“Well, of all things!” Elinor’s tone was exasperated. “Another new suit—when Annette and I have been wearing our old ones all winter! That’s so like you, Tina, never considering where the money is to come from.”
“I don’t care where the money comes from! Annette, don’t you think I can have it?”
“It seems a little foolish, dear—unless you could wear it later in the season,” began Annette pacifically. “By the way, I heard you say that Francis wasn’t coming here. I thought he was going to take you and Edith to the school concert to-night.”
“No; Robert’s going to take us,” said Tina. She detached herself from her sisters’ embrace and ran away, with the black poodle after her.
“Robert,” repeated Elinor meditatively; she sat down in the chair her mother had just vacated and stared at Annette. “How very odd! Robert has never taken Tina anywhere. She must have written to him. That child does the most unexpected things! I was wondering last night if I would care for Robert if he were quite different. Some men have such a brutal streak in them. On the other hand, you like a man to know his own mind and keep to it.”
“Yes, indeed,” assented Annette absently. She dropped down on the lounge. “Joseph and I were figuring last night that if we had two dollars more a month we might really get married. That would include the twenty-five cents a week for doctor’s bills—I suppose we ought to allow that.” She stopped a moment to switch onto another track. “It seemed to me there was something odd in Tina’s manner this morning, Elinor; I think she has some plan about Francis!”
As that week went on, and the next and the next, it became apparent to all that there was a change in the dear little youngest. She threw herself into her studies with exemplary conscientiousness, she performed her small, appointed tasks with the modicum of fractiousness. She went out nowhere. She was as lively and capricious as she had always been, and although she celebrated her eighteenth birthday, seemed younger than ever; but through it all there was an odd change—an absence of earnestness when she was earnest, an absence of mirth when she was mirthful. In some unexplained way Tina wasn’t with them; something ineffably bright and soul-inspiring had dropped out of the household. The loss of it made a growing little undercurrent of uneasiness, of anxiety. Through all the daily living there is in every home a fateful knowledge of the unexpressed.
It is impossible to hide one’s secrets. The whole family felt sure that Tina was thinking of Francis Fanshawe, though she never even looked out of the window when he spun past it, as sometimes happened, in his big, white motor car, filled with a gay crowd of bugle-blowing boys. Elinor, with the tacit consent of her elders, actually wrote a note inviting him to the house. He came, indeed, but Tina refused to see him, playing checkers up-stairs in the library with Robert, who had a meditative, humorous way of beating her, while Elinor, perforce, did the entertaining. The big youth was not unpleasing, as she owned afterwards, though he said next to nothing, but his blue eyes looked unusually appreciative and he gripped her hand so hard when he left that her fingers were nearly welded into each other.
It was at the end of the month that Tina came into her mother’s room one morning with an unexpected rush, her golden head thrown back, the black poodle barking delightedly at her heels. There was a note in her voice which had not been there in these four weeks past, as she said: