“What news?” Margery asked, thinking suddenly of the letter her mother had received from Mentone the previous night, and experiencing a vague feeling of fear and dread of some impending evil. “What news have you heard which concerns my mother?” she repeated, looking steadily at Reinette.
Reinette hesitated a moment, kept silent by something in Margery’s face, but when she said for the third time, “Tell me what news you have received from France,” she replied: “Margery, it shall never make any difference between us, but your mother is Christine Bodine, whom I have been trying to find.”
“My mother Christine Bodine! Impossible! She was Marie La Mille,” Margery gasped, as she clutched Reinette’s shoulder with a grip which was painful.
“I have it from her agent in Mentone, who has received money for her at different times from Messrs. Polignie in Paris—money my father deposited for her with them years ago. Now let me go! I must see her!” Queenie said, darting up the stairs, no longer restrained by Margery, who had let her pass without further protest.
Clasping her hand to her head as if smitten with a blow, Margery staggered back, and leaning against the wall for support, tried to think what it all meant, while her mind traveled rapidly back over the past, gathering up a thread here and there, until she had no doubt that what Queenie had told her was true. Her mother was Christine Bodine. But why this concealment? What was she hiding? What had she done?
Margery’s first impulse was to hurry to her mother’s room, where there was already the sound of excited voices, her mother’s and Queenie’s blended together, as each strove to be heard, and once she caught her own name, as if her mother were calling her to come.
Then she did start, and was half way up the stairs, when the door-bell rang violently—a sharp, imperious ring, which she recognized as Anna Ferguson’s. She was expecting that young lady, and knowing that however fierce a storm might be blowing, she must keep it from the world, she calmed herself with a tremendous effort, and opening the door to Anna, listened patiently for several minutes, while the girl examined her sacque and said it would do very well, only the price was too high.
“Ma never asked anything like that for a common sacque.”
“Very well. Pay me what you like,” Margery said, anxious to be rid of her customer, who had asked, in her supercilious way:
“Isn’t that Queenie up stairs? And isn’t she talking pretty loud for a well-bred person?”