came in at eleven o'clock.




CHAPTER III


At almost this same moment Norma's self was the subject of a rather
unusual talk between Christopher Liggett and his wife.

Christopher had come softly into his house, at about half-past ten, to
find Alice awake, still on the big couch before her fire. Her little
bedroom beyond was softly lighted, the white bed turned down, and the
religious books she always read before going to sleep laid in place by
Miss Slater. But Alice had no light except her fire and two or three
candles in old sconces.

She welcomed Christopher with a smile, and he sat down, in his somewhat
rumpled evening dress, and smiled back at her in a rather weary fashion.
He often told her that these rooms of hers were a sanctuary, that he
tested the men and women he met daily in the world by her fine and lofty
standard. It was part of his utter generosity to her that he talked to
her as frankly as if he thought aloud, and it was Alice's pride and joy
to know that this marriage of theirs, which had so sadly and suddenly
become no marriage at all, was not as one-sided as the world might have
suspected. Her clear, dispassionate viewpoint and her dignified
companionship were not wifehood, but they were dear and valuable to him
none the less, a part of his life that he would not have spared. And he
could still admire her, too, not only for the exquisite clearness of her
intellect, her French and Italian, her knowledge of countries and
affairs, but physically--the clear, childish forehead that was as
unwrinkled as Leslie's, the fair, beautifully brushed hair, the mouth
with its chiselling of wisdom and of pain, and the transparent hand from
which she shook back transparent laces. She was always proud, always
fresh and fragrant, always free for him and for his problems, and it was
proverbial in the circle of their intimates that Chris admired Alice
with all his heart, and never felt himself anything but the privileged
guardian of a treasure.

To-night he dropped into a chair before her fire, and she watched him
for five or six restful minutes in silence.

"Stupid dinner?" she ventured.

"Rotten!" he answered, cheerfully. "I was late, but I got in to hear
Hendrick's speech. The Vice-President was there, everyone else I knew. I
cut away finally; I'm done up."

"I thought you picked up Hendrick on your way and went together," Mrs.
Liggett said, sympathetically. "I'm sorry it was dull--I suppose men
have to go to these political things!"

Chris was leaning forward, his locked hands dropped between his knees,
and his eyes on the fire.

"Hendrick and I stopped at your mother's," he said, deliberately, "and
she was so upset that I sent Hendrick on alone!"

Alice's eyes lighted apprehensively, but she spoke very quietly.

"What was it, Chris? Leslie getting saucy?"

"Oh, no, no! It was a complication of things, I imagine!" Christopher
took out his cigarette-case, looked at its moiré surface reflectively,
and selected a smoke. "She was tired--she'd been out in the
snow--Leslie had gone off with Annie to some débutante affair--I daresay
she felt blue. Alice, do you remember a woman named Kate Sheridan?"

The question was sudden, and Alice blinked.

"Yes, I do," she answered, after a moment's thought, "she was a sort of
maid or travelling companion of Mama's. We called her Mrs. Sheridan--she
was quite a superior sort of person."

"What do you remember about her, dear?"

"Well--just that. She came when I was only a child--and then when Annie
was ill in Paris she went abroad with Mama--and I remember that she came
back, and she used to come see me at school, for Mama, and once she took
me up to Grandma's, in Brookline. She was a widow, and she had a
child--or two, maybe. Why, Chris?"

Her husband did not answer, and she repeated the question.

"Well," he said, at last, flinging the end of his cigarette into the
fire, "she came to see your mother to-day."

Alice waited, a little at a loss. To her this had no particular
significance.

"She had her niece with her, young girl about eighteen," Christopher
said.

"Well--what _of_ it?" Alice demanded, with a sort of superb indifference
to anything such a woman might do.

He looked at her through his round eyeglasses, with the slight frown
that many of life's problems brought to his handsome face. Then the
glass fell, on its black ribbon, and he laughed.

"That's just what I don't _get_," he said, good-humouredly. "But I'll
tell you exactly what occurred. What's-His-Name, your mother's
butler----"

"Joseph."

"Joseph. Joseph told me that at about four o'clock this Mrs. Sheridan
came in. Your mother had told him that she was expecting the lady, and
that he was to bring her upstairs. With her came this girl--I can't
remember her name--but it was something Sheridan--Nora Sheridan, maybe.
Leslie carried the girl off for tea, and the woman stayed with your
mother.

"Well, at five--or later, this Mrs. Sheridan ran into the hall, and it
seems--she's all right now!--it seems that your mother had fainted."

"Mama!" Alice said, anxiously, with an incredulous frown.

"Yes, but don't worry. She's absolutely all right now. Leslie,"
Christopher went back to his narrative, "Leslie cried, and I suppose
there was a scene. Mrs. Sheridan and the girl went home--Leslie dressed
and went out--and your mother immediately telephoned Lee----"

"Judge Lee?"

"Yes--she said so. Lee's up in Westchester with his daughter, she
couldn't get him----"

"But, Chris, why did she want her lawyer?"

"That's just it--_why_? Well, then she telephoned here for me--I was on
my way there, as it happened, and just before eight Hendrick and I went
in. I could see she was altogether up stage, so I sent Von on and had it
out with her."

"And what was her explanation, Chris?"

Christopher laughed again.

"I'll be darned," he said, thoughtfully, "if I can make head or tail of
it! It would be funny if it wasn't that she's taking it so hard. She was
in bed, and she had been crying--wouldn't eat any dinner----"

"But, Chris," Alice said, worriedly, "what do you _make_ of it! What did
she _say_?"

"Well, she clasped my hand, and she said that she had an opportunity to
undo a great wrong--and that I must help her--and not ask any
questions--she was just acting as you and I would have her act under the
circumstances----"

"What circumstances?" Alice said, at an utter loss, as he paused.

"She didn't say," he smiled.

"Oh, come, now, Chris, she must have said more than that!"

"No, she didn't. She said that she must make it up to this girl, and she
wished to see Lee about it immediately."

"To change her will!" Alice exclaimed.

"She didn't say so. Of course, it may be some sort of blackmail."
Christopher looked whimsically at his wife. "As I remember my
father-in-law," he said, "it seems to me improbable that out of the past
could come this engaging young girl--very pretty, they said----"

"Father! Oh, nonsense!" Alice exclaimed, almost in relief at the
absurdity. "No, but it might be some business--some claim against the
firm," she suggested.

"Well, I thought of that. But there are one or two reasons why it
doesn't seem the solution. I asked your mother if it was money, and she
said no, said it positively and repeatedly. Then I asked her if she
would like this Sheridan woman shut up, and she was quite indignant.
Kate!--Kate was one of the most magnificent women God had ever made, and
so on!"

"Well, I do remember Mrs. Sheridan as a lovely sort of person," Alice
contributed. "Plain, you know, but quite wonderful for--well,
_goodness_. It's funny--but then you know Mama is terribly excitable,"
she added, "she gets frightfully worked up over nothing, or almost
nothing. It's quite possible that when Kate recalled old times to her
she suddenly wished that she had done more for Kate--something like
that. She'd think nothing of sending for Judge Lee on the spot. You
remember her recalling us from our wedding-trip because she couldn't
find the pearls? All the way from Lake Louise to hear that they had been
lost!"

"I know," Christopher smiled. "She is--unique, _ma belle mère_. By
George, I'll never forget our rushing into the house like maniacs, not
knowing what had happened to Leslie or Acton, and having her fall
sobbing into your arms, with the pearls in her hands!"

"Mama's wonderful," Alice laughed. "Chris, did you eat any dinner?"

He considered.

"But I'm really not hungry, dear," he protested.

Alice, superbly incredulous, rang at once. Who was in the kitchen? Well,
she was to be asked to send up a tray at once to Mr. Liggett. "Now that
you asked me, the dinner had reached the point of ice-cream in a paper
tub, as I sat down," he remembered. "You're a little miracle of healing
to me, Alice. When I came in here I didn't know _what_ we were up
against, as a family. Your mother wished the girl pensioned----"

"Oh, Chris, not really?"

"I give you my word!" But he was enough his usual self to have taken his
seat at the piano, now, and was looking at her across it, while his
fingers fitted themselves lazily to chords and harmonics.

"I'll tell you something, if you'll promise to stop playing the instant
your supper comes up!"

"I'll promise!"

"Well, then--the new Puccini is there!" She nodded toward the
music-shelves, and he turned to the new score with an eager exclamation.
Fifteen minutes later she had to scold him to bring him to the fire
again, and to the smoking little supper. While Alice sipped ginger ale,
Christopher fell upon his meal, and they discussed the probable
presentation of the opera, and its quality.

But an hour later, when she was in bed, and Christopher was going back
to the piano for another half-hour of music, she caught his hand.

"Chris, you're not worried about this Sheridan matter?"

"Worried? No, dearest child, what is there to worry about? It isn't
blackmail, apparently it's nothing but an overdose of imagination on
your mother's part. If the girl really was promised something, or
has--for example!--old stock, or if her father was an employee who did
this or that or the other--Mrs. Sheridan's husband was employed by your
father at the time of his death, by the way--why, it's easy enough to
pay the claim, whatever it is! The girl seems to have made a nice
impression--your mother tells me she's sold me books, but that doesn't
mean much, I buy books everywhere! No, I don't think you'll ever hear of
her again. But your mother will be here in a day or two; see what you
can make of it all!"

"Oh, of course, it's nothing _wrong_!" Alice said, confidently.

And Christopher returned to his beloved piano, relieved in mind by his
wife's counsel, refreshed in body by the impromptu supper, and ready for
the music that soothed in him all the restless and unsatisfied fibres of
his soul.




CHAPTER IV


Annie, who signed herself "Anne Melrose von Behrens," was the real
dictator in the various circles of the allied families, and had a
fashion of finding herself supreme in larger circles, as well. Annie was
thirty-seven or eight, tall, thin, ash-blonde, superb in manner and
bearing. Nature had been generous to her, but she had done far more for
herself than Nature had. Her matchless skin, her figure, her hands, her
voice, were all the result of painstaking and intelligent care. Annie
had been a headstrong, undisciplined girl twenty years ago. She had come
back from a European visit, at twenty-three, with a vague if general
reputation of being "a terror." But Annie was clever, and she had real
charm. She spoke familiarly of European courts, had been presented even
in inaccessible Vienna. She spoke languages, quoted poets, had great
writers and painters for her friends, and rippled through songs that had
been indisputably dedicated, in flowing foreign hands, to the beautiful
Mademoiselle Melrose. Society bowed before Annie; she was the sensation
of her winter, and the marriage she promptly made was the most brilliant
in many winters.

Annie proceeded to bear her sober, fine, dull, and devoted Hendrick two
splendid sons, and thus riveted to herself his lasting devotion and
trust. The old name was safe, the millions would descend duly to young
Hendrick and Piet. The family had been rich, conspicuous, and respected
in the city, since its sturdy Holstein cattle had browsed along the
fields of lower Broadway, but under Annie's hands it began to shine.
Annie's handsome motor-cars bore the family arms, her china had been
made in the ancestral village, two miles from Rotterdam, and also
carried the shield. Her city home, in Fifth Avenue, was so magnificent,
so chastely restrained and sober, so sternly dignified, that it set the
cue for half the other homes of the ultra-aristocratic set. Annie's
servants had been in the Von Behrens family for years; there was nothing
in the Avenue house, or the Newport summer home, that was not as
handsome, as old, as solid, as carven, as richly dull, or as purely
shining, as human ingenuity could contrive to have it. Collectors saved
their choicest discoveries for Annie; and there was no painter in the
new world who would not have been proud to have Annie place a canvas of
his among her treasures from the old.

If family relics were worth preserving, what could be more remarkable
than Annie's Washington letter, her Jefferson tray, her Gainsboroughs of
the Murisons who had been the only Americans so honoured by the painter?
Melrose and Von Behrens honours crowded each other--here was the thin
old silver "shepherdess" cup awarded that Johanna von Behrens who had
won a prize with her sheep, while Washington was yet a boy; and here the
quaint tortoise-shell snuff-box that a great prince, homeless and
unknown, had given the American family that took him in; and the silver
buttons from Lafayette's waistcoat that the great Frenchman had
presented Colonel Horace Murison of the "Continentals."

These things were not thrust at the visitor, nor indeed were they
conspicuous among the thousand other priceless souvenirs that Annie had
gathered about her.

"Rather nice, isn't it?" Annie would say, abstractedly, when some
enthusiastic girl pored over the colonial letters or the old portraits.
"See here, Margaret," she might add, casually, "do you see the inside of
this little slipper, my dear? Read what's written there: 'In these
slippers Deborah Murison danced with Governor Winthrop, on the night of
her fifteenth birthday, July 1st, 1742.' Isn't that rather quaint?"

Annie could afford to be casual, to be abstracted. In her all the pride
of the Melrose and Murison families was gathered; hers was an arrogance
so sure of itself, a self-confidence so supreme, that the world
questioned it no more than it questioned the heat of the sun. The old
silver, the Copleys, and the colonial china, the Knickerbocker "court
chests" with their great locks of Dutch silver, and the laces that had
been shown at the Hague two hundred years before, were all confirmed,
all reinforced, as it were, by the power and prosperity of to-day. It
was no by-gone glory that made brilliant the lives of Hendrick and Anne
Melrose von Behrens. Hendrick's cousins and uncles, magnificent persons
of title, were prominent in Holland to-day, their names associated with
that of royalty, and their gracious friendship extended to the American
branch of the family whenever Hendrick chose to claim it. Old maps of
New York bore the boundary lines of the Von Behrens farm; early
histories of the city mingled the names of Melrose and Von Behrens among
those of the men who had served the public need.

Wherever there was needed that tone that only names of prominence and
wealth can bestow Annie's name was solicited. Wherever it appeared it
gave the instant stamp of dignity and integrity. She had seen this goal
dimly in the distance, when she stepped from her rather spoiled and
wilful girlhood into this splendid wifehood, but even Annie was
astonished at the rapidity with which it had come about. Mama, of
course, had known all the right people, even if she _had_ dropped all
social ties after Papa's death. And Hendrick's name was an open sesame.
But even so it was surprising, and it was gratifying.

In appearance Annie had no problem. If she was not a beauty she was near
enough to being one. She was smart enough, and blonde enough, and
splendidly dressed enough to be instantly identifiable, and that was all
she desired. Financially, Annie had no problem. Her own inheritance and
her husband's great wealth silenced all question there. The Murison
pearls and the famous diamond tiara that her father had given her mother
years ago had come to Annie, but they were eclipsed by the Von Behrens
family jewels, and these were all hers, with the laces, and the ivories,
and the brocades. Life could give nothing more to Annie, but not many
women would have made so much of what Annie had. There was, far down and
out of sight, a little streak of the adventuress in her, and she never
stopped halfway.

A young wife, Annie had dutifully considered her nursery.

