"I am glad you have asked me to do that, Miss Treharne," he said. "And he will be more than glad—depend upon that. Goodbye—not for very long, I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again—especially at this time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and was gone.
"'Especially at this time'—I wonder what he meant by that?" thought Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that his face was clouded with worry.
An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing, holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura, gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise, considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome, superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her mother at her home-coming.
"Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her again, and hugged her once more.
Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter bending toward her.
"You are grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are well, dear? You are looking excessively well."
Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.
"But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up, and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.
Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.