But very soon she learned that Elsie was thanking her for that impulsive gesture of generosity in her own way. When they joined each other in the big car that was waiting for them at the door, half an hour later, Elsie was plainly trying to force herself to be friendly and natural. But since this friendliness was forced, Kate’s response to it was of necessity forced, too. Oh, how different everything was turning out between these two girls from the way Kate had dreamed it!
“Don’t you think Oakdale is pretty?” Elsie asked. “People care so much about their gardens. And then the streets are all so wide and shady, and where they aren’t wide they are just little lanes like ours that end perhaps in a gate or an open meadow. Those endings of streets seem romantic to me always.”
“Yes, I think they are romantic,” Kate agreed. “And when your lane turned all the away around and ended in the orchard, that must have been awfully romantic. I wonder why Aunt Katherine ever let the grass grow over it so that it got lost, the end of the lane!”
Something in Elsie’s restrained silence at this remark made Kate realize that she had blundered. Oh, dear! She hadn’t meant to. Truly! She tried to explain.
“You see it was my mother’s house, Elsie. You can’t know what fun it is to imagine your mother a little girl, to see for the first time the house where she was born and the places where she played. Everything about your mother’s childhood—well, there’s a kind of mystery about it.”
Elsie deliberately turned away her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. What an idiot I am! I had forgotten about your mother! How could I be such a—brute!”
Elsie looked at Timothy’s back steadily. “Don’t be so sorry as all that,” she replied coolly and without any apparent emotion in her voice. “My mother was killed in an automobile accident in France two years ago. But I never knew her, anyway. When I was at home she was usually somewhere else, at house-parties or sanitariums, or abroad. And I was only home for holidays. She sent me off to boarding school when I was eight. Her being dead hasn’t made much difference to me. I was terribly sorry for her when they told me, that was all. She was so pretty, and too young-seeming to be a mother. And she would have hated dying! Sometimes I ache for her when I think of that. But that’s all.”
“Oh, how can you! How can you speak about a dead mother like that!” Kate’s heart was crying. But she only said, after a second: “There are lots of jolly-looking girls and boys in this town. Do you know them all? They keep looking at us, but you never speak. Don’t you see people? Mother’s like that. She’s so absent minded.”
But even this was an unfortunate subject. Unlucky Kate!
“I know who most of them are but of course I don’t know them socially.”