THE
BELOVED WOMAN

By KATHLEEN NORRIS

Author of

"Harriet and the Piper," etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers
New York

Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Page & Company
Printed in U. S. A.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

TO
MARY O'SULLIVAN SUTRO

For gifts beyond all counting and esteeming,
For kindness than which Heaven's self is not kinder,
For the old days of tears, and smiles, and dreaming,
This in acknowledgment, and in reminder.

CHAPTER I

For forty-eight hours the snow-storm had been raging unabated over New York. After a wild and windy Thursday night the world had awakened to a mysterious whirl of white on Friday morning, and to a dark, strange day of steady snowing. Now, on Saturday, dirty snow was banked and heaped in great blocks everywhere, and still the clean, new flakes fluttered and twirled softly down, powdering and feathering every little ledge and sill, blanketing areas in spotless white, capping and hooding every unsightly hydrant and rubbish-can with exquisite and lavish beauty. Shovels had clinked on icy sidewalks all the first day, and even during the night the sound of shouting and scraping had not ceased for a moment, and their more and more obvious helplessness in the teeth of the storm awakened at last in the snow-shovellers, and in the men and women who gasped and stumbled along the choked thoroughfares, a sort of heady exhilaration in the emergency, a tendency to be proud of the storm, and of its effect upon their humdrum lives. They laughed and shouted as they battled with it, and as Nature's great barrier of snow threw down the little barriers of convention and shyness. Men held out their hands to slipping and stumbling women, caught them by their shoulders, panted to them that this was a storm, all right, this was the worst yet! Girls, staggering in through the revolving glass doors of the big department stores, must stand laughing helplessly for a few seconds in the gush of reviving warmth, while they beat their wet gloves together, regaining breath and self-possession, and straightened outraged millinery.

Traffic was congested, deserted trucks and motor-cars lined the side streets, the subways were jammed, the surface cars helpless. Here and there long lines of the omnibuses stood blocked in snow, and the press frantically heralded impending shortages of milk and coal, reiterating pessimistically: "No relief in sight."

But late in Saturday morning there was a sudden lull. The snow stopped, the wind fell, and the pure, cold air was motionless and sweet. The city emerged exhausted from its temporary blanketing, and from the buried benches of Bowling Green to the virgin sweep of pure white beyond Van Cortlandt Park, began its usual January fight with the snow.

A handsome, rosy old lady, wrapped regally in furs, and with a maid picking her way cautiously beside her, was one of the first to take advantage of the sudden change in the weather. Mrs. Melrose had been held captive for almost two days, first by Thursday's inclement winds, and then by the blizzard. Her motor-car was useless, and although at sixty she was an extremely youthful and vigorous woman, her daughters and granddaughter had threatened to use force rather than let her risk the danger of an expedition on foot, at least while the storm continued.

But now the wind was gone, and by the time Mrs. Melrose had been properly shod, and coated, and hatted, there was even a dull glimmer toward the southeast that indicated the location of the long-lost sun. The old lady looked her approval at Fifth Avenue, with all its crudities veiled and softened by the snowfall, and as she climbed into an omnibus expressed herself firmly to Regina.

"You mark my words, the sun will be out before we come home!"

Regina, punching the two dimes carefully into the jolting receiver, made only a respectful murmur for answer. She was, like many a maid, a snob where her mistress was concerned, and she did not like to have Mrs. Melrose ride in public omnibuses. For Regina herself it did not matter, but Mrs. Melrose was one of the city's prominent and wealthy women, and Regina could not remember that she had ever sunk to the use of a public conveyance before to-day. The maid was glad when they descended at a street in the East Sixties. They would probably be sent home, she reflected, in Mrs. Liggett's car. For Regina noticed that private cars were beginning to grind and slip over the snow again.

Old Mrs. Melrose was going to see her daughter Alice, who was Mrs. Christopher Liggett, because Alice was an invalid. It had been only a few years after Alice's most felicitous marriage, a dozen years ago, when an accident had laid the lovely and brilliant woman upon the bed of helplessness that she might never leave again. There was no real reason why the spine should continue useless, the great specialists said, there was a hope—even a probability—that as Alice grew rested and strong, after the serious accident, she might find herself walking again. But Alice had been a prisoner for ten years now, and the mother and sister who idolized her feared that she would never again be the old dancing Alice and feared that she knew it. What Christopher Liggett feared they did not know. He insisted that Alice's illness was but temporary, and was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife. Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions.

The young Liggetts had sold the old house of Christopher's father, an immense brownstone mansion a few squares away, and lived in a modern, flat-faced gray-stone house that rose five stories from the beautifully arranged basement entrance. There were stone benches at the entrance, and a great iron grill, and two potted trees, and the small square windows were leaded, and showed blossoming plants inside. The three long windows above gave upon a little-used formal drawing-room, with a Gothic fireplace of white stone at one end, and a dim jumble of rich colours and polished surfaces between that and the big piano at the other. The room at the back, on this floor, was an equally large and formal dining-room, gleaming with carved mahogany and fretted plate, used only on the rare occasions of a dinner-party.

But on the floor above the gracious mistress of the house had her domain, and here there was enough beauty and colour to make the whole house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there. The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on the top of one of the low, plain, built-in bookcases, were framed alike. There were no meaningless vases, no jars or trays or plaques or ornaments in Alice's room. Her flowers she liked to see in shining glass bowls; her flat-topped desk was severely bare.

But the cretonne that dressed her big comfortable chairs and her couch was bright with roses and parrots and hollyhocks, and the same cretonne, with plain net undercurtaining, hung at her four front windows. The room was big enough to accommodate besides, even with an air of space and simplicity, the little grand piano that Christopher played for her almost every night. A great Persian tortoise-shell cat was at home here, and sometimes Alice had her magnificent parrot besides, hanging himself upside down on his gaily-painted stand, and veiling the beady, sharp eye with which he watched her. The indulgent extravagance of her mother had bound all the books that Alice loved in the same tone of stony-blue vellum, the countless cushions with which the aching back was so skillfully packed were of the same dull tone, and it pleased the persons who loved her to amuse the prisoner sometimes with a ring in which her favourite note was repeated, or a chain of old lapis-lazuli that made Alice's appreciative blue eyes more blue.

Back of Alice's room was a den in which Christopher could conduct much of his personal business, and beyond that was the luxurious bathroom, a modern miracle of enamel tiling and shining glass. Across the sun-flooded back of the house were Alice's little bedroom, nunlike in its rigid austerity, her nurse's room adjoining, and a square sun-room, giving glimpses of roofs and trim back-gardens, full of flowers, with a little fountain and goldfish, a floor of dull pink tiling, and plants in great jars of Chinese enamel. Christopher had planned this delightful addition to Alice's domain only a few years ago, and, with that knowledge of her secret heart that only Christopher could claim, had let her share the pleasure of designing and arranging it. It stretched out across the west side of the spacious backyard, almost touching the branches of the great plane tree, and when, after the painful move to her mother's house, and the necessary absence during the building of it, Alice had been brought back to this new evidence of their love and goodness, she had buried her face against Christopher's shoulder, and told him that she didn't think people with all the world to wander in had ever had anything lovelier than this!

One of the paintings that Alice might look at idly, in the silence of the winter noon, was of a daisied meadow, stretching between walls of heavy summer woodland to the roof of a half-buried farmhouse in the valley below. The other picture was of the very mother who was coming toward Alice now, in the jolting omnibus. But it was a younger mother, and a younger Alice, that had been captured by the painter's genius. It was a stout, imperious, magnificently gowned woman, of not much more than thirty, in whose spreading silk lap a fair little girl was sitting. This little earnest-eyed child was Alice at seven. The splendid, dark-eyed, proud-looking boy of about fourteen, who stood beside the mother, was Teddy, her only son, dead now for many years, and perhaps mercifully dead. The fourth and last person pictured was the elder daughter, Annie, who had been about nine years old then, Alice remembered. Annie and Alice had been unusually alike, even for sisters, but even then Annie's fair, aristocratic type of blonde prettiness had been definite where Alice's was vague, and Annie's expression had been just a trifle haughty and discontented where Alice's was always grave and sweet. Annie had almost been a beauty, she was extremely and conspicuously good-looking even now, when as Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens, wife of a son of an old and wealthy Knickerbocker family, she was supreme in the very holy of holies of the city's social life.

Mrs. Melrose came unannounced upon her daughter to-day, and Alice's colourless warm cheek flushed with happiness under her mother's fresh, cold kiss.

"Mummy—you darling! But how did you get here? Miss Slater says that the streets are absolutely impassable!"

"I came in the 'bus, dear," Mrs. Melrose said, very much pleased with herself. "How warm and comfy you are in here, darling. But what did I interrupt?"

"You didn't interrupt anything," Alice said, quickly. "Chris telephoned, and he's bringing Henrici—the Frenchman who wrote that play I loved so—to tea. Isn't that fun? I'm so excited—and I think Chris was such a duck to get hold of him. I was translating it, you know, and Bowditch, who was here for dinner last night, told me he'd place it, if I finished it. And now I can talk it over with Henrici himself—thanks to Chris! Chris met my man at the club, and told him about me, and he said he would be charmed. So I telephoned several persons, and I tried to get hold of Annie——"

"Annie has a lunch—and a board meeting at the hospital at four," Annie's mother remembered, "and Leslie is at a girls' luncheon somewhere. Annie had breakfast with me, and was rushing off afterward. She's quite wonderfully faithful about those things."

"Well, but you'll stay for lunch and tea, too, Mummy?" Alice pleaded. She was lying back in her pillows, feasting her eyes upon her mother's face with that peculiarly tense devotion that was part of her nature. Rarely did a day pass without their meeting, and no detail touching Annie's life, Annie's boys or husband, was too small to interest Alice. She was especially interested, too, in Leslie, the eighteen-year-old daughter that her brother Theodore had left to his mother's care; in fact, between the mother and daughters, the one granddaughter and two little grandsons, and the two sons-in-law of the Melrose family, a deep bond existed, a bond of pride as well as affection. It was one of their favourite boasts that to the Melroses the unity and honour of the family was the first consideration in the world.

But to-day Mrs. Melrose could not stay. At one o'clock she left Alice to be put into her prettiest robe by the devoted Miss Slater, saw with satisfaction that preparations for tea were noiselessly under way, called Regina, odorous of tea and mutton chops, from the pantry, and went out into the quiet cold of the winter noon.

The old Melrose house was a substantial, roomy, brownstone building in Madison Avenue, inconspicuous perhaps among several notoriously handsome homes, but irreproachably dignified none the less. A few blocks below it the commercial current of East Thirty-fourth Street ebbed and flowed; a few blocks north the great façade of the Grand Central Station shut off the street completely. Third Avenue, behind it, swarmed and rattled alarmingly close, and Broadway flared its impudent signs only five minutes' walk in the other direction, but here, in a little oasis of quiet street, two score of old families serenely held their place against the rising tide, and among them the Melroses confidently felt themselves valued and significant.

Mrs. Melrose mounted her steps with the householder's secret complacency. They were scrupulously brushed of the last trace of snow, and the heavy door at the top swung noiselessly open to admit her. She suddenly realized that she was very tired, that her fur coat was heavy, and her back ached. She swept straight to the dark old curving stairway, and mounted slowly.

"Joseph," she said over her shoulder, "send luncheon upstairs, please. And when Miss Leslie comes in, tell her I should like to see her, if it isn't too late. Anybody coming to-night?"

"Mr. von Behrens telephoned that he and Mr. Liggett might come in for a moment, on his way to the banquet at the Waldorf, Madam. But that was all."

