"And you really were telling some child about the little pigs going to market one night when he heard you?" I asked, thinking how much stranger than fiction this case was.
"Yes. That was after he was beginning to be better, but I was still his 'special.' The baby's cot had been moved out into the corridor just beyond his door—it was so hot—and I used to slip out there occasionally and get the little fellow to sleep. But I came down with malarial fever myself before Mr. Maxwell was entirely well. That's the reason his memory of me is so hazy."
"Then why didn't you tell him plainly—when you first met him here and saw that he remembered you?" I asked as she got up and opened the bag wider to try to find the bottle of medicine she wanted, for her hand went to her head in a manner which told me that all this excitement had in nowise lessened the pain.
"That's what I am so sorry for and ashamed of," she answered simply, as she lifted some of the contents of the bag out and placed them upon the table. "I shouldn't have stayed here an hour after Aunt Ida told me I must sail under false covers, but—I said a while ago, in my excitement, that there was a mighty temptation! I didn't intend to say it, but—it is true."
"And the temptation was—"
We heard the front door open then and close again softly. Mr. Maxwell had finished his walk out in the cool night air. I hoped that he would come on back into the library as he heard our voices, but he passed the door and in another moment we heard his footsteps on the stairs.
"They told me that he was coming," Sophie said.
Four days have passed since the night of the Thanksgiving ball; and at a house-party where four days drag there is a greater sense of calamity than would be caused by a dreary four weeks at some other time. For there is always the tormenting thought of how much hay one might have been piling up if the sun would only shine.
Here are the three of us—Evelyn, Sophie and I—all at the age of Eve; and all enduring such a period of gloom that I feel sure if the original Eve had been half as badly bored she would never have waited for a pretty snake to come along and amuse her—she would have started up a flirtation with a grub-worm!
Richard is still away and I have not even had a line from him. Neither has any one else on the place, of course, but his name appeared in the society columns of the Times the day after Thanksgiving. He had attended the football game that afternoon with Major Blake's party, the paper stated—and alas! I was in no position to dispute the statement.