"Hendrick's is the elder line, of course, although it is the colonial
one," Annie had said, superintending a princely layette. The child was a
son, his father's image, and nobody who knew Annie was in the least
surprised that fortune had fallen in with her plans. It was the
magnificent Annie who was quoted as telling Madame Modiste to give her a
fitter who would not talk; it was Annie who decided what should be done
in recognizing the principals of the Jacqmain divorce, and that old
Floyd Densmore's actress-wife should not be accepted. Annie's neat and
quiet answer to a certain social acquaintance who remarked, in Annie's
little gallery, "I have seen the original of that picture, in one of the
European galleries," was still quoted by Annie's friends. "This _is_ the
original!" Annie had said quite simply and truthfully.

Leslie admired her aunt more than any one else in the world. Grandma was
old-fashioned, and Aunt Alice insignificant, in Leslie's eyes, but
stunning, arrogant, fearless Aunt Annie was the model upon which she
would have based herself if she had known how. Annie's quick
positiveness with her servants, her cool friendliness with big men, and
clever men, her calm assurance as to which hats she liked, and which
hats she didn't, her utter belief in everything that was of Melrose or
von Behrens, and her calm contempt for everything that was not, were
masterly in Leslie's eyes.

Annie might have been a strong royalist had she been born a few
generations earlier. But in Annie's day the ideal of social service had
been laid down by fashion, and she was consequently a tremendously
independent and energetic person, with small time for languishing airs.
She headed committees and boards, knew hundreds of working girls by
name, kept a secretary and a stenographer, and mentioned topics at big
dinners that would not have shocked either old Goodwife Melrose of
Boston, or Vrouw von Behrens of Nieu Amsterdam, for neither had the
faintest idea that such things, or their names, existed.

Withal, Annie was attractive, even her little affectations were
impressive, and as she went about from luncheons to meetings, swept up
to her model nursery to revel in her model boys, tossed aside regal furs
and tore off princely rings the better to play with them, wrapped her
beautiful figure in satins and jewels to descend to formal dinners, she
was almost as much admired and envied and copied as she might fondly
have hoped to be. She managed her life on modern lines of efficiency,
planned ahead what she wished, tutored herself not to think of anything
undesirable as being even in the range of possibility, trod lightly upon
the sensitive souls of others, and asked no quarter herself, aimed high,
and enjoyed her life and its countless successes to the full.

Of course there had been setbacks. Her brother Theodore, his most
unfortunate marriage to a servant, his intemperance, the general scandal
of his mother's violent detestation of his wife, all this was most
unpleasant. But Louison, the wife, upon sufficient pressure, had brought
her child to the Melroses, and had doubtfully disappeared, and Theodore
had returned from his wanderings to live, silent and unobtrusive, in his
mother's home, for several years, and to die with his daughter beside
him, and be duly laid in the Melrose plot at Woodlawn. And
Leslie--Leslie had repaid them all, for all of it.

Alice was another disappointment, or had been one, to Annie. For Alice,
after having achieved a most unexpectedly satisfactory marriage, and
having set up her household gods in the very shadow of her sister's
brilliant example, as it were, had met with that most unfortunate
accident. For a few years Annie had been utterly exasperated whenever
she thought of it. For Christopher was really an extraordinary husband
for Alice to hold, even in normal circumstances. He was so outrageously,
frightfully, irresistibly popular with women everywhere, his wife must
needs keep a very sharp, albeit loving, eye upon him. A sickly wife--a
wife who was a burden and a reproach, that would be fatal to them all!

But Alice had showed unsuspected courage and pride in this hard trial.
She had made herself beautiful, well-informed, tactful; she had made
herself a magnet to her husband's friends, and his home the centre of a
real social group. Annie respected her for it, and helped her by
flashing into her rooms not less often than every alternate day, with
gossip, with books, with hints that showed Alice just where her course
in this or that matter must lie.

So Alice had come to be an actual asset, and now to her Aunt Annie's
tremendous satisfaction, Leslie promised to add one more feather to the
family cap by announcing her engagement to Acton Liggett. Annie smiled
to herself whenever she thought of it. When this was consummated she
would have nothing left but the selection of suitable wives for Hendrick
Junior, now aged ten, and Piet, who was four years younger.

Two or three days after the ending of the big snow-storm, and the
beginning of that domestic storm that was destined strangely to change
some of the lives nearest her, Annie went in to have luncheon with her
sister. It was a brilliant sunshiny winter day, with crossings swimming
in melting snow and roofs steaming brightly into the clear air.

Annie went straight upstairs to Alice's room, with the usual apology for
lateness. She kissed Alice lightly on the forehead, and while Freda was
coming and going with their meal, they discussed the little boys, books,
politics, and the difficulties of the city in the snow.

But when they were alone Annie asked immediately:

"What on earth is the matter with Mama, Alice?"

"You mean about----? Did she tell you?"

"No; she didn't have to. Leslie ran in yesterday afternoon, and told me
that Mama has been in bed since Saturday! I telephoned Sunday morning,
but Hendrick and I were taking the boys up to his uncle's house, in
Westchester, and--as she didn't say one word about being ill--I didn't
see her that day, nor yesterday, as it happened, for we didn't come down
until noon. When Leslie came in, there were other people there for tea,
and I didn't have a chance to speak to her alone. But I went over to
Mama this morning, and she seems all broken up!"

"What did she tell you?" Alice asked, anxiously.

"Oh, my dear, you know Mama! She wept, and patted my hand, and said that
it was sad to be the last of your own generation, and she hoped you and
I would always have each other, and that she had always loved us, and
tried to do her best for us----"

Alice laughed.

"Poor Mama! She gets so worked up!" she said.

"But what do you make of it?" demanded Annie. "She talked of this Kate
Sheridan--I remember her perfectly, she came to Paris when I was so
ill, years ago. Poor Mama cried, and said that she wished to do
something for Kate. Now you know, Alice," Annie went on reasonably,
"nobody is tying Mama's hands! If she wants to educate this young
girl--this Norma person--to please Kate, or all her children for that
matter, she doesn't have to go into hysterics, and send for Judge Lee.
She said she didn't feel at all well, and she wanted to secure to Kate
some money in her will I told her it was ridiculous--she never looked
better in her life! I wish she could get over to see you, Alice; you
always soothe her so. What on earth does Chris make of it?"

"Well, I'll tell you what we've done," Alice smiled. "Chris went to see
her Sunday, and they had a long talk. He tells me that she was just as
vague and unsatisfactory as ever, but calmer, and she finally admitted
that all she really wanted to do was to befriend this niece of Kate
Sheridan. Of course Chris and I think Mama has one of her funny notions
about it, but if the child's mother had befriended Mama, for example, a
thousand years ago, or if Mama had borrowed five dollars from Kate, and
forgotten to return it, you know that would be enough to account for all
this excitement."

"Yes, I know!" Annie admitted, with her favourite look of intolerant,
yet indulgent, scorn.

"Well, it seems the girl is in Biretta's Bookshop, and Chris has often
bought books of her. So to quiet Mama he promised that he would bring
her out here to have tea with me some day soon. Mama was delighted, and
I think she hopes that a friendship will come of it." Alice threw
herself back into the pillows, and drew a great breath as if she were
weary. "I only want to please Mama!" she finished.

"You're an angel," Annie said, absently. "I suppose I could get the
truth out of Mama in five seconds," she mused. "It looks to me rather
like blackmail!"

"No; she said not!" Alice contradicted, quickly.

"Well, it's all so silly," the elder sister said, impatiently. "And
coming just now----" she added, significantly.

"Yes. I know!" Alice agreed, with a comprehending look. And in lowered
tones they began to talk of Leslie's possible engagement.




CHAPTER V


Norma Sheridan saw the engagement announced in a morning paper two weeks
later, and carried the picture of pretty Miss Melrose home, to entertain
the dinner table. The news had been made known at a dinner given to
forty young persons, in the home of the débutante's aunt, Mrs. Hendrick
von Behrens. Miss Melrose, said the paper, was the daughter and heiress
of the late Theodore Melrose, and made her home with her grandmother.
Mr. Liggett was the brother of Christopher Liggett, whose marriage to
Miss Alice Melrose was a social event some years ago. A number of
dinners and dances were already planned in honour of the young pair.

Norma looked at the pictured face with a little stir of feelings so
confused that she could not define them, at her heart. But she passed
the paper to her aunt with no comment.

"You might send them two dozen kitchen towels, Mother," Wolf suggested,
drily, and Rose laughed joyously. Her own engagement present from her
mother had been this extremely practical one, and Rose loved to open her
lower bureau drawer, and gloat over the incredible richness of
possessing twenty-four smooth, red-striped, well-hemmed glass-towels,
all her own. Norma had brought her two thick, dull gray Dedham bowls,
with ducks waddling around them, and these were in the drawer, too,
wrapped in tissue paper. And beside these were the length of
lemon-coloured silk that Rose had had for a year, without making up, and
six of her mother's fine sheets of Irish linen, and two glass
candlesticks that Rose had won at a Five-hundred party. Altogether, Rose
felt that she was making great strides toward home-making, especially as
she and Harry must wait for months, perhaps a year. Norma had promised
her two towels a month, until there were a whole dozen, and Wolf,
prompted by the same generous little heart, told her not to give the
gas-stove a thought, for she was to have the handsomest one that money
could buy, with a stand-up oven and a water-heater, from her brother.
Rose walked upon air.

But Norma was in a mood that she herself seemed unable to understand or
to combat. She felt a constant inclination toward tears. She didn't hate
the Melroses--no, they had been most friendly and kind. But--but it was
a funny world in which one girl had everything, like Leslie, and another
girl had no brighter prospect than to drudge away in a bookstore all her
life, or to go out on Sundays with her cousin. Norma dreamed for hours
of Leslie's life, the ease and warmth and beauty of it, and when Leslie
was actually heralded as engaged the younger girl felt a pang of the
first actual jealousy she had ever known. She imagined the beautiful
drawing-room in which Acton Liggett--perhaps as fascinating a person as
his brother!--would clasp pearls about Leslie's fair little throat; she
imagined the shining dinner tables at which Leslie's modestly dropped
blonde head would be stormed with compliments and congratulations.

And suddenly molasses peppermints and dish-washing became odious to
her, and she almost disliked Rose for her pitiable ecstasies over china
bowls and glass-towels. All the pleasant excitement of her call upon
Mrs. Melrose, with Aunt Kate, died away. It had seemed the beginning of
some vaguely dreamed-of progress toward a life of beauty and
achievement, but it was two weeks ago now, and its glamour was fading.

True, Christopher Liggett had come into Biretta's bookstore, with
Leslie, and he and Norma had talked together for a few minutes, and
Leslie had extended her Aunt Alice's kind invitation for tea. But no day
had been set for the tea, Norma reflected gloomily. Now, she supposed,
the stir of Leslie's engagement would put all that out of Christopher's
head.

Wolf was not particularly sympathetic with her, she mused,
disconsolately. Wolf had been acting in an unprecedented manner of late.
Rose's engagement seemed to have completely turned his head. He laughed
at Norma, hardly heard her words when she spoke to him, and never moved
his eyes from her when they were together. Norma could not look up from
her book, or her plate, or from the study of a Broadway shop window,
without encountering that same steady, unembarrassed, half-puzzled
stare.

"What's the matter with you, Wolf?" she would ask, impatiently. But Wolf
never told her.

As a matter of fact, he did not know. He was a silent, thoughtful
fellow, old for his years in many ways, and in some still a boy. Norma
and Rose had known only the more prosperous years of Kate's life, but
Wolf remembered many a vigil with his mother, remembered her lonely
struggles to make a living for him and for the girls. He himself was the
type that inevitably prospers--industrious, good, intelligent, and
painstaking, but as a young boy in the working world he had early seen
the terrors in the lives of men about him: drink, dirt, unemployment and
disease, debt and dishonour. Wolf was not quick of thought; he had
little imagination, rather marvelling at other men's cleverness than
displaying any of his own, and he had reached perhaps his twenty-second
or twenty-third summer before he realized that these terrors did not
menace him, that whatever changes he made in his work would be
improvements, steps upward. For actual months after the move to New York
Wolf had pondered it, in quiet gratitude and pleasure. Rent and bills
could be paid, there might be theatre treats for the girls, and chicken
for Sunday supper, and yet the savings account in the Broadway bank
might grow steadily, too. Far from being a slave to his employer, Wolf
began to realize that this rather simple person was afraid of him,
afraid that young Sheridan and some of the other smart, ingenious,
practically educated men in his employ might recognize too soon their
own independence.

And when the second summer in New York came, and Wolf could negotiate
the modest financial deal that gave him and the girls a second-hand
motor-car to cruise about in on Sundays and holidays, when they could
picnic up in beautiful Connecticut, or unpack the little fringed red
napkins far down on the Long Island shore, life had begun to seem very
pleasant to him. Debt and dirt and all the squalid horrors of what he
had seen, and what he had read, had faded from his mind, and for awhile
he had felt that his cup could hold no more.

But now, just lately, there was something else, and although the full
significance of it had not yet actually dawned upon him, Wolf began to
realize that a change was near. It was the most miraculous thing that
had ever come to him, although it concerned only little Norma--only the
little cousin who had been an actual member of his family for all these
years.

He had heard his mother say a thousand times that she was pretty; he had
laughed himself a thousand times at her quick wit. But he had never
dreamed that it would make his heart come up into his throat and
suffocate him whenever he thought of her, or that her lightest and
simplest words, her most casual and unconscious glance, would burn in
his heart for hours.

During his busy days Wolf found himself musing about this undefined and
nebulous happiness that began to tremble, like a growing brightness
behind clouds, through all his days and nights. Had there ever been a
time, he wondered, when he had taken her for granted, helped her into
her blessed little coat as coolly as he had Rose? Had it been this same
Norma who scolded him about throwing his collars on the floor, and who
had sent his coat to the cleaner with a ten-dollar bill in the pocket?

Wolf remembered summer days, and little Norma chattering beside him on
the front seat, as the shabby motor-car fled through the hot, dry city
toward shade and coolness. He remembered early Christmas Mass, and Norma
and Rose kneeling between him and his mother, in the warm, fir-scented
church. He remembered breakfast afterward, in a general sense of hunger
and relaxation and well-being, and the girls exulting over their
presents. And every time that straight-shouldered, childish figure came
into his dream, that mop of cloudy dark hair and flashing laugh, the
new delicious sense of some unknown felicity touched him, and he would
glance about the busy factory self-consciously, as if his thoughts were
written on his face for all the world to read.

Wolf had never had a sweetheart. It came to him with the blinding flash
of all epoch-making discoveries that Norma was his girl--that he wanted
Norma for his own, and that there was no barrier between them. And in
the ecstasy of this new vision, which changed the whole face of his
world, he was content to wait with no special impatience for the hour in
which he should claim her. Of course Norma must like him--must love him,
as he did her, unworthy as he felt himself of her, and wonderful as this
new Norma seemed to be. Wolf, in his simple way, felt that this had been
his destiny from the beginning.

That a glimpse of life as foreign and unnatural as the Melrose life
might seriously disenchant Norma never occurred to him. Norma had always
been fanciful, it was a part of her charm. Wolf, who worked in the great
Forman shops, had felt it no particular distinction when by chance one
day he had been called from his luncheon to look at the engine of young
Stanley Forman's car. He had left his seat upon a pile of lumber, bolted
the last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed
racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to
the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it
than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn
sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a
thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous
decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not to drive a
racer.