"I may have dinner upstairs, too, if Leslie is going anywhere," Mrs. Melrose said to herself, mounting slowly. And it seemed to her fatigue very restful to find her big room warm and orderly, her coal fire burning behind the old-fashioned steel rods, all the homely, comfortable treasures of her busy years awaiting her. She sank into a chair, and Regina flew noiselessly about with slippers and a loose silk robe. Presently a maid was serving smoking-hot bouillon, and Mrs. Melrose felt herself relaxed and soothed; it was good to be home.

Yet there was trace of uneasiness, of something almost like apprehension, in the look that wandered thoughtfully about the overcrowded room. Presently she reached a plump, well-groomed hand toward the bell. But when Regina came to stand expectantly near her, Mrs. Melrose roused herself from a profound abstraction to assure her that she had not rung—it must have been a mistake.

"Miss Leslie hasn't come in?"

"Not yet, Madam, Miss Melrose is at Miss Higgins's luncheon."

"Yes; but it was an early luncheon," the grandmother said, discontentedly. "She was playing squash, or tennis, or something! Regina——"

"Yes, Madam?"

But Mrs. Melrose was musing again.

"Regina, I am expecting a caller at four o'clock, a Mrs. Sheridan. Please see that she is shown up at once. I want to see her here. And please——"

A pause. Regina waited.

"That's all!" her mistress announced, suddenly.

Alone again, the old lady stirred her tea, ruminated for a few moments with narrowed eyes fixed on space, recalled herself to her surroundings, and finished her cup.

Her room was large, filled with chairs and tables, lamps and cushions, silver trays and lacquer boxes, vases and jars and bowls, gift books and current magazines. There was not an unbroken inch of surface anywhere, the walls were closely set with pictures of all sorts. Along the old-fashioned mantel, a scalloped, narrow shelf of marble, was a crowding line of photographs in silver frames, and there were other framed photographs all about the room. There were the young mothers of the late eighties, seated to best display their bustles and their French twists, with heavy-headed infants in their tightly cased arms, and there were children's pictures, babes in shells, in swings, or leaning on gates. There were three Annies: one in ringlets, plaid silk, and tasselled boots, at eight; one magnificent in drawing-room plumes; and a recent one, a cloudy study of the severely superb mother, with a sleek-headed, wide-collared boy on each side of her. There was a photograph of the son Theodore, handsome, sullen, dressed in the fashion of the opening century, and there was more than one of Theodore's daughter, the last of the Melroses. Leslie had been a wide-eyed, sturdy little girl who carried a perpetually surprised, even a babyish expression into her teens, but her last pictures showed the débutante, the piquant and charming eighteen-year-old, whose knowingly tipped hat and high fur collar left only a glimpse of pretty and pouting face between.

Leslie came in upon her grandmother at about three o'clock. She was genuinely tired, after an athletic morning at the club, a luncheon amid a group of chattering intimates, and a walk with the young man whose attentions to her were thrilling not only her grandmother and aunts, but the cool-blooded little Leslie herself. Acton Liggett was Christopher's only brother, only relative indeed, and promised already to be as great a favourite as the irresistible Chris himself. Both were rich, both fine-looking, straightforward, honourable men, proud of their own integrity, their long-established family, and their old firm. Acton was pleasantly at home in the Melrose, Liggett, and Von Behrens houses, the very maids loved him, and his quiet singling out of Leslie for his devotion had satisfied everyone's sense of what was fitting and delightful. Pretty Leslie, back from a summer's idling with Aunt Annie and the little boys, in California and Hawaii, had found Acton's admiration waiting for her, with all the other joys of her débutante winter.

And even the critical Aunt Annie had to admit that the little minx was managing the whole matter with consummate skill. Leslie was not in the least self-conscious with Acton; she turned to him with all the artless confidence of a little sister. She asked him about her dancing partners, and about her gowns, and she discussed with him all the various bits of small gossip that concerned their own friends.

"Should I have said that, Acton?" she would ask, trustfully. "Shall I be Marion's bridesmaid? Would you?—after I refused Linda Fox, you know. I don't like to dance with Louis Davis, after what you told me; what shall I do when he comes up to me?"

Acton was twenty-five, seven years her senior. He advised her earnestly, over many a confidential cup of tea. And just lately, the grandmother noticed exultantly, hardly a day passed that did not find the young couple together.

"How did Acton happen to meet you, lovey?" she asked to-day, apropos of the walk.

"Why, he telephoned Vesta Higgins's, and asked me how I was going to get home. I said, walk. There was no use trying motor-cars, anyway, for they were slipping and bumping terribly! He said he was in the neighbourhood, and he came up. Granny——"

She paused, and her grandmother was conscious of a quickened heart-beat. The thoughtful almost tremulous tone was not like giddy little Leslie.

"Granny," the girl repeated, presently, "how old was my mother when she got married?"

"About twenty-two," the old woman said.

"And how old was Aunt Annie when she did?"

"Annie's about thirty-seven," her mother considered. "She was about twenty-five. But why, dear?"

"Nothing," said Leslie, and fell silent.

She was still in the silk blouse and short homespun skirt that she had worn at the athletic club luncheon, but she had thrown aside her loose woolly coat, and the narrow furs that were no softer than her own fair skin. Flung back into a deep chair, and relaxed after her vigorous day, she looked peculiarly childish and charming, her grandmother thought. She was like both her aunts, with Annie's fair, almost ashen hair and Alice's full, pretty mouth. But she was more squarely built than either, and a hint of a tip, at the end of her nose, gave her an expression at once infantile and astonished. When Leslie opened her blue eyes widely, and stared at anything, she looked like an amazed baby, and the effect of her round eyes and tilted nose was augmented by her very fair skin, and by just a sixteenth of an inch shortness in her upper lip. Of course she knew all this. Her acquaintance with her own good and bad points had begun in school days, and while through her grandmother's care her teeth were being straightened, and her eyes and throat subjected to mild forms of surgery, her Aunt Annie had seen to it that her masses of fair hair had been burnished and groomed, her hands scraped and polished into beauty, and finally that her weight was watched with scrupulous care. Nature had perhaps intended Leslie to be plump and ruddy, but modern fashion had decreed otherwise, and, with half the girls of her own age and set, Leslie took saccharine in her tea, rarely touched sweets or fried food, and had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that she was actually too slim and too willowy for her height, and interestingly colourless into the bargain.

Could Acton possibly have said anything definite to start this unusual train of thought, the grandmother speculated. With Leslie so felicitously married, she would have felt ready for her nunc dimittis. She watched Leslie expectantly. But the girl was apparently dreaming, and was staring absently at the tip of one sturdy oxford above which a stretch of thick white woollen stocking was visible almost to her knee.

"How can they fall in love with them, dressed like Welsh peasants!" the grandmother said to herself, in mild disapproval. And aloud she said: "Ah, don't, lovey!"

For Leslie had taken out a small gold case, and was regarding it thoughtfully.

"My first to-day, on my honour!" Leslie said, as she lazily lighted a sweet-scented cigarette. It never occurred to her to pay any attention to her grandmother's protest, for Grandmother had been regularly protesting against everything Leslie had done since her adored and despotic childhood. She had fainted when Leslie had dived off the dock at Newport, and had wept when Leslie had galloped through the big iron gates on her own roan stallion; she had called in Christopher, as Leslie's guardian, when Leslie, at fifteen, had calmly climbed into one of the big cars, and driven it seven miles, alone and unadvised, and totally without instruction or experience. Leslie knew that this half-scandalized and wholly-admiring opposition was one of her grandmother's secret satisfactions, and she combatted it only mechanically.

"Have one, Grandma?"

"Have one—you wild girl you! I'd like to know what a nice young man thinks when a refined girl offers him——"

"All the nice young men are smoking themselves, like chimneys!"

"Ah, but that's a very different thing. No, my dear, no man, whether he smokes himself or not, likes to have a sweet, womanly girl descend——"

"Darling, didn't you ever do anything that my revered great-grandmother Murison disapproved of?" Leslie teased, dropping on her knees before her grandmother, and resting her arms on her lap.

"Smoke——! My mother would have fainted," said Mrs. Melrose. "And don't blow that nasty-smelling stuff in my face!"

But she could not resist the pleasure that the lovely young face, so near her own, gave her, and she patted it with her soft, wrinkled hand. Suddenly Leslie jumped up eagerly, listening to the sound of voices in the hall.

"There's Aunt Annie—oh, goody! I wanted to ask her——"

But it was Regina who opened the door, showing in two callers. The first was a splendid-looking woman of perhaps forty-five, with a rosy, cheerful face, and wide, shrewd gray eyes shining under a somewhat shabby mourning veil. With her was a pretty girl of eighteen, or perhaps a little more.

Leslie glanced astonished at her grandmother. It was extremely unusual to have callers shown in in this unceremonious fashion, even if she had been rather unprepossessed by these particular callers. The younger woman's clothing, indeed, if plain, was smart and simple; her severe tailor-made had a collar of beaver fur to relieve its dark blue, and her little hat of blue beaver felt was trimmed only by a band of the same fur. She had attractive dark-blue eyes and a flashing smile.

But her companion's comfortable dowdiness, her black cotton gloves, her squarely built figure, and worn shoes, all awakened a certain contempt in the granddaughter of the house, and caused Leslie shrewdly to surmise that these humble strangers were pensioners of her grandmother, the older one probably an old servant.

"Kate Sheridan!" Old Mrs. Melrose had gotten to her feet, and had put her arm about the visitor. "Well, my dear, my dear, I've not seen you these——What is it? Don't tell me how many years it is! And which daughter is this?"

"This is my niece, Norma," the older woman said, in a delightful rich voice that was full of easy confidence and friendliness. "This is Mrs. Melrose, Norma, darling, that was such a good friend to me and mine years ago!"

"No warmer friend than you were to me, Kate," the old lady said, quickly, still keeping an arm about the sturdy figure. "This is my granddaughter, Theodore's little girl," Mrs. Melrose added, catching Leslie with her free hand.

Leslie was not more of a snob than is natural to a girl of her age and upbringing, but she could not but give Mrs. Sheridan a pretty cool glance. Grandmother's old friends were all very well——

But Mrs. Sheridan was studying her with affectionate freedom.

"And isn't she Miss Alice's image! But she's like you all—she's like Mr. Theodore, too, especially through the eyes!"

And she turned back to her hostess, interested, animated, and as oblivious to Leslie's hostile look as if the girl were her own picture on the wall.

"And you and my Norma must know each other," she said, presently, watching the girls as they shook hands, with a world of love and solicitude in her eyes.

"Sit down, both you two," Mrs. Melrose said. Leslie glanced at the strapped watch at her wrist.

"Grandmother, I really——" she began.

"No, you don't really!" her grandmother smiled. "Talk to Miss Sheridan while I talk"—she turned smiling to her old friend—"to Kate! Tell me, how are you all, Kate? And where are you all—you were in Detroit?"

"We've been in New York more than two years now, and why I haven't been to see you before, perhaps you can tell me, for I can't!" Kate Sheridan said. "But my boy is a great big fellow now; Wolf's twenty-four, and Rose is twenty-one, and this one," she nodded toward Norma, who was exchanging comments on the great storm with Leslie, "this one is nearly nineteen! And you see they're all working: Wolf's doing wonderfully with a firm of machine manufacturers, in Newark, and Rose has been with one real estate firm since we came. And Norma here works in a bookstore, up the Avenue a bit, Biretta's."

"Why, I go in there nearly every week!" the old lady said.

