"You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply. Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came—and she more than dimly apprehended that come it would—when such a thing need be.
Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her, Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty pretence of annoyed hostility.
"Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'? Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.
On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.
"How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs—you know he is my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such a way? Didn't you find him rather—well, distingué, we'll say, Louise?"
"I thought him very fine and——" Louise strove for a word haltingly.
"And with an air about him—of course you did, my dear; everybody does," Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed, wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've known him ever since——"
Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a girl just that day out of school.
"Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with me—permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining in the conversation.
Louise reflected a moment before replying.