So Norma's half-formed jealousies, desires, and dreams were a sealed
book to him. But this very unreasonableness lent her an odd exotic charm
in his eyes. She was to Wolf like a baby who wants the moon. The moon
might be an awkward and useless possession, and the baby much better
without it, still there is something winning and touching about the
little imperious mouth and the little upstretched arms.

One night, when he had reached home earlier than either of the girls,
Wolf was in the warm bright kitchen, alone with his mother. He was
seated at the end of the scrubbed and bleached little table; Kate at the
other end was neatly and dexterously packing a yellow bowl with bread
pudding.

"Do you remember, years and years ago, Mother," Wolf said, chewing a
raisin, thoughtfully, "that you told me that Norma isn't my real
cousin?"

Kate's ruddy colour paled a little, and she looked anxious. Not Perseus,
coming at last in sight of his Gorgon, had a heart more sick with fear
than hers was at that instant.

"What put that into your head, dear?"

"Well, I don't know. But it's true, isn't it?"

Kate scattered chopped nuts from the bowl of her spoon.

"Yes, it's true," she said. "There's not a drop of the same blood in
your veins, although I love her as I do you and Rose."

She was silent, and Wolf, idly turning the egg-beater in an empty dish,
smiled to himself.

"But what made you think of that, Wolf?" his mother asked.

"I don't know!" Wolf did not look at her, but his big handsome face was
suffused with happy colour. "Harry and Rose, maybe," he admitted.

Kate sat down suddenly, her eyes upon him.

"Not the Baby?" she half whispered.

Her son leaned back in his chair, and folded his big arms across his
chest. When he looked at her the smile had faded from his face, and his
eyes were a trifle narrowed, and his mouth set.

"I guess so!" he said, simply. "I guess it's always been--Norma. But I
didn't always know it. I used to think of her as just another
sister--like Rose. But I know now that she'll never seem that
again--never did, really."

He was silent, and Kate sat staring at him in silence.

"Has she any relatives, Mother?"

"Has--what?"

"Has she people--who are they?"

Kate looked at the floor.

"She has no one but me, Son."

"Of course, she's not nineteen, and I don't believe it's ever crossed
her mind," Wolf said. "I don't think Norma ever had a real affair--just
kid affairs, like Paul Harrison, and that man at the store who used to
send her flowers. But I don't believe those count."

"I don't think she ever has," Kate said, heavily getting to her feet,
and beginning to pour her custard slowly through the packed bread.
Presently she stopped, and set the saucepan down, her eyes narrowed and
fixed on space. Then Wolf saw her press the fingers of one hand upon
her mouth, a sure sign of mental perturbation.

"I know I'm not worthy to tie her little shoes for her, Mother," he
said, suddenly, and very low.

"There's no woman in the world good enough for you," his mother
answered, with a troubled laugh. And she gave the top of his head one of
her rare, brisk kisses as she passed him, on her way out of the room.

Wolf was sufficiently familiar with the domestic routine to know that
every minute was precious now, and that she was setting the table. But
his heart was heavy with a vague uneasiness; she had not encouraged him
very much. She had not accepted this suggestion as she did almost all of
the young people's ideas, with eager cooperation and sympathy. He sat
brooding at the kitchen table, her notable lack of enthusiasm chilling
him, and infusing him with her own doubts.

When she came back, she stood with her back turned to him, busied with
some manipulation of platters and jars in the ice-box.

"Wolf, dear," she said, "I want to ask you something. The child's too
young to listen to you--or any one!--now. Promise me--_promise me_, that
you'll speak to me again before you----"

"Certainly I'll promise that, Mother!" Wolf said, quickly, hurt to the
soul. She read his tone aright, and came to lay her cheek against his
hair.

"Listen to me, Son. Since the day her mother gave her to me I've hoped
it would be this way! But there's nothing to be gained by hurry.
You----"

"But you would be glad, Mother! You do think that she might have me?"
poor Wolf said, eagerly and humbly. He was amazed to see tears brimming
his mother's eyes as she nodded and turned away.

Before either spoke again a rush in the hall announced the home-coming
girls, who entered the kitchen gasping and laughing with the cold.

"Whew!" panted Norma, catching Wolf's hands in her own half-frozen ones.
"I'm dying! Oh, Wolf, feel my nose!" She pressed it against his
forehead. "Oh, there's a wind like a knife--and look at my shoe--in I
went, right through the ice! Oh, Aunt Kate, let me stay here!" and
locking both slender arms about the older woman's neck, she dropped her
dark, shining head upon her breast like a storm-blown bird. "It's four
below zero in Broadway this minute," she added, looking sidewise under
her curling lashes at Wolf.

"Who said so?" Wolf demanded.

"The man I bought that paper from said so; go back and ask him. Oh, joy,
that looks good!" said Norma, eyeing the pudding that was now being
drawn, crackling, bubbling, and crisp, from the oven. "Rose and I fell
over the new lineoleum in the hall; I thought it was a dead body!" she
went on, cheerfully. "I came _down_ on my family feature with such a
noise that I thought the woman downstairs would be rattling the
dumb-waiter ropes again long before this!" She stepped to the
dumb-waiter, and put her head into the shaft. "What is it, darling?" she
called.

"Norma, behave yourself. It would serve you good and right if she heard
you," Mrs. Sheridan said, in a panic. "Go change your shoes, and come
and eat your dinner. I believe," her aunt added, pausing near her, "that
you _did_ skin your nose in the hall."

"Oh, heavens!" Norma exclaimed, bringing her face close to the dark
window, as to a mirror. "Oh, say it will be gone by Friday! Because on
Friday I'm going to have tea with Mrs. Liggett--her husband came in
to-day and asked me. Oh, the darling! He certainly is the--well, the
most--well, I don't know!----His voice, and the quiet, _quiet_ way----"

"Oh, for pity's sake go change your shoes!" Rose interrupted. "You are
the biggest idiot! I went into the store to get her," Rose explained,
"and I've had all this once, in the subway. How Mr. Liggett picks up his
glasses, on their ribbon, to read the titles of books----"

"Oh, you shut up!" Norma called, departing. And unashamed, when dinner
was finished, and the table cleared, she produced a pack of cards and
said that she was going to play _The Idle Year_.

"... and if I get it, it'll mean that the man I marry is going to look
exactly like Chris Liggett."

She did not get it, and played it again. The third time she interrupted
Wolf's slow and patient perusal of the _Scientific American_ to announce
that she was now going to play it to see if he was in love with Mary
Redding.

"Think how nice that would be, Aunt Kate, a double wedding. And if Wolf
or Rose died and left a lot of children, the other one would always be
there to take in whoever was left--you know what I mean!"

"You're the one Wolf ought to marry, to make it complete," Rose, who was
neatly marking a cross-stitch "R" on a crash towel, retaliated neatly.

"I can't marry my cousin, Miss Smarty."

"Oh, don't let a little thing like that worry you," Wolf said, looking
across the table.

"Our children would be idiots--perhaps they would be, anyway!" Norma
reminded him, in a gale of laughter. Her aunt looked up disapprovingly
over her glasses.

"Baby, don't talk like that. That's not a nice way to talk at all. Wolf,
you lead her on. Now, we'll not have any more of that, if you please. I
see the President is making himself very unpopular, Wolf--I don't know
why they all make it so hard for the poor man! Mrs. McCrea was in the
market this morning----"

"If I win this game, Rose, by this time next year," Norma said, in an
undertone, "you'll have----"

"Norma Sheridan!"

"Yes, Aunt Kate!"

"Do you want me to speak to you again?"

"No, ma'am!"

Norma subsided for a brief space, Rose covertly watching the game.
Presently the younger girl burst forth anew.

"Listen, Wolf, I'll bet you that I can get more words out of the letters
in Christopher than you can!"

Wolf roused himself, smiled, took out his fountain pen, and reached for
a sheet of paper. He was always ready for any sort of game. Norma,
bending herself to the contest, put her pencil into her mouth, and
stared fixedly at the green-shaded drop light. Rose, according to
ancient precedent, was permitted to assist evenly and alternately.

And Kate, watching them and listening, even while she drowsed over the
Woman's Page, decided that after all they were nothing but a pack of
children.




CHAPTER VI


To Leslie Melrose had come the very happiest time of her life. She had
always had everything she wanted; it had never occurred to her to
consider a fortunate marriage engagement as anything but a matter of
course, in her case. She was nineteen, she was "mad," in her own terms,
about Acton Liggett, and the engagement was the natural result.

But the ensuing events were far more delightful than Leslie had dreamed,
even in her happy dreams. All her world turned from its affairs of
business and intrigue and amusement to centre its attention upon her
little person for the moment, and to shower her with ten times enough
flattery and praise to turn a much steadier head. Presents rained upon
Leslie, and every one of them was astonishingly handsome and valuable;
newspapers clamoured for her picture, and wherever she went she was
immediately the focus for all eyes. That old Judge Lee should send her
some of his mother's beautiful diamonds; that Christopher and Alice
should order for her great crates of specially woven linen that were
worthy of a queen; that Emanuel Massaro, the painter of the hour, should
ask her to sit for him, were all just so much sheer pleasure added to
the sum total of her happiness in loving the man of her choice and
knowing herself beloved by him.

Leslie found herself, for the first time in her life, a person of
importance with Aunt Annie, too. The social leader found time to advise
her little niece in the new contingencies that were perpetually arising,
lent Leslie her private secretary for the expeditious making of lists or
writing of notes, and bullied her own autocratic modiste into promising
at least half of the trousseau. It was Annie who decided that the
marriage must be at a certain Park Avenue church, and at a certain hour,
and that the reception at the house must be arranged in a certain
manner, and no other. Hendrick or Judge Lee would give away the bride,
Christopher would be his brother's best man, and Leslie would be given
time to greet her guests and change her gown and be driven to Alice's
house for just one kiss before she and Acton went away.

Acton had begged for an Easter wedding, but Leslie, upon her aunt's
advice, held out for June. If the war was over by that time--and
everyone said it must be, for so hideous a combat could not possibly
last more than six or eight months--then they would go to England and
the Continent, but otherwise they might drift through Canada to the
Pacific Coast, and even come back by San Francisco and the newly opened
Canal.

Meanwhile, Annie entertained her niece royally and untiringly. Formal
dinners to old family friends must come first, but when spring arrived
Leslie was promised house parties and yachting trips more after her own
heart. The girl was so excited, so bewildered and tired, even after the
first two weeks, that she remained in bed until noon every day, and had
a young maid especially detailed to take her dressmaker's fittings for
her. But even so she lost weight, her cheeks burned and her eyes
glittered feverishly, and her voice took an unnaturally high key, her
speech a certain shallow quickness. Acton's undeviating adoration she
took with a pretty, spoiled acquiescence, and with old family friends
she was charmingly dutiful and deferential, but always with the air of
sparing a few glittering drops to their age and dulness from the
overflowing cup of her youth and beauty and power. But with her
grandmother and aunts she had a new attitude of self-confidence, and to
her girl friends she was no longer the old intimate and equal, but a
being who had, for the moment at least, left them all behind. She would
show them the new silver, the new linens, the engagement-time frocks
that were in themselves a trousseau, and wish that Doris or Marion or
Virginia were engaged, too; it was such fun! And with older women, the
débutantes of six and eight and ten years ago, who had failed of all
this glory, who could only listen sweetly to the chatter of plans and
honours, and look in uncomplaining admiration at the blazing ring,
Leslie was quite merciless. The number of times that she managed to
mention her age, the fact that Madame Modiste had tried to give her
fittings after three o'clock under the impression that she was a
schoolgirl, and the "craziness" of "little me" going over all the late
Mrs. Liggett's chests of silver and china, perhaps only these
unsuccessful candidates for matrimony could estimate. Certainly Leslie
herself was quite unconscious of it, and truly believed what she heard
on all sides, that she was "adorable," and "not changed one bit," and
"just as unconscious that there was anything else in the world but
Acton, as a little girl with her first doll."

Christopher and Alice, in the first years of their married life, had
built a home at Glen Cove, and Christopher made this his wedding
present to his brother. Necessarily, even the handsomest of country
homes, if ten years old, needs an almost complete renovation, and this
renovation Acton and Leslie, guided by a famous architect, began
rapturously to plan, reserving a beautiful apartment not far from Alice
in Park Avenue for autumn furnishing and refitting.

All these activities and interests kept the lovers busy, and kept them
apart indeed, or united them only in groups of other people. But Acton
could bring his pretty sweetheart home from a dinner now and then, and
come into the old Melrose house for a precious half hour of murmuring
talk, or could sometimes persuade her to leave a tea or a matinée early
enough to walk a few blocks with him.

In this fashion they slipped away from a box party one Friday afternoon,
and found themselves walking briskly northward, into the neighbourhood
of Alice's house. Leslie had had, for several days, a rather guilty
feeling in regard to this lovely aunt. It was really hard, rising at
noon, and trying to see and please so many persons, to keep in close
touch with the patient and uncomplaining invalid, who had to depend
wholly upon the generosity of those she loved for knowledge of them. So
Leslie was glad to suggest, and Acton glad to agree, that they had
better go in and see Aunt Alice for a few minutes.

As usual, Mrs. Liggett had company, although it proved only to be the
pretty Miss Sheridan who had called upon Leslie's grandmother on the
first day of that mysterious indisposition that had kept the old lady
bedridden almost ever since.

Alice looked oddly tired, but her eyes were shining brightly, and Norma
was charmingly happy and at ease. She jumped up to shake hands with
Acton with a bright comment that he was not in the _least_ like his
brother, and recalled herself to Leslie before offering her all sorts of
good wishes. Norma, hoping that it would some day occur, had indeed
anticipated this meeting with Leslie by a little mental consideration of
what she should say, but the effect was so spontaneous and sincere that
the four were enabled to settle down comfortably to tea, in a few
moments, like old friends.

"Miss Sheridan--or Norma, rather--and I have been having a perfectly
delicious talk," said Alice. "She loves Christina Rossetti, and she knew
the 'Hound of Heaven' by heart, and she has promised to send me a new
man's work that sounds delightful--what was it? Something about General
Booth?"

"If I haven't chattered you to death!" Norma said, penitentially. And
Leslie added: "Aunt Alice, you _do_ look tired! Not that talking poetry
ever would tire you!" she hastened to add, with a smile for Norma.

"No, I'm not--or rather, I was, but I feel wonderfully!" Alice said.
"Pour the tea, Kitten. What have you two little adventurers been doing
with yourselves?"

"Mrs. Dupré's party--Yvette Guilbert," Leslie said. "She is quite too
wonderful!"

"I've always wanted to see her, and I've always known I would adore
her," Norma interpolated, dreamily.

Alice glanced at her quickly.

"Does she give another matinée, Leslie?"

"Two----" Leslie looked at Acton. "Is it two weeks from to-day?" she
questioned.

"I'll send you seats for it," Alice said, making a little note on her
ivory memoranda pages, as she nodded to Norma. The colour rushed into
Norma's face, and she bit her lip.

