She could not proceed.
Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.
"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone. "It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can—wait. We shall not speak of it again, shall we, mother?"
Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour later. But Laura did not ask her why.
Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part, required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during the holiday vacation.
One afternoon, at an opera matinée, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed, granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.
Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.
"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"
Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear, and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:
"Bella!"