“That’s Nettie,” Alice said, immediately arousing herself and getting to her feet. “I’ll go up. The child’s slept quite a while; it’s almost four o’clock.”
She crossed the porch with careful tread not to disturb her sister, and in another minute her voice and her daughter’s, alternately, floated down from an upstairs window. Roy produced a pipe from his coat pocket, and proceeded to empty, fill and light it with attentive deliberation. When he had it briskly going, he rose and leisurely crossed the strip of lawn to his neighbor’s yard, vaulted the low wire fence, and was lost in a moment beyond the cosmos and chrysanthemums.
Jeannette remained as she was, head in hand, thinking, thinking. The tears had dried upon her face, her eyes were staring, and there was an empty hunger in her heart that she recognized at last had been there for a long, long time.
CHAPTER III
§ 1
“Etta! Is that you?”
“Yes,—it’s me, Aunt Jan.”
“Say ‘it’s I,’ dear. What brings you to the city, Sunday?”
“I stayed in town last night. There was a dance at Marjorie Bowen’s cousin’s house and Moth’ said I could go. We had a perfectly divine time! Her aunt chaperoned us and I slept with Marj. I thought maybe you’d be going down to Cohasset Beach this morning, and we’d go together. So I got up, left the girls in bed, had my breakfast, and took a ’bus to come down to see you. I want to talk to you about something.”
“But, dear,—I wasn’t going to the country to-day. I promised an old friend of mine who lives at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, I’d go to see her this afternoon.”