"But, Mrs. Liggett--honestly--I truly didn't mean--I only meant----" she
began to stammer, half laughing. Alice laid her hand upon Norma's
reassuringly.

"My dear, you know I don't think you hinted! But I want to do it. I
can't"--Alice said, smiling--"I can't do anything for little Miss
Aladdin here, and it gives me the greatest pleasure, now and then----"

"I want to tell you something about Mrs. Liggett," Acton said; "she's
got a grasping nature and a mean soul--you can see that! She's the
limit, all right!" He smiled down at her as he gave her her teacup, and
Leslie laughed outright. Acton was a person of few words, but when he
chose to talk, Leslie found his manner amusing. Christopher, coming up
to join them fifteen minutes later, said that from the noise they made
he had supposed at least fifty persons to be in his wife's room.

Did Norma, as she gave the master of the house her hand, have sudden
memory of all her recent absurd extravagances in his name--the games,
the surmises, the wild statements that had had Chris Liggett as their
inspiration? If she did, she gave no sign of it beyond the bright flush
with which she greeted her oldest acquaintance in this group.
Christopher sat down, content to be a listener and an onlooker, as he
sipped his tea, but Norma saw that his wife's look of white fatigue made
him uneasy, and immediately said that she must go.

He made no protest, but said that the car was at the door, and she must
let him send her home. Norma agreed, and Acton asked if he and Leslie
might not use it, too. The three departed in high spirits, Alice
detaining the radiant and excited Norma long enough to exact from her
the promise of another visit soon, and to send an affectionate message
to Mrs. Sheridan from "Miss Alice." Then they went down to the big car,
an exciting and delightful experience to Norma.

Leslie was left first, and Acton, pleading that he was already late for
another engagement, was dropped at his club. Then Norma had the car to
herself, and as it smoothly flew toward the humble doorway of the
Sheridans, could giggle, almost aloud, in her pleasure and exhilaration
at an afternoon that had gone without a single awkward minute, all
pleasant, harmonious, and vaguely flattering. And the wonderful Mrs.
Liggett had asked her to come soon again, and had made that delightful
suggestion about the concert. The name of Yvette Guilbert meant little
to Norma, but the thought that Alice Liggett really wanted to hold her
friendship was nothing less than intoxicating.

She looked out of the car, the streets were bare of snow now, there was
not a leaf showing in the park, and the ground was dark and unpromising.
But a cool, steady wind was blowing through the lingering twilight, men
were running after rolling hats, and at least the milliners' windows
were radiant with springtime bloom. Children were playing in Norma's
street, wrapped and muffled children, wild with joy to be out of doors
again, and a tiny frail little moon was floating in the opal sky just
above the grim line of roofs. Norma looked up at it, and the pure
blowing air touched her hot face, and her heart sang with the sheer joy
of living.




CHAPTER VII


Christopher had gone down to the door with his brother and the girls,
and had sent a glance up and down the quiet, handsome block, feeling in
the moving air what Norma felt, what all the city felt--the bold, wild
promise of spring. He turned back into the house with something like a
sigh; Acton and Leslie in their young happiness were somehow a little
haunting to-night.

The butler was starting upstairs with the papers; Christopher took them
from him, and went back to Alice's room with his eyes idly following the
headlines. The pretty apartment was somewhat disordered, and looked dull
and dark in the half light. Christopher walked to a window, and pushed
it open upon its railed balcony.

"Chris!" whispered his wife's voice, thick and dry in the gloom.

Aghast in the instant apprehension of something wrong, he sprang to her
couch, dropped to his knees, and put an arm about her.

"Alice! What is it, my darling?"

She struggled for speech, and he could see that her face was ashen.

"Chris--no, don't ring. Chris, _who is that girl_?"

Christopher touched the chain that flooded the couch with rosy light. He
bent in eager sympathy over his wife's relaxed form.

"Alice, what is it?" he asked, tenderly. "Don't worry, dear, don't try
to talk too fast! Just tell Chris what frightened you----"

Alice laughed wretchedly as she detached the fingers he had pressed
anxiously upon her forehead.

"No, I'm not feverish!" she assured him, holding tight to his hand. "But
I want you to tell me, Chris, I must know--and no matter what promise
you have given Mother--or given any one----"

"Now, now, now!" he soothed her. "I'll tell you anything, sweetheart,
only don't let yourself get so excited. Just tell me what it is, Alice,
and I'll do anything in the world for you, of course!"

"Chris," she said, swallowing with a dry throat, and sitting up with an
air of regaining self-control, "you must tell me. You know you can trust
me, you _know_----! That girl----"

"But _what_ girl--what are you talking about, dear? Do--do try to be
just a little clearer, and calmer----"

"Who"--said Alice, with a ghastly look, sweeping the hair back from her
damp forehead--"who is that Norma Sheridan?"

"Why, I told you, dear, that I don't know," her husband protested. "I
told you weeks ago, after your mother made that scene, the night of
Hendrick's speech, that I couldn't make head or tail of it!"

"Chris"--Alice was regarding him fixedly--"you _must_ know!"

"Dearest, couldn't your mother simply wish to befriend a girl whose
parents----"

Alice flung her loosened hair back, and at her gesture and her glance at
the little carafe on her table he poured her a glass of cold water.
Drinking it off, and raising herself in her cushions, she stretched her
hand to touch the chair beside her, and still without a word indicated
that he was to take it. With a face of grave concern Christopher sat
down beside her, holding her hands in both his own.

"Chris," she said, clearly and quickly, if with occasional catches of
breath, "the minute that girl came into the room I knew that--I knew
that _horror_ had come upon us all! I knew that she was one of us--one
of us Melroses, somehow----"

"Alice!" he said, pleadingly.

"But Mama," she said, with a keen look, "didn't tell you that?"

"She told me only what I told you that night, on my honour as a
gentleman! Alice, what makes you say what you do?"

"Ah, Chris," his wife cried, almost frantically, "look at her! _Look_ at
her! Why, her voice is Annie's, the same identical voice--she looks like
my father, like Theodore--she looks like us all! She and Leslie were so
much alike, as they sat there, in spite of the colouring, that I almost
screamed it at them! Surely--surely, you see it--everyone sees it!"

He stared at her, beginning to breathe a little quickly in his turn.

"By George!" she heard him whisper, as if to himself.

"Do you see it, Chris?" Alice whispered, almost fearfully.

"But--but----" He got up and walked restlessly to the window, and came
back to sit down again. "But there's a cousinship somewhere," he said,
sensibly. "There's no reason to suppose that the thing can't be
explained. I do think you're taking this thing pretty hard, my dear.
What can you possibly suppose? There might be a hundred girls----"

His voice fell. Alice was watching him expectantly.

"Mama felt it--saw it--as I do," she said. "You may be very sure that
Mama wouldn't have almost lost her mind, as she did, unless something
had given her cause!"

They looked at each other in silence, in the utter silence of the
lovely, cool-toned room.

"Alice," Chris said in a puzzled voice after awhile, "you suspect me of
keeping something from you. But on my honour you know all that your
mother told me--all that I know!"

"Oh, Chris," she said, with a sort of wail. "If I don't know more!"

Her husband's slow colour rose.

"How could you know more?" he asked, bewilderedly.

Alice was unhappily silent.

"Chris, if I tell you what I'm afraid of--what I fear," she said,
presently, after anxious thought, "will you promise me never, never to
speak of it--never even to think of it!--if it--if it proves not to be
true?"

"I don't have to tell you that, Alice," he said.

"No, of course you don't--of course you don't!" she echoed with a
nervous laugh. "I'll tell you what I think, Chris--what has been almost
driving me mad--and you can probably tell me a thousand reasons why it
can't be so! You see, I've never understood Mama's feverish distress
these last weeks. She's been to see me, she's done what had to be done
about Leslie's engagement, but she's not herself--you can see that!
Yesterday she began to cry, almost for nothing, and when I happened to
mention--or rather when I mentioned very deliberately--that Miss
Sheridan was coming here, she almost shrieked. Well, I didn't know what
to make of it, and even then I rather wondered----

"Even then," Alice began again, after a painful pause, and with her own
voice rising uncontrollably, "I suspected something. But not this! Oh,
Chris, if I'm wrong about this, I shall be on my knees for gratitude for
the rest of my life; I would die, I would die to have it just--just my
wretched imagination!--A thing like this--to us--the Melroses--who have
always been so straight--so respected!"

"Now, Alice--now, Alice!"

"Yes, I know!" she said, quickly. "I know!" And for a moment she lay
back quietly, stroking his hand. "Chris," she resumed, composedly, after
a moment, "you know the tragedy of Annie's life?"

Chris, taken by surprise, frowned.

"Why, yes, I suppose so," he admitted, unwillingly.

"Chris, did it ever occur to you that she might have had a child--by
that fiend?"

Chris looked at his wife a moment, and his eyes widened, and his mouth
twitched humorously.

"Oh, come now, Alice--come now!"

"You think it's folly!" she asked, eagerly.

"Worse!" he answered, briefly, his eyes smiling reproach.

Alice's whole tense body relaxed, and she stared at him with light
dawning in her eyes.

"Well, probably it is," she said, very simply.

"Of course it is," Chris said. "Now, you are dead tired, dear, and you
have let the thing mill about in your head until you can't see anything
normally. I confess that I don't understand your mother's mysterious
nervousness, but then I am free to say that I don't by any means always
understand your mother! You remember the pearl episode, and the time
that she had Annie and Hendrick cabling from Italy--because Hendrick
Junior had a rash! And then there was Porter--a boy nineteen years old,
and she actually had everyone guessing exactly what she felt toward
him----"

"Oh, Chris, no, she didn't! She simply felt that he was a genius, and he
hadn't a penny," Alice protested, reproachful and hurt.

"Well, she had him there at the house until his mother came after him,
and then, when he finally was sent abroad, she asked me seriously if I
thought two hundred dollars a month was enough for his musical
education!"

"Yes, I know!" Alice said, ruefully, shaking her head.

"Now this comes along," said Christopher, encouraged by the effect of
his words, "and you begin to fret your poor little soul with all sorts
of wild speculations. I wish to the Lord that your mother was a little
bit more trusting with her confidences, but when it all comes out it'll
prove to be some sister of your grandfather who married a tailor or
something, and left a line of pretty girls to work in Biretta's----"

"But, Chris, she reminded me so of Annie to-day I almost felt _sick_,"
Alice said, still frightened and dubious.

"Well, that merely shows that you're soft-hearted; it's no reflection on
Annie!" Chris said, giving her her paper, and opening his own. But
Alice did not open her paper.

A maid came in, and moved about noiselessly setting chairs and rugs in
order. Another soft light was lighted and the little square table set
before the fire. The cool fresh air drifted in at the half-open window,
and sent a delicate breath, from Alice's great bowl of freesia lilies,
through the peaceful room. The fire snapped smartly about a fresh log,
and Alice's great tortoise-shell cat came to make a majestic spring into
her lap.

"Chris--I'm so worried!" said his wife.

"As a matter of fact," said Christopher, quietly, after a while,
"did----Annie was very ill, I know, but was there--was there any reason
to suppose that there might have been--that such a situation as to-day's
might have arisen?"

Alice looked at him with apprehension dawning afresh.

"Oh, yes--that is, I believe so. I didn't know it then, of course."

"I never knew that," Christopher said, thoughtfully.

"Well, I didn't at the time, you know. It was--of course it was
sixteen--eighteen years ago," Alice said. And in a whisper she added,
"Chris, that girl is eighteen!"

Christopher pursed his lips to whistle, but made no sound, and looked
into the fire.

"You see I was only about thirteen or fourteen," Alice said. "I was
going to Miss Bennet's school, and we were all living in the Madison
Avenue house. Papa had been dead only a year, or less, for I remember
that Annie was eighteen, and wasn't going out much, because of mourning.
Theodore had been worrying Mama to death, and had left the house then,
and Mama was sending him and his wife money, I believe, but of course
lots of that was kept from me. Annie was terribly wild and excitable
then, always doing reckless things; I can remember when she and Belle
Duer dressed up as boys and had their pictures taken, and once they put
a matrimonial advertisement in the papers--of course they were just
silly--at least that was. But then she began to rave about this man
Müller----"

"The acrobat!" Christopher, who was listening intently, supplied.

"No, dearest! He was their riding master--I suppose that isn't much
better, really. But he was an extremely handsome man--really stunning.
Carry Winchester's mother forbade her taking any more lessons because
_she_ was so wild about him, and Annie told me once that that was why
Ida Burnett was popped into a boarding school. He was big, and dark, and
he had a slight foreign accent, and he was ever so much older than
Annie--forty, at least. She began to spend all her time at the riding
club; it used to make Mama wild--especially as Annie was so headstrong
and saucy about it! Poor Mama, I remember her crying and complaining!"

"And how long did this go on?" Christopher asked.

"Oh, weeks! Well, and then one hot day, just before Easter vacation it
was, I remember, I came home early from school with a headache, and when
I reached the upper hall I could hear Mama crying, and Annie shouting
out loud, and this Kate--this very same Kate Sheridan!--trying to quiet
Mama, and everything in an uproar! Finally I heard Annie sobbing--I was
frightened to death of course, and I sat down on the stairs that go up
to the nursery--and I heard Annie say something about being
eighteen--and she was eighteen the very day before; and she ran by me,
in her riding clothes, with the derby hat that girls used to wear then,
and her hair clubbed on her neck, and she ran downstairs, and I could
hear her crying, and saying to herself: 'I'll show them; I'll show
them!' And that was the last I saw of her," Alice finished sadly, "for
almost two years."

"She went out?" Christopher asked.

"Yes; she slammed the door. Mama fainted."

"Of course!"

"Oh, Chris," said his wife, half crying, "wasn't that enough to make any
one faint?--let alone Mama. Anyway, she was dreadfully ill, and they
rather shut me up about it, and told everyone that Annie had gone
abroad. We had been living very quietly, you know, and nobody cared much
what Annie did, then. And she really had gone abroad, she wrote Mama
from Montreal, and she had been married to Emil Müller in Albany. They
had taken a train there, and were married that same afternoon. They went
to London, and they were in Germany, and then--then it all broke up, you
know about that!"

"How much later was that?"

Alice considered.

"It was about Christmas time. Don't you remember that I went to your
mother, and Acton and I got measles? Mama was abroad then."

"And this Kate went with her?"

"Yes. That was--that was one of the things I was--just thinking about!
Annie wrote Mama that she was very ill, in Munich, and poor Mama just
flew. Müller had left her; indeed there was a woman and two quite big
girls that had a claim on him, and if Mama hadn't been so anxious to
shut it all up, she might have proved that he was a bigamist--but I
don't know that she was ever sure. Judge Lee put the divorce through for
Annie, and Mama took her to the Riviera and petted her, and pulled her
through. But all her hair came out, and for weeks they didn't think she
would live. She had brain fever. You see, Annie had had some money
waiting for her on her eighteenth birthday, and your own father, who was
her guardian, Chris, had given her the check--interest, it was, about
seven or eight thousand dollars. And he told her to open her own
account, and manage her own income, from then on. And we thought--Mama
and I--that in some way Müller must have heard of it. Anyway, she never
deposited the check, and when her money gave out he just left her."