"She told me the other night that she had been selling some books to Mr. Christopher Liggett, and that's Miss Alice's husband, I hear," said Mrs. Sheridan. "She's in what they call the Old Book Room," she added, lowering her voice. "She's wonderful about books, reads them, and knows them as if they were children—they think the world of her in there! And I keep house for the three of them, and what with this and that—I never have any time!"

"But you have someone to help you, Kate?" the old lady asked, with her amused and affectionate eyes on the other's wholesome face.

"Why would I?" demanded Mrs. Sheridan, roundly. "The girls are a great help——"

"She always assumes a terrific brogue the minute you ask her why we don't have someone in to help her," Norma contributed, with a sort of shy and loving audacity. "She'll tell you in a minute that faith, she and her sister used to run barefoot over the primroses, and they blooming beyond anything the Lord ever created, and the spring on them——"

Leslie Melrose laughed out suddenly, in delighted appreciation, and the tension between the two girls was over. They had not quite known how to talk to each other; Norma naturally assuming that Leslie looked down upon a seller of books, and anxious to show her that she was unconscious of either envy or inferiority, and Leslie at a loss because her usual social chatter was as foreign here as a strange tongue would be. But no type is quicker to grasp upon amusement, and to appreciate the amuser, than Leslie's, unable to amuse itself, and skilled in seeking for entertainment. She was too shy to ask Norma to imitate her aunt again, but her stiffness relaxed, and she asked Norma if it was not great "fun" to sell things—especially at Christmas, for instance. Norma asked in turn if Mr. Liggett was not Leslie's uncle, and said that she had sold him hundreds of beautiful books for his wife, and had even had a note from Leslie's Aunt Alice, thanking her for some little courtesy.

"But isn't that funny!" Leslie said, with her childish widening of the eyes. "That you should know Chris!"

"Well, now," said Mrs. Sheridan's voice, cutting across both conversations, "where can these girls go for about fifteen minutes? I'll tell you my little bit of business, Mrs. Melrose, and then Norma and I will go along. It won't take me fifteen minutes, for there's nothing to decide to-day," the girls heard her add, comfortably, as they went into the hall.

"Leslie!" her grandmother called after her. "If you must change, dear—but wait a minute, is that Aunt Annie out there?"

"No, Grandma, just ourselves. What were you going to say?"

"I was going to say, lovey, that you could ask Miss Sheridan to wait in the library; her aunt tells me she is fond of books." Mrs. Melrose did not quite like to commit Leslie to entertaining the strange girl for perhaps half an hour. She was pleasantly reassured by Leslie's answering voice:

"We'll have tea in my room, Grandma. Marion and Doris may come in!"

"That's right, have a good time!" her grandmother answered. And then settling back comfortably, she added with her kind, fussy superiority, "Well, Kate, I've wondered where you were hiding yourself all this time! Let's have the business. But first I want to say that I appreciate your turning to me. If it's money—I've got it. If it's something else, Chris Liggett is one of the cleverest men in New York, and we'll consult him."

"It's not money, thank God!" Mrs. Sheridan said, in her forthright voice. "Lord knows where it all comes from, these days, but the children always have plenty," she added, glad of a diversion. "They bought themselves a car two years ago, and if it isn't a Victrola this week, it's a thermos bottle, or a pair of white buckskin shoes! Rose told me she paid eight dollars for her corsets. 'Eight dollars for what,' I said, 'a dozen?' But then I've the two houses in Brooklyn, you know——"

"You still have those?"

"I have, indeed. And even the baby—we call Norma the baby—is earning good money now."

"She has your name, Kate—Sheridan. Had your husband a brother?"

Kate Sheridan's face grew a trifle pale. She glanced at the door to see that it was shut, and at the one to the adjoining room to make sure that it was closed also. Then she turned to Mrs. Melrose, and it was an anxious glance she directed at the older woman.

"Well, now, there's no hurry about this," she began, "and you may say that it's all nonsense, and send me packing—and God knows I hope you will! But it just began to get on my mind—and I've never been a great one to worry! I'll begin at the beginning——"

CHAPTER II

Marion Duer and Doris Alexander duly arrived for tea with Leslie, and Norma was introduced. They all sat in Leslie's room, and laughed as they reached for crumpets, and marvelled at the storm. Norma found them rather younger than their years, and shyly anxious to be gracious. On her part she realized with some surprise that they were not really unapproachable, and that Leslie was genuinely anxious to take her to tea with Aunt Alice some day, and have them "talk books and things." The barriers between such girls as this one and herself, Norma was honest enough to admit, were largely of her own imagining. They were neither so contemptibly helpless nor so scornfully clever as she had fancied them; they were just laughing girls, absorbed in thoughts of gowns and admirers and good times, like her cousin Rose and herself.

There had been perhaps one chance in one hundred that she and Leslie Melrose might at once become friends, but by fortunate accident that chance had favoured them. Leslie's spontaneous laugh in Mrs. Melrose's room, her casual mention of tea, her appreciative little phrases as she introduced to Marion and Doris the young lady who picked out books for Aunt Alice, had all helped to crush out the vaguely hostile impulse Norma Sheridan had toward rich little members of a society she only knew by hearsay. Norma had found herself sitting on Leslie's big velvet couch laughing and chatting quite naturally, and where Norma chatted naturally the day was won. She could be all friendliness, and all sparkle and fun, and presently Leslie was listening to her in actual fascination.

The butler announced a motor-car, a maid came up; Doris and Marion had to go. Leslie and Norma went into Leslie's dressing-room, and Leslie's maid went obsequiously to and fro, and the girls talked almost intimately as they washed their hands and brushed their hair. Neither cared that the time was passing.

But the time was passing none the less. Five o'clock came with a pale and uncertain sunset, and a cold twilight began to settle over the snowy city. Leslie and Norma came back to the fire, and were standing there, a trifle uncertainly, but still talking hard and fast, when there was an interruption.

They looked at each other, paling. What was that?

There was utter silence in the old house. Leslie, with a frightened look at Norma, ran to the hall door. As she opened it Mrs. Sheridan opened the door of her grandmother's room opposite, and called, quite loudly:

"It's nothing, dear! Get hold of your grandmother's maid—somebody! She feels a little—but she's quite all right!"

Leslie and Norma ran across the hall, and into Mrs. Melrose's room. By this time Regina had come flying in, and two of the younger maids, and Joseph had run upstairs. Leslie had only one glimpse of her grandmother, leaning against Regina's arm, and drinking from a glass of water that shook in the maid's hands. Then Mrs. Sheridan guided both herself and Norma firmly into the hall, and reassured them cheerfully:

"The room was very hot, dear, and your grandmother said that she had gotten tired, walking in the wind. She's quite all right—you can go in immediately. No; she didn't faint—she just had a moment of dizziness, and called out."

Regina came out, too evidently convinced that she had to deal with a murderess, and coldly asked that Mrs. Sheridan would please step back for a minute. Mrs. Sheridan immediately complied, but it was hardly more than a minute when she joined the girls again.

"She wants to see you, dear," she said to Leslie, whose first frightened tears had dried from bewilderment and curiosity, "and we must hurry on. Come, Norma, we'll say good-night!"

"Good-night, Miss Melrose," Norma said.

"Good-night," Leslie answered, hesitating over the name. Her wide babyish smile, the more appealing because of her wet lashes, made a sudden impression upon Norma's heart. Leslie hung childishly on the upstairs balustrade, in the dim wide upper hall, and watched them go. "I—I almost called you Norma!" she confessed, mischievously.

"I wish you had!" Norma called up from below. She was in great spirits as they went out into the deepening cold blue of the street, and almost persuaded her aunt to take the omnibus up the Avenue. But Mrs. Sheridan protested rather absent-mindedly against this extravagance. They were close to the subway and that was quicker.

Norma could not talk in the packed and swaying train, and when they emerged at Sixty-fifth Street they had only one slippery, cold, dark block to walk. But when they had reached the flat, and snapped on lights everywhere, and cast off outer garments, aproned and busy, in the kitchen, she burst out:

"What on earth was the matter with that old lady, Aunt Kate?"

"Oh, I suppose they all eat too much, and sleep too much, and pamper themselves as if they were babies," her aunt returned, composedly, "and so it doesn't take much to upset 'em!"

"Oh, come now!" the girl said, stopping with arrested knife. "That wasn't what made her let out a yell like that!"

Mrs. Sheridan, kneeling at the oven of the gas stove, laughed uneasily.

"Oh, you could hear that, could you?"

"Hear it! They heard it in Yonkers."

"Well," Mrs. Sheridan said, "she has always been high-strung, that one. I remember years ago she'd be going into crying and raving fits. She's got very deep affections, Mrs. Melrose, and when she gets thinking of Theodore, and of Alice's accident, and this and that, she'll go right off the handle. She had been crying, poor soul, and suddenly she began this moaning and rocking. I told her I'd call someone if she didn't stop, for she'd go from bad to worse, with me."

"But why with you, Aunt Kate? Do you know her so well?"

"Do I know them?" Mrs. Sheridan dug an opener into a can of corn with a vigorous hand. "I know them all!"

"But how was that?" Norma persisted, now dropping her peeled potatoes into dancing hot water.

"I've told you five thousand times, but you and Rose would likely have one of your giggling fits on, and not a word would you remember!" her aunt said. "I've told you that years ago, when your Uncle Tom died, and I was left with two babies, and not much money, a friend of mine, a milliner she was, told me that she knew a lady that wanted someone to help manage her affairs—household affairs. Well, I'd often helped your Uncle Tom with his books, and my mother was with me, to look out for the children——"

"Where was I, Aunt Kate?"

"You! Wolf wasn't but three, and Rose a year old—where would you be?"

"I was minus two years," Norma said, sententiously. "I was part of the cosmic all——"

"You be very careful how you talk about such things until you're a married woman!" her aunt said. "Salt those potatoes, darling. Norma, can you remember what I did with the corn that Rose liked so?"

Norma was attentive.

"You beat it up with eggs, and it came out a sort of puff," she recalled. "I know—you put a little cornstarch in, to give it body! Listen, Aunt Kate, how long did you stay with Mrs. Melrose?"

"Well, first I just watched her help for her, and paid the bills, and went to market. And then I got gradually managing more and more; I'd go to pay her interest, or deposit money, or talk to tenants; I liked it and she liked me. And then she talked me into going to France with her, but I cried all the way for my children, and I was glad enough to come home again! She and Miss Annie spent some time over there, but I came back. Miss Alice was in school, and Theodore—dear knows where he was—into some mischief somewhere! But I'd saved money, and she'd given me the Brooklyn houses, and I took a boarder or two, and that was the last I ever worked for any one but my own!"

"Well, that's a nice girl, that Leslie," Norma said, "if her father was wild!"

"Her mother was a good girl," Kate said, "I knew her. But the old lady was proud, Baby—God save any one of us from pride like that! You'd never know it, to see her now, but she was very proud. Theodore's wife was a good girl, but she was Miss Annie's maid, and what Mrs. Melrose never could forgive was that when she ordered the girl out of the house, she showed her her wedding certificate. She was Mrs. Theodore Melrose, fast enough—though his mother never would see her or acknowledge her in any way."

"They must think the Lord has made a special arrangement for them—people like that!" Norma commented, turning a lovely flushed face from the pan where she was dexterously crisping bacon. "What business is it of hers if her son marries a working girl? That gives me a feeling akin to pain—just because she happens to have a lot of money! What does Miss Leslie Melrose think of that?"

