And Cally, ardently wishing to be free of this subject, said gaily that Mr. Canning had thrown her over--the second time, too! So she had told him that she had some spirit, that some day he would do that once too often....
"Oh, you're joking," said Mats, quite pettishly. "Dear, I don't care for jokes."
And then, as she gazed, not without envy, at her friend's profile, so strangely sweet and gay, she exclaimed suddenly in a shocked tone: "I believe you really did do it!"
"Whisper it not in Gath," said Cally, with shining calm....
It was a belief, so mamma had cried in the midnight, which nobody outside of institutions for the feeble-minded would ever hold. But Cally was struck only with Mattie's enormous seriousness. Self-reproach filled her for the interval that seemed to lie between them....
"Mats, you know I've never kept secrets from you. I'll tell you everything you want to hear about it, from beginning to end. Only--not to-day."
The kaleidoscope shifted: Mattie faded out of the purview, and in her stead sat the Misses Winton, who had helped to pass the time in Europe last year, but whose presence had a contrary effect to-day. And she wondered how they could not see for themselves what a shell of a hostess they were talking at. All her being was so far away from company: one half of her continually flowing back over the months; the rest always going forward to the afternoon, and beyond; nothing at all left here....
Certainly she would tease him a little about the neat way he and papa had dropped her out of the Works. "And I thought I was the one who was doing it, too!..."
Callers gone; and then mamma, in the vein of dignity, was inviting her opinion about the color scheme of her luncheon-table. And with what an uprush of affection she responded, what eagerness to help, to be friends again!... And then it was time for her to make ready for luncheon herself. One-thirty o'clock; a long day....
In the May-time, once, Hugo had asked her to name a day, and she had named the seventeenth of October. And now the seventeenth was here, to-day. Her wedding-day it might have been, but for this or that: and behold, her high banquet was laid at the board of the Cooneys, cold corned beef and baked potatoes, with sliced peaches such as turn nicely from the can for an unexpected guest.