Floyd Grandon's Honor

by Amanda M. Douglas

"Oh, you asked me yourself!" retorts her antagonist. "If you were at all sharp-sighted you could have seen——"

Violet stops Marcia with a gesture of her hand. She stands there white as snow, but her eyes are larger, and gleam black, the color and tenderness have gone out of her scarlet mouth, and she seems to grow taller. Marcia is checked in her onslaught, and a half-misgiving comes to her.

"After all," she says, presently, in a more moderate tone, "I supposed you did know something about it. You really ought to have been told in the beginning, as all the rest were, it seems." And she adds the last a little bitterly, remembering she has been shut out of the family conference.

"Mr. Grandon did what was right and best," Violet returns, loyally.

"I suppose we all do what we think best," comments Marcia, with an air of wisdom, and experience sits enthroned on the little strip of brow above her eyes. "Well, I'm sorry you were not at the Brades', and I do think Eugene ought to pay better attention to business, especially now that Floyd is away. And I don't see why he should stay away from parties if you do not want to go."

"There is no reason," answers Violet, coldly.

Marcia bids her good morning, and flies down the steps with the air of one who has performed her whole duty. Now that she has attained to married respectability, she feels quite free to criticise the rest of the world, and she rejoices in the fact that she does carry more weight than a single woman.

Violet stands by the window where Marcia left her. She is very glad to be alone, and thankful that Cecil is at the Latimers' for the day, although she is due there for a kind of nursery tea-party. A whirlwind seems to have swept over her, to have lifted her up bodily and carried her out of the sphere she was in two hours ago, and in this new country all is strange; on this desolate shore where she is stranded the sea moans in dull lament, as if the soul had gone out of that also, and left an aching heart behind. She might dismiss Marcia's tirade as other members of the family are wont to do, but there comes an awesome, shivering fear that it is true in some degree. How many times she has seen Gertrude check Marcia when Floyd was under discussion. She has never tried to pry into family secrets, but she knows there have been many about her; a certain kind of knowledge that all have shared, a something against her. She has fancied that she made some advances in living down the dislike; Mrs. Grandon has been kinder of late, and Marcia, since her marriage, quite confidential. Instead, she has done nothing, gained nothing.

If Gertrude were only here. She has made that one true friend, whom nothing can shake, who, knowing all, came to love her with a tender regard that was not pity. But there is no one, no one. All is a dreary waste.

A step comes up the balcony, and the mellifluous voice is whistling Schumann's Carnival. Whither shall she fly? But even now it is too late, for he meets her in the wide doorway.