"I don't know what she thinks—she loves her grandmother, I suppose. Mrs. Melrose took her in when she was only a tiny girl, and she's been the apple of her eye ever since. Theodore and his wife were divorced, and when Leslie was about four or five he came back to his mother to die—poor fellow! It was a terrible sorrow to the old lady—she'd had her share, one way and another! My goodness, Norma," Mrs. Sheridan interrupted herself to say, in half-reproachful appreciation, "I wish you'd always help me like this, my dear! You can be as useful as ten girls, when you've a mind to! And then perhaps to-morrow you'll be as contrary——!"

"Oh, Aunt Kate, aren't you ashamed! When I ironed all your dish-towels last night, when you were setting bread, and I made the popovers Sunday!" Norma kissed her aunt, brushed a dab of cornstarch from the older woman's firm cheek, and performed a sort of erratic dance about the protestant and solid figure. "I'm a poor working girl," she said, "and I get dragged out with my long, hard day!"

"Well, God knows that's true, too," her aunt said, with a sudden look of compunction; "you may make a joke of it, but it's no life for a girl. My dear," she added, seriously, holding Norma with a firm arm, and looking into her eyes, "I hope I did no harm by what I did to-day! I did it for the best, whatever comes of it."

"You mean stirring up the whole thing?" Norma asked, frowning a little in curiosity and bewilderment. "Going to see her?"

"That—yes." Mrs. Sheridan rubbed her forehead with her hand, a fashion she had when puzzled or troubled, and suddenly resumed, with a great rattling of pans and hissing of water, her operations at the sink. "Well, nothing may come of it—we'll see!" she added, briskly. Norma, who was watching her expectantly, sighed disappointedly; the subject was too evidently closed. But a second later she was happily distracted by the slamming of the front door; Wolf and Rose Sheridan had come in together, and dinner was immediately served.

Norma recounted, with her own spirited embellishments, her adventures of the afternoon as the meal progressed. She had had "fun" getting to the office in the first place, a man had helped her, and they had both skidded into another man, and bing!—they had all gone down on the ice together. And then at the shop nobody had come in, and the lights had been lighted, and the clerks had all gathered together and talked. Then Aunt Kate had come in to have lunch, and to have Norma go with her to the gas company's office about the disputed charge, and they had decided to make, at last, that long-planned call on the Melroses. There followed a description of the big house and the spoiled, pretty girl, and the impressive yet friendly old lady.

"And Aunt Kate—I'm sorry to say!—talked her into a nervous convulsion. You did, Aunt Kate—the poor old lady gave one piercing yell——"

"You awful girl, there'll be a judgment on you for your impudence!" her aunt said, fondly. But Rose looked solicitously at her mother, and said:

"Mother looks as if she had had a nervous convulsion, too. You look terribly tired, Mother!"

"Well, I had a little business to discuss with Mrs. Melrose," Mrs. Sheridan said, "and I'm no hand for business!"

"You know it!" Wolf Sheridan concurred, with his ready laugh. "Why didn't you send me?"

"It was her business, lovey," his mother said, mildly, over her second heartening cup of strong black tea.

The Sheridan apartment was, in exterior at least, exactly like one hundred thousand others that line the side streets of New York. It faced the familiar grimy street, fringed on the great arteries each side by cigarette stands and saloons, and it was entered by the usual flight of stained and shabby steps, its doorway showing a set of some dozen letter-boxes, and looking down upon a basement entrance frequently embellished with ash-cans and milk-bottles, and, just at present, with banks of soiled and sooty snow. The Sheridans climbed three long flights inside, to their own rooms, but as this gained them a glimpse of river, and a sense in summer of airiness and height, to say nothing of pleasant nearness to the roof, they rarely complained of the stairs—in fact, rarely thought of them at all.

With the opening of their own door, however, all likeness to their neighbours ceased. Even in a class where home ties and home comforts are far more common than is generally suspected, Kate Sheridan was exceptional, and her young persons fortunate among their kind. Her training had been, she used to tell them, "old country" training, but it was not only in fresh linen and hot, good food that their advantage lay. It was in the great heart that held family love a divine gift, that had stood between them and life's cold realities for some twenty courageous years. Kate idolized her own two children and her foster-child with a passion that is the purest and the strongest in the world. In possessing them, she thought herself the most blessed of women. To keep a roof over their heads, to watch them progress triumphantly through long division and measles and skates, to see milk glasses emptied and plates scraped, to realize that Wolf was as strong morally as he was physically, and that all her teachers called Rose an angel, to spoil and adore the beautiful, mischievous, and amusing "Baby"; this made a life full to the brim, for Kate, of pride and happiness. Kate had never had a servant, or a fur coat; for long intervals she had not had a night's unbroken rest; and there had been times, when Wolf's fractured arm necessitated a doctor's bill, or when coal for the little Detroit house had made a disproportionate hole in her bank account, in which even the thrifty Kate had known biting financial worry.

But the children never knew it. They knew only her law of service and love. They must love each other, whatever happened. There was no quarrelling at meals at Kate's house. Rose must of course oblige her brother, sew on the button, or take his book to the library; Wolf must always protect the girls, and consider them. Wolf firmly believed his sister and cousin to be the sweetest girls in the world; Rose and Norma regarded Wolf as perfection in human form. They rarely met without embraces, never without brightening eyes and light hearts.

That this attitude toward each other was only the result of the healthy bodies and honest souls that Kate had given them they would hardly have believed. That her resolute training had literally forced them to love and depend upon themselves in a world where brothers and sisters as habitually teased and annoyed each other, would have struck them as fantastic. Perhaps Kate herself hardly knew the power of her own will upon them. Her commands in their babyhood had not been couched in the language of modern child-analysts, nor had she given, or been able to give, any particular reason for her law. But the instinct by which she drew Wolf's attention to his sister's goodness, or noted Wolf's cleverness for Rose's benefit, was better than any reason. She summed the situation up simply for the few friends she had, with the phrase:

"They're all crazy about each other, every one of them!"

Kate's parlour would have caused Annie von Behrens actual faintness. But it was a delightful place to Rose and Wolf and their friends. The cushioned divan on Sunday nights customarily held a row of them, the upright ebony piano sifted popular music impartially upon the taboret, the patent rocker, and the Rover rug. They laughed, gossiped, munched candy, and experimented in love-making quite as happily as did Leslie and her own intimates. They streamed out into the streets, and sauntered along under the lights to the moving pictures, or on hot summer nights they perched like tiers of birds on the steps, and the world and youth seemed sweet to them. In Kate's dining-room, finished in black wood and red paper, they made Welsh rarebits and fudge, and in Kate's spotless kitchen odours of toast and coffee rose at unseemly hours.

Lately, Rose and Norma had been talking of changes. Rose was employed in an office whose severe and beautiful interior decoration had cost thousands of dollars, and Norma's Old Book Room was a study in dull carved woods, Oriental rugs, dull bronzes, and flawless glass. The girls began to feel that a plain cartridge paper and net curtains might well replace the parlour's florid green scrolling and Nottingham lace. But they did not worry about it; it served as a topic to amuse their leisure hours. The subject was generally routed by a shrewd allusion, from Norma or Wolf, to the sort of parlour people would like if they got married, married to someone who was doing very well in the shoe business, for example.

These allusions deepened the colour in Rose's happy face; she had been "going" for some three months with an attractive young man who exactly met these specifications—not her first admirer, not noticeable for any especial quality, yet Rose and Norma, and Kate, too, felt in their souls that Rose's hour had come. Young Harry Redding was a big, broad, rather inarticulate fellow, whose humble calling was not the more attractive to the average young woman because he supported his mother by it. But he suited Rose, more, he seemed wonderful to Rose, and because her dreams had always been humble and self-sacrificing, Harry was a thousand times more than she had dreamed. She felt herself the luckiest girl in the world.

Kate sat at the head of her table, and Wolf at the foot. Rose, a gentle, quiet copy of her handsome mother, was nearest the kitchen door, to which she made constant flying trips. Norma was opposite Rose, and by falling back heavily could tip her entire chair against the sideboard, from which she extracted forks or salt or candy, as the case might be. The telephone was in the dining-room, Wolf's especial responsibility, and Mrs. Sheridan herself occasionally left the table for calls to the front door or the dumb-waiter.

To-night, after supper, the girls flew through their share of clearing-up. It never weighed very heavily upon them; they usually began the process of piling and scraping dishes before they left the table, Rose whisking the tablecloth into its drawer as Norma bumped through the swinging door with the last dishes, and Kate halfway through the washing even then. Chattering and busy, they hustled the hot plates onto their shelves, rattled the hot plated ware into its basket, clanked saucepans, and splashed water. Not fifteen minutes after the serving of the dessert the last signs of the meal had been obliterated, and Kate was guilty of what the girls called "making excuses" to linger in the kitchen. She was mixing cereal, storing cold potatoes and cut bread, soaking dish-towels. But these things did not belong to the duties of Norma and Rose, and the younger girl could flash with a free conscience to the little room she shared with Rose. Wolf had called out for a companion, they were going to take a walk and see what the blizzard had done!

Norma washed her face, the velvety skin emerging with its bloom untouched, the lips crimson, the blue eyes blazing. She pressed a great wave of silky dark hair across her white forehead, and put the fur-trimmed hat at a dashing angle. The lace blouse, the pearl beads, her fur-collared coat again, and Norma was ready to dance out beside Wolf as if fatigue and labours did not exist.

"Where's Rose?" he said, as they went downstairs.

"Oh, Wolf—Saturday night! Harry's coming, of course!" Norma slipped her little hand, in its shabby glove, through his big arm. "She and Aunt Kate were gossiping!"

"Suits me!" Wolf said, contentedly. He held her firmly on the slippery lumps of packed snow. The sidewalks were almost impassable, yet hundreds of other happy persons were stumbling and scrambling over them in the mild winter darkness. Stars were out; and whether Norma was blinking up at them, or staring into lighted windows of candy stores and fruit markets, her own eyes danced and twinkled. The elevated trains thundered above their heads, and the subway roared under their feet; great advertising signs, with thousands of coloured lights, fanned up and down in a haze of pink and blue; the air was full of voices, laughing and shouting, and the screaming of coasting children.

"I have my pearls on," Norma told her companion. They stopped for some molasses peppermints, and their pungent odour mingled for Norma in the impression of this happy hour. "Wolf, how do they do that?" the girl asked, watching an electric sign on which a maid mopped a dirty floor with some prepared cleaner, leaving the floor clean after her mop. Wolf, interested, explained, and Norma listened. They stopped at a drug store, and studied a picture that subtly altered from Roosevelt's face to Lincoln's, and thence to Wilson's face, and Wolf explained that, too. Norma knew that he understood everything of that nature, but she liked to impress him, too, and did so far more often than she realized, with her book-lore. When Norma spoke lightly of a full calf edition de luxe of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, she might almost have been speaking in that language for all she conveyed to Wolf, but he watched the animated face proudly just the same. Rose had always been good and steady and thoughtful, but Wolf knew that Norma was clever, taking his big-brotherly patronage with admiring awe, but daring where he hesitated, and boldly at home where he was ill at ease. When she said that when she got married she wanted Dedham china, and just a plain, glass bowl for goldfish, Wolf nodded, but he would have nodded just as placidly if she had wanted a Turkish corner and bead portières. And to-night when she asserted that she wouldn't be Leslie Melrose for anything in the world, Wolf asked in simple wonderment why she should be.

"Imagine, a maid came to take those big girls home, Wolf! They can speak French," Norma confided. Wolf did not look for coherence from her, and took the two statements on their face value. "Now, I know I'm not pretty," she continued, following, as was usual with her, some obscure line of thought, "but I'm prettier than Doris Alexander, and she had her picture in the paper!"

