“I want to know how you knew,” demanded Eleanor eagerly. “How you guessed exactly how I’ve felt all these years about—about everything and—and Dick.”
Madeline smiled. “If every woman in the audience wants to know that,” she said, “the play goes. The shop-girl next me in the gallery wants to know, and Miss Dwight, and now you—— Excuse me, Eleanor, but where did you get those stockings?”
CHAPTER XV
A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK—WITH “FEATURES”
Babe seized upon Eleanor’s engagement as the best possible excuse for a week-end party.
“Living in a castle is rather a fright,” she confided to Betty. “John doesn’t mind it, because he’s always lived in a near-castle. I get lost. I’m afraid of the butler. The English housekeeper drops her aitches so fast that I can’t tell what she wants to ask me. I forget the names of my horses. And when John is in town I haven’t anybody to play with.”
“Seems to me you’re not a very enthusiastic newly-wed,” Betty told her laughingly.
“Oh, yes, I am,” Babe declared very earnestly. “I love John, and I love Father Morton, and I love my house. Only I rattle around in it like a pea in a band-box. While I’m growing up to fit my surroundings I’ve got to have the assistance of all my friends. Will you come to my party, Betty? I’m going to ask Father Morton, because he knows Mr. Blake, and besides he missed all the fun of the wedding.”
So Betty, resolving to “’tend up” to business strictly for the rest of the year, took another week-end off to celebrate the engagement, see Babe’s gorgeous mansion, and help make up to Mr. Morton for losing the wedding—all on her account, as he persisted in saying.
Babe’s house, which had been Mr. Morton’s wedding gift to her, was up on the Hudson, in a suburb so discreetly removed from the noise and dust of the railroad that nobody lived there except “carriage people.” The wide roads wound in sweeping curves along the river, between lilac hedges, now capped with snow. In front, Babe’s territory sloped through great gardens to the water; behind she had a real wood of her own. Inside the house the stately rooms were crowded with expensive furniture and beautiful bric-à-brac. Mr. Morton had taken Babe shopping and bought everything she had as much as stopped to look at. A famous decorator had been sent up to arrange the house and fill in the gaps. There was a fireplace taken bodily from a Florentine palace, a Rembrandt that had once graced a royal gallery, a rug that men had spent their whole lives in weaving.
“I shall never know what we’ve got,” sighed Babe, as she led the way through her domain. “Father Morton loves to surprise people. He says I haven’t discovered half the special features that he’s put in just to amuse me.”