"But what makes you think that her illness didn't commence--or wasn't
entirely--brain fever?"

"That she might have had a baby?" Alice asked, outright.

Christopher nodded, the point almost insufferably distasteful to him.

"Oh, I know it!" Alice said.

"You _know_ it?" the man echoed, almost in displeasure.

"Yes, she told me herself! But of course that was years later. At the
time, all I knew was that Kate Sheridan came home, and came to see me at
school, and told me that Mama and Annie were very well, but that Annie
had been frightfully sick, and that Mama wouldn't come back until Annie
was much stronger. As a matter of fact, it was nearly two
years--Theodore took me over to them a year from that following summer,
and then Annie stayed with some friends in England; she was having a
wonderful time! But years afterward, when little Hendrick was coming, in
fact, she was here one day, and she seemed to feel blue, and finally I
happened to say that if motherhood seemed so hard to a person like
herself, whose husband and whose whole family were so mad with joy over
the prospect of a baby, what on earth must it be to the poor girls who
have every reason to hate it. And she looked at me rather oddly, and
said: 'Ah, I know what _that_ is!' Of course I guessed right away what
she meant, and I said: 'Annie--not really!' And she said: 'Oh, yes, that
was what started my illness. I had been so almost crazy--so blue and
lonesome, and so sick with horror at the whole thing, that it all
happened too soon, the day after Mama and Kate got there, in fact!' And
then she burst out crying and said: 'Thank God it was that way! I
couldn't have faced _that_.' And she said that she had been too
desperately ill to realize anything, but that afterward, at Como, when
she was much better, she asked Mama about it, and Mama said she must
only be glad that it was all over, and try to think of it as a terrible
dream!"

"Well, there you are," said Chris, "she herself says that no child was
born!"

"Yes, but, Chris, mightn't it be that she didn't know?" Alice submitted,
timidly.

Her husband eyed her with a faint and thoughtful frown.

"It seems to me that that is rather a fantastic theory, dear! Where
would this child be all this time?"

"Kate" Alice said, simply.

"Kate!" he echoed, struck. And Alice saw, with a sinking heart, that he
was impressed. After a full moment of silence he said, simply: "You
think this is the child?"

"Chris," his wife cried, appealingly, "I don't say I think so! But it
occurred to me that it might be. I hope, with all my soul, that you
don't think so!"

"I'm afraid," he answered, thoughtfully, "that I do!"

Alice's eyes filled with tears, and she tightened her fingers in his
without speaking.

"The idea being," Christopher mused, "that Mrs. Sheridan brought the
baby home, and has raised her. That makes Miss Sheridan--Norma--the
child of Annie and that German blackguard!"

"I suppose so!" Alice admitted, despairingly.

"But why has it been kept quiet all this time!"

"Well, that," Alice said, "I don't understand. But this I _am_ sure of:
Annie hasn't the faintest suspicion of it! She supposes that the whole
thing ended with her terrible illness. She was only eighteen, and
younger and more childish even than Leslie is! Oh, Chris," said Alice,
her eyes watering, "isn't it horrible! To come to us, of all people!
Will everybody know?"

"Well, it all depends. It's a nasty sort of business, but I suppose
there's no help for it. How much does Hendrick know?"

"About Annie? Oh, everything that she does; I know that. Annie told him,
and Judge Lee told him about Müller and the divorce, or nullification,
or whatever it was! There was nothing left unexplained there. But if the
child lived, she didn't know that--only Mama did, and Kate. Oh, poor
Annie, it would kill her to have all that raked up now! Why Kate kept it
secret all these years----"

"I must say," Christopher exclaimed, "that----By George, I hate this
sort of thing! No help for it, I suppose. But if it gets out we shall
all be in for a sweet lot of notoriety. We shall just have to make terms
with these Sheridans, and keep our mouths shut. I didn't get the idea
that they were holding your mother up. I believe it's more that she
wants justice done; she would, you know, for the sake of the family. The
girl herself, this Norma, evidently hasn't been raised on any
expectations--probably knows nothing about it!"

"Oh, I'm sure of that!" Alice agreed, eagerly. "And if she has Melrose
blood in her, you may be sure she'll play the game. But, Chris, I can't
stand the uncertainty. Mama's coming to have luncheon with me to-morrow,
and I'm going to ask her outright. And if this Norma is really--what we
fear, what do you think we ought to do?"

"Well, it's hard to say. It's all utterly damnable," Christopher said,
distressed. "And Annie, who let us all in for it, gets off scot free! I
wish, since she let it go so long, that your mother had forgotten it
entirely. But, as it is, this child isn't, strictly speaking,
illegitimate. There was a marriage, and some sort of divorce, whether
Müller deceived Annie as to his being a bachelor or not!"

A maid stood in the doorway.

"Mrs. Melrose, Mrs. Liggett."

"Oh," Alice said, in an animated tone of pleasure, "ask her to come
upstairs!" But the eyes she turned to her husband were full of
apprehension. "Chris, here's Mama now! Shall we----? Would you dare?"

"Use your own judgment!" he had time to say hastily, before his wife's
mother came in.




CHAPTER VIII


Mrs. Melrose frequently came in to join Alice for dinner, especially
when she was aware, as to-night, that Christopher had an evening
engagement. She was almost always sure of finding Annie alone, and
enjoying the leisurely confidences that were crowded out of the daytime
hours.

She had had several weeks of nervous illness now, but looked better
to-night, looked indeed her handsome and comfortable self, as she
received Chris's filial kiss on her forehead, and bent to embrace her
daughter. Freda carried away her long fur-trimmed cloak, and she pushed
her veil up to her forehead, and looked with affectionate concern from
husband to wife.

"Now, Chris, I'm spoiling things! But I thought Carry Pope told me that
you were going to her dinner before the opera!"

"I'm due there at eight," he said, reassuringly. "And by the same token,
I ought to be dressing! But Alice and I have been loafing along here
comfortably, and I'd give about seven dollars to stay at home with my
wife!"

"He always says that!" Alice said, smilingly. "But he always has a nice
time; and then the next night he plays over the whole score, and tells
me who was there, and so I have it, too!"

Chris had walked to the white mantelpiece, and was lighting a
cigarette.

"Alice had that little protégée of yours here, to-day, Aunt Marianna,"
he said, casually.

There was no mistaking the look of miserable and fearful interest that
deepened instantly in the older woman's eyes.

"Miss Sheridan?" she said.

"Mama," Alice exclaimed, suddenly, clasping a warm hand over her
mother's trembling one, and looking at her with all love and
reassurance, "you know how Chris and I love you, don't you?"

Tears came into Mrs. Melrose's eyes.

"Of course I do, lovey," she faltered.

"Mama, you know how we would stand behind you--how anxious we are to
share whatever's worrying you!" Alice went on, pleadingly. "Can't
you--I'm not busy like Annie, or young like Leslie, and Chris is your
man of business, after all! Can't you tell us about it? Two heads--three
heads," said Alice, smiling through a sudden mist of tears, "are better
than one!"

"Why," Mrs. Melrose stammered, with a rather feeble attempt at
lightness, "have I been acting like a person with something on her mind?
It's nothing, children, nothing at all. Don't bother your dear, generous
hearts about it another second!"

And she looked from one to another with a gallant smile.

Chris eyed his wife with a faint, hopeless movement of the head, and
Alice correctly interpreted it to mean that the situation was worse
instead of better.

"You remember the night you sent for me, some weeks ago, Aunt Marianna?"
he ventured. Mrs. Melrose moistened her lips, and swallowed with a dry
throat, looking at him with a sort of alert defiance.

"I confess that I was all upset that night," she admitted, bravely. "And
to tell you children the truth, Kate Sheridan coming upon me so
unexpectedly----"

"Joseph quite innocently told me that evening that you had anticipated
her coming!" Christopher said, quietly, as she paused.

"Joseph was mistaken!" Mrs. Melrose said, warmly, with red colour
beginning to burn in her soft, faded old face. "Kate had been associated
with a terrible time in my life," she went on, almost angrily. "And it
was quite natural--or at least it seems so to me!--I don't know what
other people would feel, but to _me_----But what are you two
cross-examining me for?" she interrupted herself to ask, with a sudden
rush of tears, as Chris looked unconvinced, and Alice still watched her
sorrowfully. "Little do you know, either of you, what I have been
through----"

"Mama," entreated Alice, earnestly, "will you answer me one question? I
promise you that I won't ask another. You know how anxious we are only
to help you, to make everything run smoothly. You know what the family
is--to us. Don't you _see_ we are?" Alice asked suddenly, seeing that
the desire for sympathy and advice was rapidly breaking up the ice that
had chilled her mother's heart for long weeks. "Won't you tell me just
this--it's about Annie, Mama. When she was so ill in Munich. Was--was
her little baby born there?"

"Yes!" Mrs. Melrose whispered, with fascinated eyes fixed on her
daughter's face.

Alice, ashen faced, fell back against her pillows without speaking.

"Kate Sheridan brought the child home," Christopher stated, rather than
asked, very quietly. His mother-in-law looked at him apathetically.

"Kate--yes!"

"Does Annie know it, Mama?" Alice whispered, after a silence.

"Annie? Oh, my God, no!" The mother's voice rose almost to a wail. "Oh,
Chris--Alice--if you love me, Annie must not know! So proud, so happy;
and she would never bear it! I know her--I know her! She would kill
herself before----"

"Darling, you must be quiet!" Alice said, commandingly. "No one shall
know it. What we do for this child shall be done for--well, our cousin.
Chris will help you manage everything, and no one shall ever suspect it
from me. It will all work out right, you'll see. Other people aren't
watching us, as we always think they are; it's nobody's business if a
cousin of ours suddenly appears in the family. No one would dare whisper
one word against the Melroses. Only be quiet, Mama darling, and don't
worry. Now that we know it, we will never, never allude to it again,
will we, Chris? You can trust us."

Mrs. Melrose had sunk back into her chair; her face was putty-coloured,
beads of water stood on her forehead.

"Oh, the relief--the relief!" she kept whispering, as she clung to
Alice's hand. "Alice, for the sake of the name--dear--for all our
sakes!----"

"Now, if you two girls will take my advice!" Christopher suggested,
cheerfully, "you'll stop talking about all this, and let it wait until
to-morrow. Then we'll consult, and see just what proposition we can make
to little Miss Sheridan, and what's best to be done. Alice, why don't
you go over that wedding list of Leslie's with your mother? And ring for
dinner. I'm going to dress."

"We will!" Alice agreed, sensibly. "As a family we've always faced
things courageously. We're fighters--we Melroses--and we'll stand
together!"




CHAPTER IX


This was on Friday, and it was on the following Monday that Wolf and
Rose Sheridan came home to find news awaiting them. The day before had
been surprisingly sunny and sweet, and Wolf and Harry Redding had taken
the girls to Newark, where Wolf's motor-car had been stored all winter,
and they had laughed, and joked, and chattered all the way like the
care-free young things they were. Mrs. Sheridan, urged to join them, had
pleaded business: she had promised old Mrs. Melrose to go and see her.
So she had left them at the church door, after Mass, and they had gone
their way rejoicing in sunshine and warm breezes, a part of the
streaming holiday crowds that were surging and idling along the drying
pavements.

Wolf was neither of an age nor type for piety, but to-day he had prayed
that this little Norma kneeling beside him, with the youth and fire and
audacity shining in her face even while she prayed, might turn that same
mysterious and solemn smile upon him again some day, as his wife. And
all day long, as she danced along by his side, as she eagerly debated
the question of luncheon, as she enslaved the aged coloured man in the
garage, the new thrill of which he had only recently become so
pleasantly conscious, stirred in his heart, and whatever she touched, or
said, or looked, was beautified almost beyond recognition.

He had thought, coming home Monday night, that he and she would take a
little walk, in the lingering dusk of the cool spring evening, and
perhaps see the twelfth installment of "The Stripe-Faced Terror," which
was playing in the near-by moving-picture house.

But he found her in a new mood, almost awed with an unexpected ecstasy
in which he had no part--would never have a part. She and Aunt Kate had
been to see Mrs. Melrose again.

"And, Wolf, what do you think! They want me to go live there--with the
Liggetts, to help with lists and things for Leslie's wedding. Mrs.
Melrose kissed me, Wolf, and said--didn't she, Aunt Kate?--that I must
try to feel that I belong to them; and she was so sweet--she put her arm
about me, and said that I must have some pretty clothes! And the car is
coming for me on Wednesday; isn't it like a dream? Oh, Rose, if I'm
thankful enough! And I'm to come back here for dinner once a week, and
of course you and Rose are to come there! Oh, Rose, but I wish it was us
both--I wish it was you, you're so good!"

"I wouldn't have it, Norma," Rose said, in her honest, pleasant voice.
"You know I'd feel like a fool."

"Oh, but I am so happy!" And Norma, who had gotten into Aunt Kate's lap,
as the marvellous narrative progressed, dug her face into Aunt Kate's
motherly soft shoulder, and tightened her arms about her neck, and cried
a little, for sheer joy.

But Wolf said almost nothing, and when he went to wash his hands for
supper he went slowly, and found himself staring absently at the towel,
and stopping short in the hall, still staring. He seemed himself at
dinner, and his mother, at first watching him anxiously, could resume
her meal, and later, could fall asleep, in the confident hope that it
would all come right, after all. But Wolf slipped from the house after
awhile, and walked the streets until almost dawn.

It was almost dawn, too when the old mistress of the Melrose mansion
fell asleep. She had called Regina more than once, she had tried the
effect of reading, and of hot milk, and of a cold foot-bath. But still
the crowded, over-furnished room was filled with ghosts, and still she
watched them, pleaded with them, blamed them.

"I've done all I could!" she whispered at last, into the heavy dark
before the dawn. "It isn't my fault if they think she's Annie's child!
I've never said so--it was Alice and Chris who said so. Annie and Leslie
will never know anything more, and the girl herself need never know
anything at all. Perhaps, as Kate said yesterday, it will all work out
right, this way! At least it's all we can do now!"




CHAPTER X


So it came about quite naturally that the little unknown cousin of the
Melroses was made a familiar figure in their different family groups,
and friends of the house grew accustomed to finding pretty little Norma
Sheridan lunching with Leslie, reading beside Alice's couch in the late
summer afternoons, or amusing and delighting the old head of the family
in a hundred charming ways. Norma called Mrs. Melrose "Aunt Marianna"
now, as Chris and Acton did. She did not understand the miracle, it
remained a marvel still, but it was enough that it continued to deepen
and spread with every enchanted hour.

She had longed--what girl in Biretta's Bookstore did not?--to be rich,
and to move and have her being "in society." And now she had her wish, a
hundred times fulfilled, and of course she was utterly and absolutely
happy.

