“David! You’re not going? Without telling me goodby?” Sally cried, stumbling blindly after them.
“Goodby, my darling.” He put his arm about her shoulders and laid his cheek against her hair as he murmured in a low, shaken voice: “I’ll be loving you—always!”
When the door had closed upon her mother and her almost-husband, Sally did a surprising thing: she went stumbling toward Mrs. Stone, and dropped upon her knees before that majestic, rigid figure which she had feared for twelve years.
When Enid Barr returned a few minutes later, two round spots of color burning in her cheeks, she found her daughter in the orphanage matron’s lap, cuddled there like a small child, trustfully sobbing out her grief.
CHAPTER XVI
Enid Barr left with her daughter for Kansas City that night, after wiring her husband, Courtney Barr, who was still awaiting word from her in Capital City. For two days Sally and Enid shopped for a suitable wardrobe for Sally, went to shows together, explored the city, and spent many hours talking. Whenever the question of Sally’s future arose, Enid spoke only in generalities, evading all direct questions, but about Sally’s childhood and young girlhood in the orphanage and on the Carson farm, and about her experiences with the carnival, Enid was insatiably curious and invariably sympathetic. Sally sensed that her mother was anxiously awaiting Courtney Barr’s arrival before making any definite plans, and gradually the girl grew to dread the ordeal of meeting her mother’s husband, the man who would become her father by adoption.
And when at last he came she knew that her troubled intuition had been correct. However “wonderful” he had been to Enid when she had discovered that her child had not been born dead but was alive somewhere in the world, Sally felt instantly that his kindness and generosity toward Enid would not extend to herself.
Courtney Barr was a meticulously groomed, meticulously courteous man who had, in slipping into middle-age, lost all traces of the boy and youth he must have been. To Sally’s terrified eyes, this rather heavy, ponderous man, on whom dignity rested like a royal cloak, looked as if he had been born old and wise and cold. She wondered how her exquisite, arrogant little mother could love him so devotedly.
Almost immediately after the awkward introduction—“This is our Sally, Court!”—the three of them had had dinner together, a silent meal, so far as Sally was concerned. She had felt that the Enid with whom she had talked and laughed and wept these two days had slipped away, leaving this sophisticated, strange woman in her place, a woman who was in nowise related to her, a woman who was merely Mrs. Courtney Barr.
They left her alone for an hour after dinner, an hour which she spent in her own room in writing a long, frightened, appealing letter to David. At nine o’clock Enid knocked on her door and invited her to join them in the parlor of the luxurious suite which had been such a delight to orphanage-bred Sally.