Laura contributed whatever of merriness there was to the home-coming feast. Mrs. Treharne confined herself to occasional questions directed at Louise, and the girl saw that her mother was tired and out of sorts; she remembered what Laura had told her at the station of her mother's state of mind "over matters," and she made the allowances that she had been accustomed to make for her mother since her earliest years.
The three women were still at the table, beginning to make allusions to bed—Laura had summoned her car by 'phone, for it was close upon eleven—when a great-girthed man, in a sealskin coat that fell almost to his heels, an opera hat set rakishly on one side of his bald head, and his turkey-like eyes still more reddened with the libations that his lurching gait made still more obvious, lumbered into the room without the least attempt at knocking on the door.
"Hay-o, folks—having a little party?" said Judd, lurching toward the table. "Am I in on it?" and he plumped himself drunkenly into a chair.
Laura rose at the first sight of him. Mrs. Treharne kept her seat but gazed at him vitriolically. Louise looked at him quietly enough. She was intensely mystified, but quite willing to wait for any information as to the intrusion. No information, however, was forthcoming.
"Your mother will show you to your room, dear," said Laura, placing an arm around Louise's waist and guiding her to the door. Under her breath she said: "No questions, dear heart. He is an—an adviser of your mother. We are going to be great cronies, are we not?" She kissed Louise and went. Her mother conducted Louise to a sleeping room done in white and silver, and kissed the girl good night with a sort of belated rush of affection. But she said nothing to her in explanation of Judd.
Toward midnight John Blythe, after striding up and down his solitary bachelor apartment for two hours in lounging robe and slippers, went to the telephone in his study and called up Laura.
"Is that you, Laura?" he said, quietly, into the transmitter when she answered the call. "What time tomorrow forenoon will you be fit to be seen?"
"By noon," Laura's voice came back to him quietly. "I know what you want to see me about, John."
"Do you? I doubt that."
"It is about Louise Treharne."