"Here, you'll slip." Catherine seized her arm, and engineered her passage. "Has Charles come home?"
"Yes, poor boy. He's had an awful time. Tell the driver to go very slowly!" Mrs. Spencer disappeared in the cab.
VIII
"'At Flora, she coming back to wuk for you-all?" Sam made friendly inquiry as he stopped the elevator at Catherine's floor.
"No."
"She say she got grand job for some elegant folks. Sma't worker, Flora is."
Poor Flora—Catherine unlocked the door quietly—lying to Sam, to save her face some way, of course.
If Charles is miserable—hope thrust out a new tendril, waveringly, in a blurred picture of herself ministering to him, pretending tenderly that nothing ever had been wrong.
"Hello." She smiled as he turned from the window, draped in a melancholy air of pain nobly borne. "You have had a horrid time, haven't you?"