That is, except for the momentary embarrassments and jealousies and
uncertainties, and for sometimes being bored, she thought that she might
consider herself happy. And there were crumpled rose-leaves everywhere!
she reminded herself sternly. She--Norma Sheridan--could spend more
money upon the single item of shoes, for example, than Miss Smith, head
of Biretta's Bookshop, could earn in a whole long year of hot months and
cold, of weary days and headachy days.

That part of it was "fun", she admitted to herself. The clothes were
fun, the boxes and boxes and boxes that came home for her, the
petticoats and stockings, the nightgowns heavy with filet lace, and the
rough boots for tramping and driving, and the silk and satin slippers
for the house. Nothing disappointing there! Norma never would forget the
ecstasies of those first shopping trips with Aunt Marianna. Did she want
them?--the beaded bag, the woolly scarf, the little saucy hat, were all
to be sent to Miss Sheridan, please. Norma lost her breath, and laughed,
and caught it again and lost it afresh. They had so quickly dropped the
little pretence that she was to make herself useful, these wonderful and
generous Melroses; they had so soon forgotten everything except that she
was Leslie's age, and to be petted and spoiled as if she had been
another Leslie!

And now, after more than half a year, she knew that they liked her; that
all of them liked her in their varying degrees. Old Mrs. Melrose and
Alice--Mrs. Christopher Liggett--were most warmly her champions,
perhaps, but Leslie was too unformed a character to be definitely
hostile, and the little earlier jealousies and misunderstandings were
blown away long ago, and even the awe-inspiring Annie had shown a real
friendliness of late. Acton Liggett and Hendrick von Behrens were always
kind and admiring, and Norma had swiftly captivated Annie's little boys.
But of them all, she still liked Chris Liggett the best, and felt
nearest Chris even when he scolded her, or hurt her feelings with his
frank advice. And she knew that Chris thoroughly liked her, in spite of
the mistakes that she was continually making, and the absurd ways in
which her ignorance and strangeness still occasionally betrayed her.

It had been a time full of mistakes, of course. Chris often told her
that she had more brains in her little finger than most of the girls of
her set had in their whole bodies, but that had not saved her. If she
was pretty, they were all pretty, too. If she wore beautiful clothes,
they wore clothes just as beautiful, and with more assurance. If her wit
was quick, and her common sense and human experience far greater than
theirs, these were just the qualities they neither needed nor trusted.
They spoke their own language, the language of youthful arrogance and
ignorance, the language of mutual compliments and small personalities,
and Norma could not speak this tongue any more than she could join them
when they broke easily into French or German or Italian. She could ride,
because she was not afraid of the mild-mannered cobs that were used at
the riding school and in the park, but she knew little of correct
posture and proper handling of reins. She could swim, as Wolf had taught
her, in the old river years ago, but she knew nothing of the terms and
affectations of properly taught swimming. When she went to see Aunt
Kate, she was almost ashamed of the splendour of her clothing and the
utter luxury of the life she led, but with Leslie and her friends she
often felt herself what perhaps they thought her, an insignificant
little poor relation of the Melroses, who had appeared from nobody knew
where, and might return unchallenged at any moment to her original
obscurity.

This phase of the new life was disappointing, and Norma realized herself
that she spent a quite disproportionate amount of time in thinking about
it. Wasn't it enough, she would ask herself impatiently, to be one of
them at all, to see one's picture in the fashionable weeklies, as a
member of the family, at the Liggett-Melrose wedding; to have clothes
and motor-cars, and a bedroom that was like a picture; to know Newport
at first-hand; to have cruised for a week in the Craigies' yacht, and
have driven to Quebec and back in the Von Behrens' car? A year ago, she
reminded herself, it would have seemed Paradise to have had even a
week's freedom from the bookshop; now, she need never step into
Biretta's again!

But it was not enough, and Norma would come impatiently to the end of
her pondering with the same fretted sense of dissatisfaction. It was not
enough to be tremulously praised by old Aunt Marianna, to be joked by
Chris, greeted by Alice, his wife, with a friendly smile. Norma wanted
to belong to this life, to be admired and sought by Leslie, rather than
endured; to have the same easy familiarity with Duers, and Alexanders,
and Rutgers that Leslie had.

As was quite natural, she and Leslie had eyed each other, from the very
beginning, somewhat as rivals. But Leslie, even then preparing for her
marriage, had so obviously held all the advantages, that her vague
resentment and curiosity concerning the family's treatment of the
unknown newcomer were brief. If Aunt Alice liked Norma to come in and
talk books and write notes, if Chris chose to be gallant, if Grandma
lavished an unusual affection upon this new protégée, well, it robbed
Leslie of nothing, after all.

But with Norma it was different. She was brought into sharp contact with
another girl, only slightly her senior, who had everything that this new
turn of fortune had given Norma herself, and a thousand times more.
Norma saw older women, the important and influential matrons of the
social world, paying court to the promised wife of Acton Liggett. Norma
knew that while Alice and Chris were always attentive to her own little
affairs, the solving of Leslie's problems they regarded as their own
sacred obligation. Norma had hours and hours of this new enchanting
leisure to fill; she could be at anybody's beck and call. But Leslie,
she saw, was only too busy. Everybody was claiming Leslie; she was
needed in forty places at once; she must fly from one obligation to
another, and be thanked for sparing just a few minutes here and there
from her crowded days.

Mrs. Melrose had immediately made Norma an allowance, an allowance so
big that when Norma first told Aunt Kate about it, it was with a sense
of shame. Norma had her check-book, and need ask nobody for spending
money. More than that her generous old patron insisted that she use all
the family charge accounts freely: "You mustn't think of paying in any
shop!" said Aunt Marianna and Aunt Alice, earnestly.

But Leslie was immensely rich in her own right. The hour in which Norma
realized this was one of real wretchedness. Chris was her innocent
informant.

It was only two or three days before the wedding, a warm day of rustling
leaves and moving shadows, in late May. The united families were still
in town, but plans for escape to the country were made for the very day
after the event. Norma had been fighting a little sense of hurt pride
because she was not to be included among Leslie's wedding attendants.
She knew that Aunt Marianna had suggested it to Leslie, some weeks
before, and that the bride had quite justifiably reminded her
grandmother that the eight maids, the special maid and matron of honour,
and the two little pages, had all been already asked to perform their
little service of affection, and that a readjustment now would be
difficult. So Norma had been excluded from the luncheons, the
discussions of frocks and bouquets, and the final exciting rehearsals in
the big Park Avenue church.

She had chanced to be thinking of all these things on the day when Chris
made a casual allusion to "needing" Leslie.

"The poor kid has got a stupid morning coming to-morrow, I'm afraid!" he
had said, adding, in answer to Norma's raised eyebrows, "Business. She
has to sign some papers, and alter her will--and I want all that done
before they go away!"

"Has Leslie a will?" Norma had asked.

"My child, what did you suppose she had? Leslie inherited practically
all of her Grandfather Melrose's estate. At least, her father, Theodore,
did, and Leslie gets it direct through him. Of course your Aunt Annie
got her slice, and my wife hers, but the bulk was left to the son. Poor
Teddy! he didn't get much out of it. But during her minority the
executors--of which I happen to be one--almost doubled it for Leslie.
And to-morrow Judge Lee and I have got to go over certain matters with
her."

He had been idling at the piano, while Alice dozed in the heat, and
Norma played with a magazine. Now he had turned back to his music, and
Norma had apparently resumed her reading. But she really had been shaken
by a storm of passionate jealousy.

Jealousy is in its nature selfish, and the old Norma of Aunt Kate's
little group had not been a selfish girl. But Norma had had a few weeks
now of a world governed by a different standard. There was no necessity
here, none of the pure beauty of sacrifice and service and
insufficiency. This was a world of superfluities, a standard of excess.
To have merely meals, clothing, comfort, and ease was not enough here.
All these must be had in superabundance, and she was the best woman and
the happiest who had gowns she could not wear, jewels lying idle, money
stored away in banks, and servants standing about uselessly for hours,
that the momentary needs of them might be instantly met.

The poison of this creed had reached Norma, in spite of herself. She was
young, and she had always been beloved in her own group for what she
honestly gave of cheer and service and friendship. It hurt her that
nobody needed what she could give now, and she hated the very memory of
Leslie's wedding.

But when that was over, Mrs. Melrose had taken her to Newport, whither
Alice was carefully moved every June. Leslie was gone now, and Norma
free from pricking reminders of her supremacy, and as old friends of
Mrs. Melrose began to include her in the summer's merrymaking, she had
some happy times. But even here the cloven hoof intruded.

Norma had always imagined this group as being full of friendly women and
admiring men, as offering her a hundred friendships where the old life
had offered one. She discovered slowly, and with pained surprise, that
although there were plenty of girls, they were not especially anxious
for intimacy with her, and that the men she met were not, somehow,
"real." They were absorbed in amusement, polo and yachting, they moved
about a great deal, and they neither had, nor desired to have, any
genuine work or interest in life. She began to see Leslie's wisdom in
making an early and suitable marriage. As a matron, Leslie was
established; she could entertain, she had dignified duties and
interests, and while Norma felt awkward and bashful in asking young men
to dine with Aunt Marianna, Acton brought his friends to his home, and
Leslie had her girl friends there, and the whole thing was infinitely
simpler and pleasanter.




CHAPTER XI


Norma had indeed chanced to make one girl friend, and one of whom Leslie
and Alice, and even Annie, heartily approved. Caroline, the
seventeen-year-old daughter of the Peter Craigies, was not a débutante
yet, but she would be the most prominent, because the richest, of them
all next winter. Caroline was a heavy-lidded, slow-witted girl, whose
chief companions in life had been servants, foreign-born governesses,
and music-masters. Norma had been seated next to her at the
international tennis tournament, and had befriended the squirming and
bashful Caroline from sheer goodness of heart. They had criticized the
players, and Caroline had laughed the almost hysteric, shaken laugh that
so worried her mother, and had blurted confidences to Norma in her
childish way.

The next day there had been an invitation for Norma to lunch with
Caroline, and Mrs. von Behrens had promptly given another luncheon for
both girls. Norma was pleased, for a few weeks, with her first social
conquest, but after that Caroline became a dead weight upon her. She
hated the flattery, the inanities, the utter dulness of the great
Craigie mansion, and she began to have a restless conviction that time
spent with Caroline was time lost.

The friendship had cost her dear, too. Norma hated, even months later to
remember just what she had paid for it.

In August a letter from Rose had reached her at Newport, announcing
Rose's approaching marriage. Harry Redding's sister Mary was engaged to
a most satisfactory young man of Italian lineage, one Joe Popini, and
Mrs. Redding would hereafter divide her time between the households of
her daughter and her son. Harry, thus free to marry, had persuaded Rose
to wait no longer; the event was to be on a Monday not quite two weeks
ahead, and Norma was please, _please_, PLEASE to come down as soon as
she could.

Norma had read this letter with a sensation of pain at her heart. She
felt so far away from them nowadays; she felt almost a certain
reluctance to dovetail this life of softness and perfume and amusement
in upon the old life. But she would go. She would go, of course!

And then she had suddenly remembered that on the Monday before Rose's
wedding, the Craigies' splendid yacht was to put to sea for a four- or
five-days' cruise, and that Caroline had asked her to go--the only other
young person besides the daughter of the house. And great persons were
going, visiting nobility from England, a young American Croesus and his
wife, a tenor from the Metropolitan. Annie had been delighted with this
invitation; even Leslie, just returned from California and Hawaii, had
expressed an almost surprised satisfaction in the Craigies'
friendliness.

If they got back Friday night, then Norma could go down to the city
early Saturday morning, and have two days with Rose and Aunt Kate. But
if the yacht did not return until Saturday--well, even then there would
be time. She and Rose could get through a tremendous lot of talking in
twenty-four hours. And the voyage certainly would not be prolonged over
Saturday, for had not Mrs. Craigie said, in Norma's hearing, that
Saturday was the very latest minute to which she could postpone the
meeting for the big charity lawn party?

So Norma and the enslaved Caroline continued to plan for their sea trip,
and Norma commissioned Chris to order Rose's wedding present at
Gorham's.

Mrs. von Behrens had been a trifle distant with the newcomer in the
family until now, but the day before the cruise began she extended just
a little of her royal graciousness toward Norma. Like Leslie, Norma
admired her Aunt Annie enormously, and hungered for her most casual
word.

"You've plenty of frocks, Kiddie?" asked Annie. "One uses them up at the
rate of about three a day!"

"Oh!"--Norma widened her innocent eyes--"I've a wardrobe trunk full of
them: white skirts and white shoes and hats!"

"Well, I didn't suppose you had them tied in a handkerchief!" Annie had
responded, with her quiet smile. "See if that fits you!"

They had been up in Mrs. von Behrens's big bedroom, where that lady was
looking at a newly arrived box of gowns. "That" was the frail,
embroidered coat of what Norma thought the prettiest linen suit she had
ever seen.

"It's charming on you, you little slender thing," Annie had said. "The
skirt will be too long; will you pin it, Keating? And see that it goes
at once to my mother's house."

Keating had pinned, admired. And Norma, turning herself before the
mirror, with her eyes shy with pleasure and gratitude, had known that
she was gaining ground.

So they had started radiantly on the cruise. But after the first few
miraculous hours of gliding along beneath the gay awnings that had all
been almost astonishingly disappointing, too. Caroline, to begin with,
was a dreadful weight upon her young guest. Caroline for breakfast,
luncheon, and dinner; Caroline retiring and rising, became almost
hateful. Caroline always wanted to do something, when Norma could have
dreamed and idled in her deck chair by the hour. It must be deck golf or
deck tennis, or they must go up and tease dignified and courteous
Captain Burns, "because he was such an old duck," or they must harass
one or two of the older people into bridge. Norma did not play bridge
well, and she hated it, and hated Caroline's way of paying for her
losses almost more than paying them herself.

Norma could not lie lazily with her book, raising her eyes to the
exquisite beauty of the slowly tipping sea, revelling in coolness and
airiness, because Caroline, fussing beside her, had never read a book
through in her life. The guest did not know, even now, that Caroline had
been a mental problem for years, that Caroline's family had consulted
great psycho-analysts about her, and had watched the girl's
self-centredness, her odd slyness, her hysteric emotions, with deep
concern. She did not know, even now, that the Cragies were anxious to
encourage this first reaching out, in Caroline, toward a member of her
own sex, and that her fancies for members of the opposite sex--for
severely indifferent teachers, for shocked and unresponsive
chauffeurs--were among the family problems, a part of the girl's
unfortunate under-development. Caroline's family was innocently
surprised to realize that her mind had not developed under the care of
maids who were absorbed in their own affairs, and foreigners who would
not have been free to attend her had they not been impecunious and
unsuccessful in more lucrative ways. They had left her to Mademoiselles
and Fräuleins quite complacently, but they did not wish her to be like
these too-sullen or too-vivacious ladies.

So they welcomed her friendship with Norma, and Caroline's passionate
desire to be with her friend was not to find any opposition on the part
of her own family. Little Miss Sheridan had an occasional kindly word
from Caroline's mother, a stout woman, middle-aged at thirty-five, and
good-natured smiles from Caroline's father, a well-groomed young man.
And socially, this meant that the Melroses' young protégée was made.