"Who broke it to you that you're not pretty?" Wolf asked.

"Well, I know I'm not!" Norma jumped along at his side for a few minutes, eyeing him expectantly, but Wolf's mind was honestly busy with this assertion, and he did not speak. Wasn't she pretty? Girls had funny standards. "You know," she resumed, "you'd hate a girl like Leslie Melrose, Wolf!"

"Would I?"

"Oh, you'd loathe her. But I'll tell you who you would like," Norma added, in a sudden burst. "You'd love Mr. Liggett!"

"Why should I?" Wolf asked, in some surprise.

"Oh, because he's nice—he's very good-looking, and he has such a pleasant voice, as if he knew everything, but wasn't a bit conceited!" Norma said. "And he picks out books for his wife, and when I try to tell him something about them, he always knows lots more. You know, in a pleasant, careless sort of way, not a bit as if he was showing off. And I'll tell you what he did. Miss Drake was showing him a pottery bowl one day, and she dropped it, and she told me he sort of caught at it with his hand, and he said to Mr. Biretta, 'I've very stupidly broken this—just put it on my bill, will you?' Of course," Norma added, vivaciously, "old B. G. immediately said that it was nothing at all, but you know what Miss Drake would have caught, if she'd broken it!"

Perhaps Wolf did, but he was thinking at the moment that the family baby was very cunning, with her bright eyes and indignant mouth. He stopped her before a vaudeville house, in a flare of bright light.

"Want to go in?"

"Oh, Wolf! Would Aunt Kate care? Oh, Wolf, let's!"

There was absolute ecstasy in her eyes as they went through the enchanted doorway and up the rising empty foyer toward the house. It was nine o'clock; the performance was fairly under way. Norma rustled into a seat beside her companion without moving her eyes from the coloured comedian on the stage; she could remove hat and gloves and jacket without losing an instant of him.

When the lights went up Wolf approved the dark hair and the pearls, and bent toward her to hear the unending confidences. Norma thought she had never seen anything better, and even Wolf admitted that it was a good show. They finished the peppermints, and were very happy.

They had seen the big film, and so could cut the last third of the programme, and reach home at ten o'clock. There was no comment from Aunt Kate, who was yawning over the evening paper in the dining-room. Rose and Harry were murmuring in the dimly lighted parlour. Wolf, who was of the slow-thinking, intense type that discovers a new world every time it reads a new book, was halfway through a shabby library copy of "War and Peace," and went off to his room with the second volume under his arm. Norma went to her room, too, but she sat dreaming before the mirror, thinking of that Melrose house, and of Leslie's friendliness, until Rose came in at eleven o'clock.

CHAPTER III

At almost this same moment Norma's self was the subject of a rather unusual talk between Christopher Liggett and his wife.

Christopher had come softly into his house, at about half-past ten, to find Alice awake, still on the big couch before her fire. Her little bedroom beyond was softly lighted, the white bed turned down, and the religious books she always read before going to sleep laid in place by Miss Slater. But Alice had no light except her fire and two or three candles in old sconces.

She welcomed Christopher with a smile, and he sat down, in his somewhat rumpled evening dress, and smiled back at her in a rather weary fashion. He often told her that these rooms of hers were a sanctuary, that he tested the men and women he met daily in the world by her fine and lofty standard. It was part of his utter generosity to her that he talked to her as frankly as if he thought aloud, and it was Alice's pride and joy to know that this marriage of theirs, which had so sadly and suddenly become no marriage at all, was not as one-sided as the world might have suspected. Her clear, dispassionate viewpoint and her dignified companionship were not wifehood, but they were dear and valuable to him none the less, a part of his life that he would not have spared. And he could still admire her, too, not only for the exquisite clearness of her intellect, her French and Italian, her knowledge of countries and affairs, but physically—the clear, childish forehead that was as unwrinkled as Leslie's, the fair, beautifully brushed hair, the mouth with its chiselling of wisdom and of pain, and the transparent hand from which she shook back transparent laces. She was always proud, always fresh and fragrant, always free for him and for his problems, and it was proverbial in the circle of their intimates that Chris admired Alice with all his heart, and never felt himself anything but the privileged guardian of a treasure.

To-night he dropped into a chair before her fire, and she watched him for five or six restful minutes in silence.

"Stupid dinner?" she ventured.

"Rotten!" he answered, cheerfully. "I was late, but I got in to hear Hendrick's speech. The Vice-President was there, everyone else I knew. I cut away finally; I'm done up."

"I thought you picked up Hendrick on your way and went together," Mrs. Liggett said, sympathetically. "I'm sorry it was dull—I suppose men have to go to these political things!"

Chris was leaning forward, his locked hands dropped between his knees, and his eyes on the fire.

"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."

Alice waited, a little at a loss. To her this had no particular significance.

"She had her niece with her, young girl about eighteen," Christopher said.

"Well—what of it?" Alice demanded, with a sort of superb indifference to anything such a woman might do.

He looked at her through his round eyeglasses, with the slight frown that many of life's problems brought to his handsome face. Then the glass fell, on its black ribbon, and he laughed.

"That's just what I don't get," he said, good-humouredly. "But I'll tell you exactly what occurred. What's-His-Name, your mother's butler——"

"Joseph."

"Joseph. Joseph told me that at about four o'clock this Mrs. Sheridan came in. Your mother had told him that she was expecting the lady, and that he was to bring her upstairs. With her came this girl—I can't remember her name—but it was something Sheridan—Nora Sheridan, maybe. Leslie carried the girl off for tea, and the woman stayed with your mother.

"Well, at five—or later, this Mrs. Sheridan ran into the hall, and it seems—she's all right now!—it seems that your mother had fainted."

"Mama!" Alice said, anxiously, with an incredulous frown.

"Yes, but don't worry. She's absolutely all right now. Leslie," Christopher went back to his narrative, "Leslie cried, and I suppose there was a scene. Mrs. Sheridan and the girl went home—Leslie dressed and went out—and your mother immediately telephoned Lee——"

"Judge Lee?"

"Yes—she said so. Lee's up in Westchester with his daughter, she couldn't get him——"

"But, Chris, why did she want her lawyer?"

"That's just it—why? Well, then she telephoned here for me—I was on my way there, as it happened, and just before eight Hendrick and I went in. I could see she was altogether up stage, so I sent Von on and had it out with her."

"And what was her explanation, Chris?"

Christopher laughed again.

"I'll be darned," he said, thoughtfully, "if I can make head or tail of it! It would be funny if it wasn't that she's taking it so hard. She was in bed, and she had been crying—wouldn't eat any dinner——"

"But, Chris," Alice said, worriedly, "what do you make of it! What did she say?"

"Well, she clasped my hand, and she said that she had an opportunity to undo a great wrong—and that I must help her—and not ask any questions—she was just acting as you and I would have her act under the circumstances——"

"What circumstances?" Alice said, at an utter loss, as he paused.

"She didn't say," he smiled.

"Oh, come, now, Chris, she must have said more than that!"

"No, she didn't. She said that she must make it up to this girl, and she wished to see Lee about it immediately."

"To change her will!" Alice exclaimed.

"She didn't say so. Of course, it may be some sort of blackmail." Christopher looked whimsically at his wife. "As I remember my father-in-law," he said, "it seems to me improbable that out of the past could come this engaging young girl—very pretty, they said——"

"Father! Oh, nonsense!" Alice exclaimed, almost in relief at the absurdity. "No, but it might be some business—some claim against the firm," she suggested.

"Well, I thought of that. But there are one or two reasons why it doesn't seem the solution. I asked your mother if it was money, and she said no, said it positively and repeatedly. Then I asked her if she would like this Sheridan woman shut up, and she was quite indignant. Kate!—Kate was one of the most magnificent women God had ever made, and so on!"

"Well, I do remember Mrs. Sheridan as a lovely sort of person," Alice contributed. "Plain, you know, but quite wonderful for—well, goodness. It's funny—but then you know Mama is terribly excitable," she added, "she gets frightfully worked up over nothing, or almost nothing. It's quite possible that when Kate recalled old times to her she suddenly wished that she had done more for Kate—something like that. She'd think nothing of sending for Judge Lee on the spot. You remember her recalling us from our wedding-trip because she couldn't find the pearls? All the way from Lake Louise to hear that they had been lost!"

"I know," Christopher smiled. "She is—unique, ma belle mère. By George, I'll never forget our rushing into the house like maniacs, not knowing what had happened to Leslie or Acton, and having her fall sobbing into your arms, with the pearls in her hands!"

"Mama's wonderful," Alice laughed. "Chris, did you eat any dinner?"

He considered.

"But I'm really not hungry, dear," he protested.

Alice, superbly incredulous, rang at once. Who was in the kitchen? Well, she was to be asked to send up a tray at once to Mr. Liggett. "Now that you asked me, the dinner had reached the point of ice-cream in a paper tub, as I sat down," he remembered. "You're a little miracle of healing to me, Alice. When I came in here I didn't know what we were up against, as a family. Your mother wished the girl pensioned——"

"Oh, Chris, not really?"

"I give you my word!" But he was enough his usual self to have taken his seat at the piano, now, and was looking at her across it, while his fingers fitted themselves lazily to chords and harmonics.

"I'll tell you something, if you'll promise to stop playing the instant your supper comes up!"

"I'll promise!"

"Well, then—the new Puccini is there!" She nodded toward the music-shelves, and he turned to the new score with an eager exclamation. Fifteen minutes later she had to scold him to bring him to the fire again, and to the smoking little supper. While Alice sipped ginger ale, Christopher fell upon his meal, and they discussed the probable presentation of the opera, and its quality.

But an hour later, when she was in bed, and Christopher was going back to the piano for another half-hour of music, she caught his hand.

"Chris, you're not worried about this Sheridan matter?"

"Worried? No, dearest child, what is there to worry about? It isn't blackmail, apparently it's nothing but an overdose of imagination on your mother's part. If the girl really was promised something, or has—for example!—old stock, or if her father was an employee who did this or that or the other—Mrs. Sheridan's husband was employed by your father at the time of his death, by the way—why, it's easy enough to pay the claim, whatever it is! The girl seems to have made a nice impression—your mother tells me she's sold me books, but that doesn't mean much, I buy books everywhere! No, I don't think you'll ever hear of her again. But your mother will be here in a day or two; see what you can make of it all!"

"Oh, of course, it's nothing wrong!" Alice said, confidently.

And Christopher returned to his beloved piano, relieved in mind by his wife's counsel, refreshed in body by the impromptu supper, and ready for the music that soothed in him all the restless and unsatisfied fibres of his soul.

CHAPTER IV

Annie, who signed herself "Anne Melrose von Behrens," was the real dictator in the various circles of the allied families, and had a fashion of finding herself supreme in larger circles, as well. Annie was thirty-seven or eight, tall, thin, ash-blonde, superb in manner and bearing. Nature had been generous to her, but she had done far more for herself than Nature had. Her matchless skin, her figure, her hands, her voice, were all the result of painstaking and intelligent care. Annie had been a headstrong, undisciplined girl twenty years ago. She had come back from a European visit, at twenty-three, with a vague if general reputation of being "a terror." But Annie was clever, and she had real charm. She spoke familiarly of European courts, had been presented even in inaccessible Vienna. She spoke languages, quoted poets, had great writers and painters for her friends, and rippled through songs that had been indisputably dedicated, in flowing foreign hands, to the beautiful Mademoiselle Melrose. Society bowed before Annie; she was the sensation of her winter, and the marriage she promptly made was the most brilliant in many winters.

