Mrs. Burnham arose suddenly and closed both of the doors opening into the hall. She knew that her son was in town, and that his wife had gone by appointment to meet him there; but it seemed to her that such extraordinary talk as this must be closed away from the hall through which they must presently pass. What could this woman mean? She but fourteen when Irene was married? Yet she was at least eighteen when she visited her brother in the college town, and that was nearly fifteen years ago! Irene a married woman seventeen or eighteen years ago! She could see a line in that fateful foreign letter from her son as distinctly as though she were reading it from the page, 'although she is so young, barely twenty-six, she has,' etc. Of course there was some absurd mistake. Irene could not have been more than eight or nine years old at that time when some one whom Mamie Parker fancied was the same person, was married.
"How old do you think my son's wife is?" she asked suddenly. A few statistics, such as she could furnish, would help to clear up this absurd blunder.
"Oh, I know exactly. I have a vivid recollection of the wonderful doings there were in honor of her sixteenth birthday. It happens that our birthdays fall on the very same month and day, the eleventh of November; so that on the day she was sixteen, I was thirteen. I remember how sorely I took to heart the contrast between the two celebrations. It was before my father had made his successes, and we were much straitened at the time."
Mrs. Burnham's pulses were athrob with her effort at self-control. It was true that Irene's birthday fell on the eleventh of November. It had been celebrated with much circumstance that very season; but instead of its being her twenty-seventh, Miss Parker's story would make it her thirty-seventh! That was absurd! And yet—how often had the thought occurred to her that Irene looked much older than her years! Her maiden name, too, was Carpenter, and her married name had been Somerville. Still, there must have been a cousin, or some near relative of the same name. It was an insult to the family to suppose for a moment that Irene could deceive her husband as to her exact age!
And then, Miss Parker made a remark before which all else that she had said sank into insignificance.
"Mrs. Erskine Burnham as I saw her to-day, seemed to me a very beautiful woman, though she does not look in the least as she did when a girl. But her daughter does. At seventeen, Maybelle is really the image of what her mother was at that age. I wish so much that you could see her just now, in all her girlish beauty."
CHAPTER XVI
FOR MAYBELLE'S SAKE