But Norma did not realize all this. She only knew that all the charm and
beauty of the yacht were wasted on her. Everyone ate too much, talked
too much, played, flirted, and dressed too much. The women seldom made
their appearance until noon; in the afternoons there was bridge until
six, and much squabbling and writing of checks on the forward deck, with
iced drinks continually being brought up from the bar. At six the women
loitered off to dress for dinner, but the men went on playing for
another half hour. The sun sank in a blaze of splendour; the wonderful
twilight fell; but the yacht might have been boxed up in an armoury for
all that her passengers saw of the sea.

After the elaborate dinner, with its ices and hot rolls, its warm wines
and chilled champagne, cards began again, and unless the ocean was so
still that they might dance, bridge continued until after midnight.

Norma's happiest times had been when she arose early, at perhaps seven,
and after dressing noiselessly in their little bathroom, crept upstairs
without waking Caroline. Sunshine would be flooding the ocean, or
perhaps the vessel would be nosing her way through a luminous fog--but
it was always beautiful. The decks, drying in the soft air, would be
ordered, inviting, deserted. Great waves of smooth water would flow
evenly past, curving themselves with lessening ripples into the great
even circle of the sea. A gentle breeze would stir the leaves of the
potted plants on the deck and flap the fringes of the awnings.

Norma, hanging on the railing, would look down upon a group of maids and
stewards laughing and talking on the open deck below. These were happy,
she would reflect, animated by a thousand honest emotions that never
crept to the luxurious cabins above. They would be waiting for
breakfast, all freshly aproned and brushed, all as pleased with the
_Seagirl_ as if they had been her owners.

On the fifth day, Friday, she had been almost sick with longing to hear
some mention of going back. Surely--surely, she reasoned, they had all
said that they must get back on Friday night! If the plan had changed,
Norma had determined to ask them to run into harbour somewhere, and put
her on shore. She was so tired of Caroline, so tired of wasting time, so
headachy from the heavy meals and lack of exercise!

Late on Friday afternoon some idle remark of her hostess had assured her
that the yacht would not make Greble light until Monday. They were
ploughing north now, to play along the Maine coast; the yachting party
was a great success, and nobody wanted to go home.

Norma, goaded out of her customary shyness, had pleaded her cousin's
marriage. Couldn't they run into Portland--or somewhere?--and let her go
down by train? But Caroline had protested most affectionately and
noisily against this, and Caroline's mother said sweetly that she
couldn't think of letting Norma do that alone--Annie von Behrens would
never forgive her! However, she would speak to Captain Burns, and see
what could be done. Anyway, Mrs. Craigie had finished, with her
comfortable laugh, Norma had only to tell her cousin that she was out
with friends on their yacht, and they had been delayed. Surely that was
excuse enough for any one?

It was with difficulty that Norma had kept the tears out of her eyes.
She had not wanted an excuse to stay away from Rose's wedding. Her heart
had burned with shame and anger and helplessness. She could hardly
believe, crying herself to sleep on Friday night, that two whole days
were still to spare before Monday, and that she was helpless to use
them. Her mind worked madly, her thoughts rushing to and fro with a
desperation worthy an actual prisoner.

On Saturday evening, after a day of such homesickness and
heavy-heartedness as she had never known before in her life, she had
realized that they were in some port, lying a short half mile from
shore.

It was about ten o'clock, warm and star-lighted; there was no moon.
Norma had slipped from the deck, where Caroline was playing bridge, and
had gone to the lowered gang-plank. Captain Burns was there, going over
what appeared to be invoices, with the head steward.

"Captain," Norma had said, her heart pounding, "can't you put me on
shore? I must be in New York to-morrow--it's very important! If I get a
coat, will you let me go in when you go?"

He had measured her with his usual polite, impersonal gaze.

"Miss Sheridan, I really could not do it, Miss! If it was a telegram, or
something of that sort----But if anything was to happen to you, Miss, it
would be--it really would be most unfortunate!"

Norma had stood still, choking. And in the starlight he had seen the
glitter of tears in her eyes.

"Couldn't you put it to Mrs. Craigie, Miss? I'm sure she'd send
someone--one of the maids----"

But Norma shook her head. It would anger Caroline, and perhaps
Caroline's mother, and Annie, too, to have her upset the cruise by her
own foolish plans. There was no hope of her hostess's consent.
What!--send a girl of eighteen down to New York for dear knows what
fanciful purpose, without a hint from parent or guardian? Mrs. Craigie
knew the modern girl far too well for that, even if it had not been
personally extremely inconvenient to herself to spare a maid. They were
rather short of maids, for two or three of them had been quite ill.

The launch had put off, with Captain Burns in the stern. Norma had stood
watching it, with her heart of lead. Oh, to be running away--flying--on
the train--in the familiar streets! They could forgive her later--or
never----

"Norma, aren't you naughty?" Caroline had interrupted her thoughts, and
had slipped a hand through her arm. "Buoso is going to sing--do come in!
My dear, you know that last hand? Well, we made it----!"

The next two days were the slowest, the hardest, the bitterest of
Norma's life. She felt that nobody had ever had to bear so aching a
heart as hers, as the most beautiful yacht in the world skimmed over the
blue ocean, and the sun shone down on her embroidered linen suit, and
her white shoes, and the pearl ring that Caroline had given her for her
birthday.

What were they doing at Aunt Kate's? What were they saying as the hours
went by? At what stage was the cake--and the gown? Was Rose really to be
married to-morrow--to-day?

In New Brunswick she had managed to send a long wire, full of the
disappointment and affection and longing she truly felt, and after that
she had been happier. But it was a very subdued little Norma who had
come quietly into Aunt Kate's kitchen three weeks later, and had
relieved her over-charged heart with a burst of tears on Aunt Kate's
shoulder.

Aunt Kate had been kind, kind as she always was to the adored
foster-child. And Norma had stayed to dinner, and made soft and penitent
eyes at Wolf until the agonized resolutions of the past lonely months
had all melted out of his heart again, and they had all gone over to
Rose's, for five minutes of kissing and crying, before the big car came
to carry Norma away.

So the worst of that wound was healed, and life could become bright and
promising to Norma once more. Autumn was an invigorating season, anyway,
full of hope and enchantment, and Caroline Craigie, by what Norma felt
to be a special providence, was visiting her grandmother in Baltimore
for an indefinite term. The truth was that there was a doctor there
whose advice was deemed valuable to Caroline, but Norma did not know
that. Norma did not know the truth, either, about Mrs. von Behrens's
sudden graciousness toward her, but it made her happy. Annie had become
friendly and hospitable toward the newcomer in the family for only one
reason. As a social dictator, she was accustomed to be courted and
followed by scores of women who desired her friendship for the prestige
it gave them. Annie was extremely autocratic in this respect, and could
snub, chill, and ignore even the most hopeful aspirants to her favour,
with the ease of long practice. It made no difference to Annie that
dazzling credentials were produced, or that past obscurity was more than
obliterated by present glory.

"One truly must be firm," Annie frequently said. "It devolves upon a few
of us, as an actual duty, to see that society is maintained in its true
spirit. Let the bars down once----!"

Norma, a negligible factor in Annie's life when she first appeared, had
quite innocently become a problem during that first summer. While not a
Melrose, she was a member of the Melrose family, making her home with
one of the daughters of the house. Annie might ignore Norma, but there
were plenty of women, and men, too, who saw in the girl a valuable
social lever. To become intimate with little Miss Sheridan meant that
one might go up to her, at teas and dinners, while she was with Mrs.
Melrose, or young Mrs. Liggett, or even Mrs. von Behrens herself, in a
casual, friendly manner that indicated, to a watching world, a
comfortable footing with the family. Norma was consequently selected
for social attention.

Annie saw this immediately, and when all the families were settled in
town again, she decided to take Norma's social training in hand, as she
had done Leslie's, and make sure that no undesirable cockle was sown
among the family fields. She would have done exactly the same if Norma
had been the least attractive of girls, but Norma fancied that her own
qualities had won Annie's reluctant friendship, and was accordingly
pleased.




CHAPTER XII


Eight months later, in the clear sunshine of a late autumn morning, a
slender young woman came down the steps of the Melrose house, after an
hour's call on the old mistress, and turned briskly toward Fifth Avenue.
In figure, in carriage, and even in the expression of her charming and
animated face, she was different from the girl who had come to that same
house to make a call with Aunt Kate, on the day after the big blizzard,
yet it was the same Norma Sheridan who nodded a refusal to the driver of
the big motor-car that was waiting, and set off by herself for her walk.

The old Norma, straight from Biretta's Bookshop, had been pretty in
plain serge and shabby fur. But this Norma--over whose soft thick belted
coat a beautiful silver-fox skin was linked, whose heavy, ribbed silk
hose disappeared into slim, flat, shining pumps that almost caressed the
slender foot, whose dark hair had the lustre that comes from intelligent
care, and whose handsome little English hat was the only one of its
special cut in the world--was a conspicuously attractive figure even in
a world of well-groomed girls, and almost deserved to be catalogued as a
beauty. From the hat to the shoes she was palpably correct, and Norma
knew, and never could quite sufficiently revel in the knowing, that the
blouse and the tailored skirt that were under the coat were correct,
too, and that under blouse and skirt were cobwebby linens and perfumed
ribbons and sheerest silks that were equally perfect in their way.
Leslie's bulldog, pulling on his strap, kept her moving rapidly, and
girl and dog exacted from almost all the passers-by that tribute of
glances to which Norma was now beginning to be accustomed.

She was walking to Mrs. von Behrens's after an unusually harmonious
luncheon with old Mrs. Melrose. This was one of Norma's happy times, and
she almost danced in the crisp November air that promised snow even now.
Leslie had asked her to come informally to tea; Annie had sent a message
that she wished to see Norma; and Alice, who, like all invalids, had
dark moods of which only her own household was aware, had been her
nicest self for a week. Then Christopher was coming home to-night, and
Norma had missed him for the three weeks he had been away, duck-shooting
in the South, and liked the thought that he was homeward bound.

She found Leslie with Annie to-day, in Annie's big front bedroom. Leslie
was in a big chair by the bed where Annie, with some chalky preparation
pasted in strips on those portions of her face that were most inclined
to wrinkle, was lying flat. Her hair, rubbed with oils and packed in
tight bands, was entirely invisible, and over her arms, protruding from
a gorgeous oriental wrap, loose chamois gloves were drawn. Annie had
been to a luncheon, and was to appear at two teas, a dinner, and the
theatre, and she was making the most of an interval at home. She looked
indescribably hideous, as she stretched a friendly hand toward Norma,
and nodded toward a chair.

"Look at the child's colour--Heavens! what it is to be young," said
Annie. "Sit down, Norma. How's Alice?"

"Lovely!" Norma said, pulling off her gloves. "She had a wire from
Chris, and he gets back to-night. I had luncheon with your mother, and I
am to go to stay with her for two or three nights, anyway. But Aunt
Alice said that she would like to have me back again next week for her
two teas."

"How old are you, Norma?" Annie asked, suddenly. Any sign of interest on
her part always thrilled the girl, who answered, flushing:

"Nineteen; twenty in January, Aunt Annie."

"I'm thinking, if you'd like it, of giving you a little tea here next
month," Annie said, lazily. "You know quite enough of the youngsters now
to have a thoroughly nice time, and afterward we'll have a dinner here,
and they can dance!"

"Oh, Aunt Annie--if I'd like it!" Norma exclaimed, rosy with pleasure.

"You would?" Annie asked, looking at a hand from which she had drawn the
glove, and smiling slightly. "It means that you don't go anywhere in the
meantime. You're not out until then, you know!"

"Oh, but I won't be going anywhere, anyway," Norma conceded,
contentedly.

"You'll have a flood of invitations fast enough after the tea," Annie
assured her, pleased at her excitement, "and until then, you can simply
say that you are not going out yet."

"Chris said he might take me to the opera on the first night; I've never
been," Norma said, timidly. "But I can explain to him!"

"Oh, that won't count!" Annie assured her, carelessly. "We'll all be
there, of course! Have you worn the corn-coloured gown yet?"

"Oh, no, Aunt Annie!"

"Well, keep it for that night. And you and Chris might----No, he'll want
to dine with Alice, and she'll want to see you in your new gown. I was
going to say that you might dine here, but you'd better not."

"I think Leslie and Acton are going to be asked to dine with us," Norma
said. "Aunt Alice said something about it!"

"Well," Annie agreed indifferently. "Ring that bell, Norma--I've got to
get up! Where are you girls going now?"

"Some of the girls are coming to my house for tea," Leslie answered,
listlessly. "I've got the car here. Come on, Norma!"

"But you're not driving, Kiddie?" her aunt asked, quickly.

Leslie, who neither looked nor felt well, raised half-resentful eyes.

"Oh, no, I'm not driving, and I'm lying in bed mornings, and I don't
play squash, or ride horseback, or go in for tennis!" she drawled, half
angrily. "I'm having a perfectly _lovely_ time! I wish Acton had a
little of it; he wouldn't be so pleased! Makes me so mad," grumbled
Leslie, as she wandered toward the door, busily buttoning her coat.
"Grandma crying with joy, and Aunt Alice goo-gooing at me, and
Acton----"

"Come, now, be a little sport, Leslie!" her aunt urged, affectionately,
with her arm about her. "It's rotten, of course, but after all, it does
mean a lot to the Liggetts----"

"Oh, now, don't _you_ begin!" Leslie protested, half-mollified, with her
parting nod. "Don't--for pity's sake!--talk about it," she added,
rudely, to Norma, as Norma began some consolatory murmur on the stairs.
But when they were before her own fire, waiting for the expected girls,
she made Norma a rather ungracious confidence.

"I don't want Aunt Alice or any one to know it, but if Acton Liggett
thinks I am going to let him make an absolute fool of me, he's
mistaken!" Leslie said, in a sort of smouldering resentment.

"What has Acton done?" Norma asked, flattered by the intimation of trust
and not inclined to be apprehensive. She had seen earlier differences
between the young married pair, and now, when Leslie was physically at a
disadvantage, she and Alice had agreed that it was not unnatural that
the young wife should grow exacting and fanciful.

"Acton is about the most selfish person I ever knew," Leslie said,
almost with a whimper. "Oh, yes, he is, Norma! You don't see it--but I
do! Chris knows it, too; I've heard Chris call him down a thousand times
for it! I am just boiling at Acton; I have been all day! He leaves
everything to me, everything; and I'm not well, now, and I can't stand
it! And I'll tell him I can't, too."

"I suppose a man doesn't understand very well," Norma ventured.

"_He_ doesn't!" Leslie said, warmly. "All Acton Liggett thinks of is his
own comfort--that's all! I do everything for him--I pay half the
expenses here, you know, more than half, really, for I always pay for my
own clothes and Milly, and lots of other things. And then he'll do some
_mean_, ugly thing that just makes me furious at him--and he'll walk out
of the house, perfectly calm and happy!"

"He's always had his own way a good deal," Norma who knew anything
except sympathy would utterly exasperate Leslie conceded, mildly.