Annie proceeded to bear her sober, fine, dull, and devoted Hendrick two splendid sons, and thus riveted to herself his lasting devotion and trust. The old name was safe, the millions would descend duly to young Hendrick and Piet. The family had been rich, conspicuous, and respected in the city, since its sturdy Holstein cattle had browsed along the fields of lower Broadway, but under Annie's hands it began to shine. Annie's handsome motor-cars bore the family arms, her china had been made in the ancestral village, two miles from Rotterdam, and also carried the shield. Her city home, in Fifth Avenue, was so magnificent, so chastely restrained and sober, so sternly dignified, that it set the cue for half the other homes of the ultra-aristocratic set. Annie's servants had been in the Von Behrens family for years; there was nothing in the Avenue house, or the Newport summer home, that was not as handsome, as old, as solid, as carven, as richly dull, or as purely shining, as human ingenuity could contrive to have it. Collectors saved their choicest discoveries for Annie; and there was no painter in the new world who would not have been proud to have Annie place a canvas of his among her treasures from the old.

If family relics were worth preserving, what could be more remarkable than Annie's Washington letter, her Jefferson tray, her Gainsboroughs of the Murisons who had been the only Americans so honoured by the painter? Melrose and Von Behrens honours crowded each other—here was the thin old silver "shepherdess" cup awarded that Johanna von Behrens who had won a prize with her sheep, while Washington was yet a boy; and here the quaint tortoise-shell snuff-box that a great prince, homeless and unknown, had given the American family that took him in; and the silver buttons from Lafayette's waistcoat that the great Frenchman had presented Colonel Horace Murison of the "Continentals."

These things were not thrust at the visitor, nor indeed were they conspicuous among the thousand other priceless souvenirs that Annie had gathered about her.

"Rather nice, isn't it?" Annie would say, abstractedly, when some enthusiastic girl pored over the colonial letters or the old portraits. "See here, Margaret," she might add, casually, "do you see the inside of this little slipper, my dear? Read what's written there: 'In these slippers Deborah Murison danced with Governor Winthrop, on the night of her fifteenth birthday, July 1st, 1742.' Isn't that rather quaint?"

Annie could afford to be casual, to be abstracted. In her all the pride of the Melrose and Murison families was gathered; hers was an arrogance so sure of itself, a self-confidence so supreme, that the world questioned it no more than it questioned the heat of the sun. The old silver, the Copleys, and the colonial china, the Knickerbocker "court chests" with their great locks of Dutch silver, and the laces that had been shown at the Hague two hundred years before, were all confirmed, all reinforced, as it were, by the power and prosperity of to-day. It was no by-gone glory that made brilliant the lives of Hendrick and Anne Melrose von Behrens. Hendrick's cousins and uncles, magnificent persons of title, were prominent in Holland to-day, their names associated with that of royalty, and their gracious friendship extended to the American branch of the family whenever Hendrick chose to claim it. Old maps of New York bore the boundary lines of the Von Behrens farm; early histories of the city mingled the names of Melrose and Von Behrens among those of the men who had served the public need.

Wherever there was needed that tone that only names of prominence and wealth can bestow Annie's name was solicited. Wherever it appeared it gave the instant stamp of dignity and integrity. She had seen this goal dimly in the distance, when she stepped from her rather spoiled and wilful girlhood into this splendid wifehood, but even Annie was astonished at the rapidity with which it had come about. Mama, of course, had known all the right people, even if she had dropped all social ties after Papa's death. And Hendrick's name was an open sesame. But even so it was surprising, and it was gratifying.

In appearance Annie had no problem. If she was not a beauty she was near enough to being one. She was smart enough, and blonde enough, and splendidly dressed enough to be instantly identifiable, and that was all she desired. Financially, Annie had no problem. Her own inheritance and her husband's great wealth silenced all question there. The Murison pearls and the famous diamond tiara that her father had given her mother years ago had come to Annie, but they were eclipsed by the Von Behrens family jewels, and these were all hers, with the laces, and the ivories, and the brocades. Life could give nothing more to Annie, but not many women would have made so much of what Annie had. There was, far down and out of sight, a little streak of the adventuress in her, and she never stopped halfway.

A young wife, Annie had dutifully considered her nursery.

"Hendrick's is the elder line, of course, although it is the colonial one," Annie had said, superintending a princely layette. The child was a son, his father's image, and nobody who knew Annie was in the least surprised that fortune had fallen in with her plans. It was the magnificent Annie who was quoted as telling Madame Modiste to give her a fitter who would not talk; it was Annie who decided what should be done in recognizing the principals of the Jacqmain divorce, and that old Floyd Densmore's actress-wife should not be accepted. Annie's neat and quiet answer to a certain social acquaintance who remarked, in Annie's little gallery, "I have seen the original of that picture, in one of the European galleries," was still quoted by Annie's friends. "This is the original!" Annie had said quite simply and truthfully.

Leslie admired her aunt more than any one else in the world. Grandma was old-fashioned, and Aunt Alice insignificant, in Leslie's eyes, but stunning, arrogant, fearless Aunt Annie was the model upon which she would have based herself if she had known how. Annie's quick positiveness with her servants, her cool friendliness with big men, and clever men, her calm assurance as to which hats she liked, and which hats she didn't, her utter belief in everything that was of Melrose or von Behrens, and her calm contempt for everything that was not, were masterly in Leslie's eyes.

Annie might have been a strong royalist had she been born a few generations earlier. But in Annie's day the ideal of social service had been laid down by fashion, and she was consequently a tremendously independent and energetic person, with small time for languishing airs. She headed committees and boards, knew hundreds of working girls by name, kept a secretary and a stenographer, and mentioned topics at big dinners that would not have shocked either old Goodwife Melrose of Boston, or Vrouw von Behrens of Nieu Amsterdam, for neither had the faintest idea that such things, or their names, existed.

Withal, Annie was attractive, even her little affectations were impressive, and as she went about from luncheons to meetings, swept up to her model nursery to revel in her model boys, tossed aside regal furs and tore off princely rings the better to play with them, wrapped her beautiful figure in satins and jewels to descend to formal dinners, she was almost as much admired and envied and copied as she might fondly have hoped to be. She managed her life on modern lines of efficiency, planned ahead what she wished, tutored herself not to think of anything undesirable as being even in the range of possibility, trod lightly upon the sensitive souls of others, and asked no quarter herself, aimed high, and enjoyed her life and its countless successes to the full.

Of course there had been setbacks. Her brother Theodore, his most unfortunate marriage to a servant, his intemperance, the general scandal of his mother's violent detestation of his wife, all this was most unpleasant. But Louison, the wife, upon sufficient pressure, had brought her child to the Melroses, and had doubtfully disappeared, and Theodore had returned from his wanderings to live, silent and unobtrusive, in his mother's home, for several years, and to die with his daughter beside him, and be duly laid in the Melrose plot at Woodlawn. And Leslie—Leslie had repaid them all, for all of it.

Alice was another disappointment, or had been one, to Annie. For Alice, after having achieved a most unexpectedly satisfactory marriage, and having set up her household gods in the very shadow of her sister's brilliant example, as it were, had met with that most unfortunate accident. For a few years Annie had been utterly exasperated whenever she thought of it. For Christopher was really an extraordinary husband for Alice to hold, even in normal circumstances. He was so outrageously, frightfully, irresistibly popular with women everywhere, his wife must needs keep a very sharp, albeit loving, eye upon him. A sickly wife—a wife who was a burden and a reproach, that would be fatal to them all!

But Alice had showed unsuspected courage and pride in this hard trial. She had made herself beautiful, well-informed, tactful; she had made herself a magnet to her husband's friends, and his home the centre of a real social group. Annie respected her for it, and helped her by flashing into her rooms not less often than every alternate day, with gossip, with books, with hints that showed Alice just where her course in this or that matter must lie.

So Alice had come to be an actual asset, and now to her Aunt Annie's tremendous satisfaction, Leslie promised to add one more feather to the family cap by announcing her engagement to Acton Liggett. Annie smiled to herself whenever she thought of it. When this was consummated she would have nothing left but the selection of suitable wives for Hendrick Junior, now aged ten, and Piet, who was four years younger.

Two or three days after the ending of the big snow-storm, and the beginning of that domestic storm that was destined strangely to change some of the lives nearest her, Annie went in to have luncheon with her sister. It was a brilliant sunshiny winter day, with crossings swimming in melting snow and roofs steaming brightly into the clear air.

Annie went straight upstairs to Alice's room, with the usual apology for lateness. She kissed Alice lightly on the forehead, and while Freda was coming and going with their meal, they discussed the little boys, books, politics, and the difficulties of the city in the snow.

But when they were alone Annie asked immediately:

"What on earth is the matter with Mama, Alice?"

"You mean about——? Did she tell you?"

"No; she didn't have to. Leslie ran in yesterday afternoon, and told me that Mama has been in bed since Saturday! I telephoned Sunday morning, but Hendrick and I were taking the boys up to his uncle's house, in Westchester, and—as she didn't say one word about being ill—I didn't see her that day, nor yesterday, as it happened, for we didn't come down until noon. When Leslie came in, there were other people there for tea, and I didn't have a chance to speak to her alone. But I went over to Mama this morning, and she seems all broken up!"

"What did she tell you?" Alice asked, anxiously.

"Oh, my dear, you know Mama! She wept, and patted my hand, and said that it was sad to be the last of your own generation, and she hoped you and I would always have each other, and that she had always loved us, and tried to do her best for us——"

Alice laughed.

"Poor Mama! She gets so worked up!" she said.

"But what do you make of it?" demanded Annie. "She talked of this Kate Sheridan—I remember her perfectly, she came to Paris when I was so ill, years ago. Poor Mama cried, and said that she wished to do something for Kate. Now you know, Alice," Annie went on reasonably, "nobody is tying Mama's hands! If she wants to educate this young girl—this Norma person—to please Kate, or all her children for that matter, she doesn't have to go into hysterics, and send for Judge Lee. She said she didn't feel at all well, and she wanted to secure to Kate some money in her will I told her it was ridiculous—she never looked better in her life! I wish she could get over to see you, Alice; you always soothe her so. What on earth does Chris make of it?"

"Well, I'll tell you what we've done," Alice smiled. "Chris went to see her Sunday, and they had a long talk. He tells me that she was just as vague and unsatisfactory as ever, but calmer, and she finally admitted that all she really wanted to do was to befriend this niece of Kate Sheridan. Of course Chris and I think Mama has one of her funny notions about it, but if the child's mother had befriended Mama, for example, a thousand years ago, or if Mama had borrowed five dollars from Kate, and forgotten to return it, you know that would be enough to account for all this excitement."

"Yes, I know!" Annie admitted, with her favourite look of intolerant, yet indulgent, scorn.

"Well, it seems the girl is in Biretta's Bookshop, and Chris has often bought books of her. So to quiet Mama he promised that he would bring her out here to have tea with me some day soon. Mama was delighted, and I think she hopes that a friendship will come of it." Alice threw herself back into the pillows, and drew a great breath as if she were weary. "I only want to please Mama!" she finished.

"You're an angel," Annie said, absently. "I suppose I could get the truth out of Mama in five seconds," she mused. "It looks to me rather like blackmail!"

"No; she said not!" Alice contradicted, quickly.

"Well, it's all so silly," the elder sister said, impatiently. "And coming just now——" she added, significantly.

"Yes. I know!" Alice agreed, with a comprehending look. And in lowered tones they began to talk of Leslie's possible engagement.

