"Hendrick and I stopped at your mother's," he said, deliberately, "and she was so upset that I sent Hendrick on alone!"
Alice's eyes lighted apprehensively, but she spoke very quietly.
"What was it, Chris? Leslie getting saucy?"
"Oh, no, no! It was a complication of things, I imagine!" Christopher took out his cigarette-case, looked at its moiré surface reflectively, and selected a smoke. "She was tired—she'd been out in the snow—Leslie had gone off with Annie to some débutante affair—I daresay she felt blue. Alice, do you remember a woman named Kate Sheridan?"
The question was sudden, and Alice blinked.
"Yes, I do," she answered, after a moment's thought, "she was a sort of maid or travelling companion of Mama's. We called her Mrs. Sheridan—she was quite a superior sort of person."
"What do you remember about her, dear?"
"Well—just that. She came when I was only a child—and then when Annie was ill in Paris she went abroad with Mama—and I remember that she came back, and she used to come see me at school, for Mama, and once she took me up to Grandma's, in Brookline. She was a widow, and she had a child—or two, maybe. Why, Chris?"
Her husband did not answer, and she repeated the question.
"Well," he said, at last, flinging the end of his cigarette into the fire, "she came to see your mother to-day."