“Yes, there were the police,” he repeated, “but I couldn’t help remembering that there was also I—and we. I had an idea we could do a good deal better than the police, in a case like this. I don’t understand how women feel, mother, but I can’t help remembering that every little girl is going to be a woman some day. And I’ve no doubt that the kind of woman she is going to be will be governed a good deal by seemingly trivial events. I don’t see why it isn’t likely that Bonnie May’s whole future may depend upon the way things fall out for her now, when she’s really helpless and alone for the first time in her life. I think it’s likely she’ll remember to the end of her days that people were kind to her—or that they weren’t. We’ve nothing to be afraid of at the hands of a little bit of a girl. At the most, we’ll have to give her a bed for the night and a bite to eat and just a little friendliness. It’s she who must be afraid of us!—afraid that we’ll be thoughtless, or snobbish, and refuse to give her the comfort she needs, now that she’s in trouble.”
He paused.
“A speech!” exclaimed Mrs. Baron, and Baron could not fail to note the irony in her voice. She added, in the same tone: “The haughty mother yields to the impassioned plea of her noble son!”
Baron turned and observed that she was smiling rather maliciously.
“You’d better go up and look after her,” she added. “Flora will be home before long.”
CHAPTER IV
A CRISIS
At five o’clock, during a brief lull in the usual noises on the avenue, there was a faint and aristocratic murmur of machinery in front of the mansion. The McKelvey girls’ motor-car drew up at the curb, and Miss Flora Baron alighted.
The Misses McKelvey had come for her early in the afternoon and had driven her out to their suburban home, where she was always treated almost like one of the family.
She was the sort of girl that people love unquestioningly: gentle, low-voiced, seemingly happy, grateful, gracious. Besides, there was a social kinship between the two families. Mrs. McKelvey had been a Miss Van Sant before her marriage, and the Van Sants and the Boones had been neighbors for a century or more.
“Good-by, Flora,” called the McKelvey girls almost in one voice, as their guest hurried toward her gate. Their cheerful faces were framed by the open door of their shining coupé. And Flora looked back over her shoulder and responded gayly, and then hurried up into the vestibule of the mansion.