CHAPTER V

Norma Sheridan saw the engagement announced in a morning paper two weeks later, and carried the picture of pretty Miss Melrose home, to entertain the dinner table. The news had been made known at a dinner given to forty young persons, in the home of the débutante's aunt, Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens. Miss Melrose, said the paper, was the daughter and heiress of the late Theodore Melrose, and made her home with her grandmother. Mr. Liggett was the brother of Christopher Liggett, whose marriage to Miss Alice Melrose was a social event some years ago. A number of dinners and dances were already planned in honour of the young pair.

Norma looked at the pictured face with a little stir of feelings so confused that she could not define them, at her heart. But she passed the paper to her aunt with no comment.

"You might send them two dozen kitchen towels, Mother," Wolf suggested, drily, and Rose laughed joyously. Her own engagement present from her mother had been this extremely practical one, and Rose loved to open her lower bureau drawer, and gloat over the incredible richness of possessing twenty-four smooth, red-striped, well-hemmed glass-towels, all her own. Norma had brought her two thick, dull gray Dedham bowls, with ducks waddling around them, and these were in the drawer, too, wrapped in tissue paper. And beside these were the length of lemon-coloured silk that Rose had had for a year, without making up, and six of her mother's fine sheets of Irish linen, and two glass candlesticks that Rose had won at a Five-hundred party. Altogether, Rose felt that she was making great strides toward home-making, especially as she and Harry must wait for months, perhaps a year. Norma had promised her two towels a month, until there were a whole dozen, and Wolf, prompted by the same generous little heart, told her not to give the gas-stove a thought, for she was to have the handsomest one that money could buy, with a stand-up oven and a water-heater, from her brother. Rose walked upon air.

But Norma was in a mood that she herself seemed unable to understand or to combat. She felt a constant inclination toward tears. She didn't hate the Melroses—no, they had been most friendly and kind. But—but it was a funny world in which one girl had everything, like Leslie, and another girl had no brighter prospect than to drudge away in a bookstore all her life, or to go out on Sundays with her cousin. Norma dreamed for hours of Leslie's life, the ease and warmth and beauty of it, and when Leslie was actually heralded as engaged the younger girl felt a pang of the first actual jealousy she had ever known. She imagined the beautiful drawing-room in which Acton Liggett—perhaps as fascinating a person as his brother!—would clasp pearls about Leslie's fair little throat; she imagined the shining dinner tables at which Leslie's modestly dropped blonde head would be stormed with compliments and congratulations.

And suddenly molasses peppermints and dish-washing became odious to her, and she almost disliked Rose for her pitiable ecstasies over china bowls and glass-towels. All the pleasant excitement of her call upon Mrs. Melrose, with Aunt Kate, died away. It had seemed the beginning of some vaguely dreamed-of progress toward a life of beauty and achievement, but it was two weeks ago now, and its glamour was fading.

True, Christopher Liggett had come into Biretta's bookstore, with Leslie, and he and Norma had talked together for a few minutes, and Leslie had extended her Aunt Alice's kind invitation for tea. But no day had been set for the tea, Norma reflected gloomily. Now, she supposed, the stir of Leslie's engagement would put all that out of Christopher's head.

Wolf was not particularly sympathetic with her, she mused, disconsolately. Wolf had been acting in an unprecedented manner of late. Rose's engagement seemed to have completely turned his head. He laughed at Norma, hardly heard her words when she spoke to him, and never moved his eyes from her when they were together. Norma could not look up from her book, or her plate, or from the study of a Broadway shop window, without encountering that same steady, unembarrassed, half-puzzled stare.

"What's the matter with you, Wolf?" she would ask, impatiently. But Wolf never told her.

As a matter of fact, he did not know. He was a silent, thoughtful fellow, old for his years in many ways, and in some still a boy. Norma and Rose had known only the more prosperous years of Kate's life, but Wolf remembered many a vigil with his mother, remembered her lonely struggles to make a living for him and for the girls. He himself was the type that inevitably prospers—industrious, good, intelligent, and painstaking, but as a young boy in the working world he had early seen the terrors in the lives of men about him: drink, dirt, unemployment and disease, debt and dishonour. Wolf was not quick of thought; he had little imagination, rather marvelling at other men's cleverness than displaying any of his own, and he had reached perhaps his twenty-second or twenty-third summer before he realized that these terrors did not menace him, that whatever changes he made in his work would be improvements, steps upward. For actual months after the move to New York Wolf had pondered it, in quiet gratitude and pleasure. Rent and bills could be paid, there might be theatre treats for the girls, and chicken for Sunday supper, and yet the savings account in the Broadway bank might grow steadily, too. Far from being a slave to his employer, Wolf began to realize that this rather simple person was afraid of him, afraid that young Sheridan and some of the other smart, ingenious, practically educated men in his employ might recognize too soon their own independence.

And when the second summer in New York came, and Wolf could negotiate the modest financial deal that gave him and the girls a second-hand motor-car to cruise about in on Sundays and holidays, when they could picnic up in beautiful Connecticut, or unpack the little fringed red napkins far down on the Long Island shore, life had begun to seem very pleasant to him. Debt and dirt and all the squalid horrors of what he had seen, and what he had read, had faded from his mind, and for awhile he had felt that his cup could hold no more.

But now, just lately, there was something else, and although the full significance of it had not yet actually dawned upon him, Wolf began to realize that a change was near. It was the most miraculous thing that had ever come to him, although it concerned only little Norma—only the little cousin who had been an actual member of his family for all these years.

He had heard his mother say a thousand times that she was pretty; he had laughed himself a thousand times at her quick wit. But he had never dreamed that it would make his heart come up into his throat and suffocate him whenever he thought of her, or that her lightest and simplest words, her most casual and unconscious glance, would burn in his heart for hours.

During his busy days Wolf found himself musing about this undefined and nebulous happiness that began to tremble, like a growing brightness behind clouds, through all his days and nights. Had there ever been a time, he wondered, when he had taken her for granted, helped her into her blessed little coat as coolly as he had Rose? Had it been this same Norma who scolded him about throwing his collars on the floor, and who had sent his coat to the cleaner with a ten-dollar bill in the pocket?

Wolf remembered summer days, and little Norma chattering beside him on the front seat, as the shabby motor-car fled through the hot, dry city toward shade and coolness. He remembered early Christmas Mass, and Norma and Rose kneeling between him and his mother, in the warm, fir-scented church. He remembered breakfast afterward, in a general sense of hunger and relaxation and well-being, and the girls exulting over their presents. And every time that straight-shouldered, childish figure came into his dream, that mop of cloudy dark hair and flashing laugh, the new delicious sense of some unknown felicity touched him, and he would glance about the busy factory self-consciously, as if his thoughts were written on his face for all the world to read.

Wolf had never had a sweetheart. It came to him with the blinding flash of all epoch-making discoveries that Norma was his girl—that he wanted Norma for his own, and that there was no barrier between them. And in the ecstasy of this new vision, which changed the whole face of his world, he was content to wait with no special impatience for the hour in which he should claim her. Of course Norma must like him—must love him, as he did her, unworthy as he felt himself of her, and wonderful as this new Norma seemed to be. Wolf, in his simple way, felt that this had been his destiny from the beginning.

That a glimpse of life as foreign and unnatural as the Melrose life might seriously disenchant Norma never occurred to him. Norma had always been fanciful, it was a part of her charm. Wolf, who worked in the great Forman shops, had felt it no particular distinction when by chance one day he had been called from his luncheon to look at the engine of young Stanley Forman's car. He had left his seat upon a pile of lumber, bolted the last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not to drive a racer.

So Norma's half-formed jealousies, desires, and dreams were a sealed book to him. But this very unreasonableness lent her an odd exotic charm in his eyes. She was to Wolf like a baby who wants the moon. The moon might be an awkward and useless possession, and the baby much better without it, still there is something winning and touching about the little imperious mouth and the little upstretched arms.

One night, when he had reached home earlier than either of the girls, Wolf was in the warm bright kitchen, alone with his mother. He was seated at the end of the scrubbed and bleached little table; Kate at the other end was neatly and dexterously packing a yellow bowl with bread pudding.

"Do you remember, years and years ago, Mother," Wolf said, chewing a raisin, thoughtfully, "that you told me that Norma isn't my real cousin?"

Kate's ruddy colour paled a little, and she looked anxious. Not Perseus, coming at last in sight of his Gorgon, had a heart more sick with fear than hers was at that instant.

"What put that into your head, dear?"

"Well, I don't know. But it's true, isn't it?"

Kate scattered chopped nuts from the bowl of her spoon.

"Yes, it's true," she said. "There's not a drop of the same blood in your veins, although I love her as I do you and Rose."

She was silent, and Wolf, idly turning the egg-beater in an empty dish, smiled to himself.

"But what made you think of that, Wolf?" his mother asked.

"I don't know!" Wolf did not look at her, but his big handsome face was suffused with happy colour. "Harry and Rose, maybe," he admitted.

Kate sat down suddenly, her eyes upon him.

"Not the Baby?" she half whispered.

Her son leaned back in his chair, and folded his big arms across his chest. When he looked at her the smile had faded from his face, and his eyes were a trifle narrowed, and his mouth set.

"I guess so!" he said, simply. "I guess it's always been—Norma. But I didn't always know it. I used to think of her as just another sister—like Rose. But I know now that she'll never seem that again—never did, really."

He was silent, and Kate sat staring at him in silence.

"Has she any relatives, Mother?"

"Has—what?"

"Has she people—who are they?"

Kate looked at the floor.

"She has no one but me, Son."

"Of course, she's not nineteen, and I don't believe it's ever crossed her mind," Wolf said. "I don't think Norma ever had a real affair—just kid affairs, like Paul Harrison, and that man at the store who used to send her flowers. But I don't believe those count."

"I don't think she ever has," Kate said, heavily getting to her feet, and beginning to pour her custard slowly through the packed bread. Presently she stopped, and set the saucepan down, her eyes narrowed and fixed on space. Then Wolf saw her press the fingers of one hand upon her mouth, a sure sign of mental perturbation.

"I know I'm not worthy to tie her little shoes for her, Mother," he said, suddenly, and very low.

"There's no woman in the world good enough for you," his mother answered, with a troubled laugh. And she gave the top of his head one of her rare, brisk kisses as she passed him, on her way out of the room.

Wolf was sufficiently familiar with the domestic routine to know that every minute was precious now, and that she was setting the table. But his heart was heavy with a vague uneasiness; she had not encouraged him very much. She had not accepted this suggestion as she did almost all of the young people's ideas, with eager coöperation and sympathy. He sat brooding at the kitchen table, her notable lack of enthusiasm chilling him, and infusing him with her own doubts.

When she came back, she stood with her back turned to him, busied with some manipulation of platters and jars in the ice-box.

"Wolf, dear," she said, "I want to ask you something. The child's too young to listen to you—or any one!—now. Promise me—promise me, that you'll speak to me again before you——"

"Certainly I'll promise that, Mother!" Wolf said, quickly, hurt to the soul. She read his tone aright, and came to lay her cheek against his hair.

"Listen to me, Son. Since the day her mother gave her to me I've hoped it would be this way! But there's nothing to be gained by hurry. You——"

"But you would be glad, Mother! You do think that she might have me?" poor Wolf said, eagerly and humbly. He was amazed to see tears brimming his mother's eyes as she nodded and turned away.

Before either spoke again a rush in the hall announced the home-coming girls, who entered the kitchen gasping and laughing with the cold.

"Whew!" panted Norma, catching Wolf's hands in her own half-frozen ones. "I'm dying! Oh, Wolf, feel my nose!" She pressed it against his forehead. "Oh, there's a wind like a knife—and look at my shoe—in I went, right through the ice! Oh, Aunt Kate, let me stay here!" and locking both slender arms about the older woman's neck, she dropped her dark, shining head upon her breast like a storm-blown bird. "It's four below zero in Broadway this minute," she added, looking sidewise under her curling lashes at Wolf.

