Ogden smiled. “Yes, I’m not going into the stone business at present.”
The dinner that night was what Adèle called a really human meal. Miss Frink sat at the head of the table and her secretary at the foot. He did the honors in a highly superior manner. Adèle sat at his right and the two men guests were placed, one each side the hostess.
Miss Frink looked thoughtfully at Hugh, dressed in the new suit she had paid for. He was happy in his promotion from the invalid chair, and responded to Mr. Ogden’s amusing stories, while Adèle put aside dull care and told canteen reminiscences of her own, some of them sufficiently daring to draw upon her the gaze of the neighboring spectacles.
After dinner they all adjourned to the drawing-room, and Miss Frink, for the first time in all the years, saw its dignified furnishings as background to a social gathering. Adèle played, and Hugh sauntered up and down the room, singing when the familiar melodies tempted him. Miss Frink’s eyes followed him with a strange, unconscious hunger.
When at last Mrs. Lumbard sought her pillow, she was too excited for sleep, and the little spurt of jollity faded into the dull consideration of her situation. Why had handsome Hughie made that break about her hair! She reviewed all that had been said in his first recognition of her. She saw herself again, sitting and nervously twisting that letter. She felt something inimical in Ogden. He had known Dr. Reece. He wanted to get his letter away from her. There, in the darkness of her unquiet pillow, she saw the twisted envelope again. It was not his letter at all. She had flattened it out and seen that it was Hughie’s.
Mr. Hugh Stanwood Sinclair. She saw the address again. Sinclair. Why? when Hughie’s name was Stanwood? Why was the address Sinclair? Her head lay quieter as she meditated. Mr. Ogden had been anxious to get that letter! He had made her feel rebuked for twisting it. She lay a long time awake.
CHAPTER XIV
ALICE
When Miss Frink went to her room that night, two red spots burned in her cheeks. She was a creature of habit and proud of it. Her maid had the bed turned down and prepared for the night as usual. A silk negligée hung over the back of a chair. The silver carafe of ice water with its cut-glass tumbler stood by the side of the bed. Her programme would be to slip off the black satin gown, don the negligée, go to the lighted bathroom and wind the waves of her front hair back on their crimping pins, and so proceed to the point of extinguishing the lights, getting into bed, and going at once to sleep.