"Yes," Leslie agreed, flushing, and stiffening her jaw rather ominously,
"and it's just about time that he learned that he isn't always going to
have it, too! It's very easy for him to have me do anything that is hard
and stupid----Do you suppose," she broke off, suddenly, "that _I'm_ so
anxious to go to the Duers' dinner? I wouldn't care if I never saw one
of them again!"

Norma gathered that a dinner invitation from the Duers had been the main
cause of the young Liggetts' difference, and framed a general question.

"That's Saturday night?"

"Friday," Leslie amended. "And what does he do? He meets Roy Duer at the
club, and says oh, no, he can't come to the dinner Friday, but _Leslie_
can! He has promised to play bridge with the Jeromes and that crowd. But
Leslie would _love_ to go! So there I am--old lady Duer called me up the
next morning, and was so sorry Acton couldn't come! But she would expect
me at eight o'clock. It's for her daughter, and she goes away again on
Tuesday. And then"--Leslie straightened herself on the couch, and fixed
Norma with bright, angry eyes;--"then Spooky Jerome telephoned here, and
said to tell Acton that if he couldn't stir up a bridge party for
Friday, he'd stir up something, and for Acton to meet him at the club!"

Norma laughed.

"And did you give Acton that message?" she inquired.

"No, indeed, I didn't--that was only this morning!" Leslie said, in
angry satisfaction. "I telephoned Mrs. Duer right away, and said that
Acton would be so glad to come Friday, and if Acton Liggett doesn't like
it, he knows what he can do! You laugh," she went on with a sort of
pathetic dignity, "but don't you think it's a rotten way for a man to
treat his wife, Norma? Don't you, honestly? There's nothing--nothing
that I don't give way in--absolutely nothing! And I don't believe most
men----Oh, hello, Doris," Leslie broke off, gaily, as there was a stir
at the door; "come in! Come in, Vera--aren't you girls angels to come in
and see the poor old sick lady!"

Norma was still lingering when Acton came home, an hour later. She heard
his buoyant voice in the hall, and began to gather her wraps and gloves
as he came to the tea table.

"Acton," Leslie said, firmly, "the bridge party is off for Friday, and
you're going to Mrs. Duer's with me, and you ought to be ashamed of
yourself!"

"Whew! I can see that I'm popular in the home circle, Norma!" Acton
said, leaning over the big davenport to kiss his wife. "How's my baby?
All right, dear, anything you say goes! I was going to cancel the game,
anyway. Look what Chris brought you, Cutey-cute! Say, Norma, has she
been getting herself tired?"

Leslie, instantly mollified, drew his cold, firm cheek against hers, and
looked sidewise toward Norma.

"Isn't he the nice, big, comfy man to come home to his mad little old
wife?" she mumbled, luxuriously.

"Yes," Acton grumbled, still half embracing her, "but you didn't talk
that way at breakfast, you little devil!"

"Am I a devil?" Leslie asked, lazily. And looking in whimsical penitence
at Norma, she added, "I _am_ a devil. But you were just as mean as you
could be," she told him, widening her eyes and shaking her head.

"I know it. I felt like a dog, walking down town," her husband admitted
promptly. "I tried to telephone but you weren't here!"

"I was at Aunt Annie's," Leslie said, softly. Her husband had slipped in
beside her on the wide davenport, and she was resting against his
shoulder, and idly kissing the little rebel lock of hair that fell
across one temple. "He's a pretty nice old husband!" she murmured,
contentedly.

"And she's a pretty nice little wife, if she did call me some mean
names!" Acton returned, kissing the top of her head without altering her
position. Norma looked at them with smiling contempt.

"You're a great pair!" she conceded, indulgently.

Leslie now was free to examine, with a flush and a laugh, the
microscopic pair of beaded Indian moccasins that Chris had brought from
Florida. Norma asked about Chris.

"Oh, he's fine," Acton answered, "looks brown and hard; he had a
gorgeous time! He said he might be round to see Grandma to-morrow
morning!"

"I'll tell her," Norma said, getting up to go. She left them still
clinging together, like a pair of little love-birds, with peace fully
restored for the time being.

Mrs. Melrose's car had been waiting for some time, and she was whirled
home through the dark and wintry streets without the loss of a second.
Lights were lighted everywhere now, and tempered radiance filled the old
hall as she entered it. It was just six o'clock, but Norma knew that she
and the old lady were to be alone to-night, and she went through the
long drawing-room to the library beyond it, thinking she might find her
still lingering over the teacups. Dinner under these circumstances was
usually at seven, and frequently Mrs. Melrose did not change her gown
for it.

There was lamplight in the library, but the old lady's chair was empty,
and the tea table had been cleared away. Norma, supposing the room
unoccupied, gave a little gasp of surprise and pleasure as Chris
suddenly got to his feet among the shadows.

She was so glad to see him, so much more glad than she would have
imagined herself, that for a few minutes she merely clung tight to the
two hands she had grasped, and stood laughing and staring at him. Chris
back again! It meant so much that was pleasant and friendly to Norma.
Chris advised her, admired her, sympathized with her; above all, she
knew that he liked her.

"Chris; it's so nice to see you!" she exclaimed.

The colour came into his face, and with it an odd expression that she
had never seen there before. Without speaking he put his arm about her,
and drew her to him, and kissed her very quietly on the mouth.

"Hello, you dear little girl!" he said, freeing her, and smiling at her,
somewhat confusedly. "You're not half so glad to see me as I am to be
back! You're looking so well, Norma," he went on, with almost his usual
manner, "and Alice tells me you are making friends everywhere. What's
the news?"

He threw himself into a large leather chair, and, hardly knowing what
she was doing, in the wild hurrying of her senses, Norma sat down
opposite him. Her one flurried impulse was not to make a scene. Chris
was always so entirely master of a situation, so utterly unemotional and
self-possessed, that if he kissed her, upon his return from a
three-weeks' absence, it must be a perfectly correct thing to do.

Yet she felt both shaken and protestant, and it was with almost
superhuman control that she began to carry on a casual conversation,
giving her own report upon Alice and Leslie, Acton and the world in
general.

When Mrs. Melrose, delighted at the little attention from her
son-in-law, came smilingly in, five minutes later, Norma escaped
upstairs. She had Leslie's old room here when she spent the night, but
it was only occasionally that Alice spared her, for her youth and high
spirits, coupled with the simplicity and enthusiasm with which she was
encountering the new world, made her a really stimulating companion for
the sick woman.

Regina came in to hook her into a simple dinner gown, but Norma did not
once address her, except by a vague smile of greeting. Her thoughts were
in a whirl. Why had he done that? Was it just brotherly--friendliness?
He was much older than she--thirty-seven or eight; perhaps he had felt
only an older man's kindly----

But her face blazed, and she flung this explanation aside angrily. He
had no business to do it! He had no right to do it! She was furious at
him!

She stood still, staring blankly ahead of her, in the centre of the
room. The memory came over her in a wave; the odd, half-hesitating,
half-confident look in his eyes as his arms enveloped her, the faint
aroma of talcum powder and soap, the touch of his smoothly shaven cheek.

It was almost an hour later that she went cautiously downstairs. He was
gone--had been gone since half-past six o'clock, Joseph reported. Norma
went in to dinner with Mrs. Melrose, and they talked cheerfully of
Chris's return, of Leslie and Annie.

By eight o'clock, reading in Mrs. Melrose's upstairs sitting-room, that
first room that she had seen in this big house, eight months ago, Norma
began to feel just a trifle flat. Chris Liggett was one of the most
popular men in society, in demand everywhere, spoiled by women
everywhere. He had quite casually, and perhaps even absent-mindedly,
kissed his wife's young protégée upon meeting her after an absence, and
she had hastily leaped to conclusions worthy of a schoolgirl! He would
be about equally amused and disgusted did he suspect them.

"He likes you, you little fool," Norma said to herself, "and you will
utterly spoil everything with your idiocy!"

"What did you say, lovey?" the old lady asked, half closing her book.

"Nothing!" Norma said, laughing. She reopened her novel, and tried to
interest herself in it. But the thought of that quarter hour in the
study came back over and over again. She came finally to the conclusion
that she was glad Chris liked her.

The room was very still. A coal fire was glowing pink and clear in the
grate, and now and then the radiators hissed softly. Norma had one big
brilliant lamp to herself, and over the old lady's chair another
glowed. Everything was rich, soft, comfortable. Regina was hovering in
the adjoining room, folding the fat satin comforters, turning down the
transparent linen sheets with their great scroll of monogram, and behind
Regina were Joseph and Emma, and all the others, and behind them the
great city and all the world, eager to see that this old woman, who had
given the world very little real service in her life, should be shielded
and warmed and kept from the faintest dream of need.

Money was a strange thing, Norma mused. What should she do, if--as her
shamed and vague phrase had it--if "something happened" to Aunt
Marianna, and she was not even mentioned in her will? Of course it was a
hateful thing to think of, and a horrible thing, sitting here opposite
Aunt Marianna in the comfortable upstairs sitting-room, but the thought
would come. Norma wished that she knew. She would not have shortened the
old lady's life by a single second, and she would have died herself
rather than betray this thought to any one, even to Wolf--even to Rose!
But it suddenly seemed to her very unjust that she could be picked out
of Biretta's bookstore to-day, by Aunt Marianna's pleasure, and perhaps
put back there to-morrow through no fault of her own. They were all
kind, they were all generous, but this was not just. She wanted the
delicious and self-respecting feeling of being a young woman with
"independent means."

Such evenings as this one, even in the wonderful Melrose house, were
undeniably dull. She and Rose had often grumbled, years ago, because
there were so many of these quiet times, in between the Saturday and
Sunday excitements. But Norma, in those days, had never supposed that
dulness was ever compatible with wealth and ease.

"Cards?" said old Mrs. Melrose, hopefully, as the girl made a sudden
move. She loved to play patience, but only when she had an audience.
Norma, who had just decided to give her French verbs a good hour's
attention, smiled amiably, and herself brought out the green table. She
sat watching the fall of kings and aces, reminding her companion of at
least every third play. But her thoughts went back to Chris, and the
faint odour of powder and soap, and the touch of his shaved cheek.




CHAPTER XIII


Norma met Chris again no later than the following afternoon. It was
twilight in Alice's room, and she and Norma were talking on into the
gloom, discussing the one or two guests who had chanced to come in for
tea, and planning the two large teas that Alice usually gave some time
late in November.

Chris came in quietly, kissed his wife, and nodded carelessly to Norma.
The girl's sudden mad heartbeats and creeping colour could subside
together unnoticed, for he apparently paid no attention to her, and
presently drifted to the piano, leaving the women free to resume their
conference.

Alice was a person of more than a surface sweetness; she loved harmony
and serenity, and there was almost no inclination to irritability or
ugliness in her nature. Her voice was always soothing and soft, and her
patience in the unravelling of other people's problems was
inexhaustible. Alice was, as all the world conceded, an angel.

But Norma had not been a member of her household for eight months
without realizing that Alice, like other household angels, did not wish
an understudy in the rôle. She did not quite enjoy the nearness of
another woman who might be all sweet and generous and peace-making, too.
That was her own sacred and peculiar right. She could gently and
persistently urge objections and find inconsistencies in any plan of
her sister or of Norma, no matter how advantageous it sounded, and she
could adhere to a plan of her own with a tenacity that, taken in
consideration with Alice's weak body and tender voice, was nothing less
than astonishing.

Norma, lessoned in a hard school, and possessing more than her share of
adaptability and common sense, had swiftly come to the conclusion that,
since it was not her part to adjust the affairs of her benefactors, she
might much more wisely constitute herself a sort of Greek chorus to
Alice's manipulations. Alice's motives were always of the highest, and
it was easy to praise them in all honesty, and if sometimes the younger
woman had mentally arrived at a conclusion long before Alice had
patiently and sweetly reached it, the little self-control was not much
to pay toward the comfort of a woman as heavily afflicted as Alice.

For Norma knew in her own heart that Alice was heavily afflicted,
although the invalid herself always took the attitude that her
helplessness brought the best part of life into her room, and shut away
from her the tediousness and ugliness of the world.

"'Aïda' two weeks from to-night!" Alice said this evening, with her
sympathetic smile.

"Oh, Aunt Alice--if you could go! Didn't you love it?"

"Love the opera? Do you hear her, Chris? But I didn't love people
talking all about me--and they will do it, you know! And that makes one
furious!"

"I see you getting furious," Norma observed, incredulously.

"You don't know me! But I was a bashful, adoring sort of little person,
on my first night----"

"Yes, you were," Chris teased her, over a lazy ripple of thirds. "She
was such a bashful little person at the Mardi Gras dance she promised
Artie Peyton her first cotillion the following season."

"Oh, Aunt Alice--you didn't!"

Alice's rather colourless face flushed happily, and she half lowered her
lids.

"Chris thinks that is a great story on me. As a matter of fact, I did do
that; I was just childish enough. But I can't think how the story got
out, for I was desperately ashamed of it."

"I told Aunt Annie and Leslie to-day that you wanted the Liggetts to
dine here that night," Norma said, suddenly. Instantly she realized that
she had made a mistake. And there was no one in the world whose light
reproof hurt her as Alice's did.

"You--you gave my invitation to Leslie?" Alice asked, quietly.

"Well--not quite that. But I told her that you had said that you meant
to ask them," Norma replied, uncomfortably.

"But, Norma, I did not ask you to mention it." Alice was even smiling,
but she seemed a little puzzled.

"I'm so sorry--if you didn't want me to!"

"It isn't that. But one feels that one----"

"What is Norma sorry about?" Chris asked, coming back to the fire.
"Norma, you're up against a terrible tribunal, here! Alice has been
known--well, even to give new hats to the people who make her angry!"

This fortunate allusion to an event now some months old entirely
restored Alice's good humour. Norma had accepted a certain almost-new
hat from Leslie just before the wedding, and Alice, burning with her
secret suspicion as to Norma's parentage, and in the first flush of her
affection for the girl, had told Norma that in her opinion Leslie should
not have offered it. It was not for Norma to take any patronage from her
cousin, Alice said to herself. But Norma's distress at having
disappointed Alice was so fresh and honest that the episode had ended
with Alice's presenting her with a stunning new hat, to wipe out the
terrible effect of her mild criticism.

"You're a virago," said Chris, seating himself near his wife. "Tell me
what you've been doing all day. Am I in for that dinner at Annie's
to-night? I wish I could stay here and gossip with you girls."

"Dearest, you'd get so stupid, tied here to me, that you wouldn't know
who was President of the United States!" Alice smiled. "Yes, I promised
you to Annie two weeks ago. To-morrow night Norma goes to Leslie, and
you and I have dinner all alone, so console yourself with that."

"_Très bien_," Christopher agreed. And as if the phrase suggested it, he
went on to test Norma's French. Norma was never self-conscious with him,
and in a few seconds he and Alice were laughing at her earnest
absurdities. When husband and wife went on into a conversation of their
own, Norma sat back idly, conscious that the atmosphere was always easy
and pleasant when Chris was at home, there were no petty tensions and no
sensitive misconstructions while Chris was talking. Sometime

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/28301