"Who said so?" Wolf demanded.

"The man I bought that paper from said so; go back and ask him. Oh, joy, that looks good!" said Norma, eyeing the pudding that was now being drawn, crackling, bubbling, and crisp, from the oven. "Rose and I fell over the new lineoleum in the hall; I thought it was a dead body!" she went on, cheerfully. "I came down on my family feature with such a noise that I thought the woman downstairs would be rattling the dumb-waiter ropes again long before this!" She stepped to the dumb-waiter, and put her head into the shaft. "What is it, darling?" she called.

"Norma, behave yourself. It would serve you good and right if she heard you," Mrs. Sheridan said, in a panic. "Go change your shoes, and come and eat your dinner. I believe," her aunt added, pausing near her, "that you did skin your nose in the hall."

"Oh, heavens!" Norma exclaimed, bringing her face close to the dark window, as to a mirror. "Oh, say it will be gone by Friday! Because on Friday I'm going to have tea with Mrs. Liggett—her husband came in to-day and asked me. Oh, the darling! He certainly is the—well, the most—well, I don't know!——His voice, and the quiet, quiet way——"

"Oh, for pity's sake go change your shoes!" Rose interrupted. "You are the biggest idiot! I went into the store to get her," Rose explained, "and I've had all this once, in the subway. How Mr. Liggett picks up his glasses, on their ribbon, to read the titles of books——"

"Oh, you shut up!" Norma called, departing. And unashamed, when dinner was finished, and the table cleared, she produced a pack of cards and said that she was going to play The Idle Year.

"... and if I get it, it'll mean that the man I marry is going to look exactly like Chris Liggett."

She did not get it, and played it again. The third time she interrupted Wolf's slow and patient perusal of the Scientific American to announce that she was now going to play it to see if he was in love with Mary Redding.

"Think how nice that would be, Aunt Kate, a double wedding. And if Wolf or Rose died and left a lot of children, the other one would always be there to take in whoever was left—you know what I mean!"

"You're the one Wolf ought to marry, to make it complete," Rose, who was neatly marking a cross-stitch "R" on a crash towel, retaliated neatly.

"I can't marry my cousin, Miss Smarty."

"Oh, don't let a little thing like that worry you," Wolf said, looking across the table.

"Our children would be idiots—perhaps they would be, anyway!" Norma reminded him, in a gale of laughter. Her aunt looked up disapprovingly over her glasses.

"Baby, don't talk like that. That's not a nice way to talk at all. Wolf, you lead her on. Now, we'll not have any more of that, if you please. I see the President is making himself very unpopular, Wolf—I don't know why they all make it so hard for the poor man! Mrs. McCrea was in the market this morning——"

"If I win this game, Rose, by this time next year," Norma said, in an undertone, "you'll have——"

"Norma Sheridan!"

"Yes, Aunt Kate!"

"Do you want me to speak to you again?"

"No, ma'am!"

Norma subsided for a brief space, Rose covertly watching the game. Presently the younger girl burst forth anew.

"Listen, Wolf, I'll bet you that I can get more words out of the letters in Christopher than you can!"

Wolf roused himself, smiled, took out his fountain pen, and reached for a sheet of paper. He was always ready for any sort of game. Norma, bending herself to the contest, put her pencil into her mouth, and stared fixedly at the green-shaded drop light. Rose, according to ancient precedent, was permitted to assist evenly and alternately.

And Kate, watching them and listening, even while she drowsed over the Woman's Page, decided that after all they were nothing but a pack of children.

CHAPTER VI

To Leslie Melrose had come the very happiest time of her life. She had always had everything she wanted; it had never occurred to her to consider a fortunate marriage engagement as anything but a matter of course, in her case. She was nineteen, she was "mad," in her own terms, about Acton Liggett, and the engagement was the natural result.

But the ensuing events were far more delightful than Leslie had dreamed, even in her happy dreams. All her world turned from its affairs of business and intrigue and amusement to centre its attention upon her little person for the moment, and to shower her with ten times enough flattery and praise to turn a much steadier head. Presents rained upon Leslie, and every one of them was astonishingly handsome and valuable; newspapers clamoured for her picture, and wherever she went she was immediately the focus for all eyes. That old Judge Lee should send her some of his mother's beautiful diamonds; that Christopher and Alice should order for her great crates of specially woven linen that were worthy of a queen; that Emanuel Massaro, the painter of the hour, should ask her to sit for him, were all just so much sheer pleasure added to the sum total of her happiness in loving the man of her choice and knowing herself beloved by him.

Leslie found herself, for the first time in her life, a person of importance with Aunt Annie, too. The social leader found time to advise her little niece in the new contingencies that were perpetually arising, lent Leslie her private secretary for the expeditious making of lists or writing of notes, and bullied her own autocratic modiste into promising at least half of the trousseau. It was Annie who decided that the marriage must be at a certain Park Avenue church, and at a certain hour, and that the reception at the house must be arranged in a certain manner, and no other. Hendrick or Judge Lee would give away the bride, Christopher would be his brother's best man, and Leslie would be given time to greet her guests and change her gown and be driven to Alice's house for just one kiss before she and Acton went away.

Acton had begged for an Easter wedding, but Leslie, upon her aunt's advice, held out for June. If the war was over by that time—and everyone said it must be, for so hideous a combat could not possibly last more than six or eight months—then they would go to England and the Continent, but otherwise they might drift through Canada to the Pacific Coast, and even come back by San Francisco and the newly opened Canal.

Meanwhile, Annie entertained her niece royally and untiringly. Formal dinners to old family friends must come first, but when spring arrived Leslie was promised house parties and yachting trips more after her own heart. The girl was so excited, so bewildered and tired, even after the first two weeks, that she remained in bed until noon every day, and had a young maid especially detailed to take her dressmaker's fittings for her. But even so she lost weight, her cheeks burned and her eyes glittered feverishly, and her voice took an unnaturally high key, her speech a certain shallow quickness. Acton's undeviating adoration she took with a pretty, spoiled acquiescence, and with old family friends she was charmingly dutiful and deferential, but always with the air of sparing a few glittering drops to their age and dulness from the overflowing cup of her youth and beauty and power. But with her grandmother and aunts she had a new attitude of self-confidence, and to her girl friends she was no longer the old intimate and equal, but a being who had, for the moment at least, left them all behind. She would show them the new silver, the new linens, the engagement-time frocks that were in themselves a trousseau, and wish that Doris or Marion or Virginia were engaged, too; it was such fun! And with older women, the débutantes of six and eight and ten years ago, who had failed of all this glory, who could only listen sweetly to the chatter of plans and honours, and look in uncomplaining admiration at the blazing ring, Leslie was quite merciless. The number of times that she managed to mention her age, the fact that Madame Modiste had tried to give her fittings after three o'clock under the impression that she was a schoolgirl, and the "craziness" of "little me" going over all the late Mrs. Liggett's chests of silver and china, perhaps only these unsuccessful candidates for matrimony could estimate. Certainly Leslie herself was quite unconscious of it, and truly believed what she heard on all sides, that she was "adorable," and "not changed one bit," and "just as unconscious that there was anything else in the world but Acton, as a little girl with her first doll."

Christopher and Alice, in the first years of their married life, had built a home at Glen Cove, and Christopher made this his wedding present to his brother. Necessarily, even the handsomest of country homes, if ten years old, needs an almost complete renovation, and this renovation Acton and Leslie, guided by a famous architect, began rapturously to plan, reserving a beautiful apartment not far from Alice in Park Avenue for autumn furnishing and refitting.

All these activities and interests kept the lovers busy, and kept them apart indeed, or united them only in groups of other people. But Acton could bring his pretty sweetheart home from a dinner now and then, and come into the old Melrose house for a precious half hour of murmuring talk, or could sometimes persuade her to leave a tea or a matinée early enough to walk a few blocks with him.

In this fashion they slipped away from a box party one Friday afternoon, and found themselves walking briskly northward, into the neighbourhood of Alice's house. Leslie had had, for several days, a rather guilty feeling in regard to this lovely aunt. It was really hard, rising at noon, and trying to see and please so many persons, to keep in close touch with the patient and uncomplaining invalid, who had to depend wholly upon the generosity of those she loved for knowledge of them. So Leslie was glad to suggest, and Acton glad to agree, that they had better go in and see Aunt Alice for a few minutes.

As usual, Mrs. Liggett had company, although it proved only to be the pretty Miss Sheridan who had called upon Leslie's grandmother on the first day of that mysterious indisposition that had kept the old lady bedridden almost ever since.

Alice looked oddly tired, but her eyes were shining brightly, and Norma was charmingly happy and at ease. She jumped up to shake hands with Acton with a bright comment that he was not in the least like his brother, and recalled herself to Leslie before offering her all sorts of good wishes. Norma, hoping that it would some day occur, had indeed anticipated this meeting with Leslie by a little mental consideration of what she should say, but the effect was so spontaneous and sincere that the four were enabled to settle down comfortably to tea, in a few moments, like old friends.

"Miss Sheridan—or Norma, rather—and I have been having a perfectly delicious talk," said Alice. "She loves Christina Rossetti, and she knew the 'Hound of Heaven' by heart, and she has promised to send me a new man's work that sounds delightful—what was it? Something about General Booth?"

"If I haven't chattered you to death!" Norma said, penitentially. And Leslie added: "Aunt Alice, you do look tired! Not that talking poetry ever would tire you!" she hastened to add, with a smile for Norma.

"No, I'm not—or rather, I was, but I feel wonderfully!" Alice said. "Pour the tea, Kitten. What have you two little adventurers been doing with yourselves?"

"Mrs. Dupré's party—Yvette Guilbert," Leslie said. "She is quite too wonderful!"

"I've always wanted to see her, and I've always known I would adore her," Norma interpolated, dreamily.

Alice glanced at her quickly.

"Does she give another matinée, Leslie?"

"Two——" Leslie looked at Acton. "Is it two weeks from to-day?" she questioned.

"I'll send you seats for it," Alice said, making a little note on her ivory memoranda pages, as she nodded to Norma. The colour rushed into Norma's face, and she bit her lip.

"But, Mrs. Liggett—honestly—I truly didn't mean—I only meant——" she began to stammer, half laughing. Alice laid her hand upon Norma's reassuringly.

"My dear, you know I don't think you hinted! But I want to do it. I can't"—Alice said, smiling—"I can't do anything for little Miss Aladdin here, and it gives me the greatest pleasure, now and then——"

"I want to tell you something about Mrs. Liggett," Acton said; "she's got a grasping nature and a mean soul—you can see that! She's the limit, all right!" He smiled down at her as he gave her her teacup, and Leslie laughed outright. Acton was a person of few words, but when he chose to talk, Leslie found his manner amusing. Christopher, coming up to join them fifteen minutes later, said that from the noise they made he had supposed at least fifty persons to be in his wife's room.

Did Norma, as she gave the master of the house her hand, have sudden memory of all her recent absurd extravagances in his name—the games, the surmises, the wild statements that had had Chris Liggett as their inspiration? If she did, she gave no sign of it beyond the bright flush with which she greeted her oldest acquaintance in this group. Christopher sat down, content to be a listener and an onlooker, as he sipped his tea, but Norma saw that his wife's look of white fatigue made him uneasy, and immediately said that she must go.

He made no protest, but said that the car was at the door, and she must let him send her home. Norma agreed, and Acton asked if he and Leslie might not use it, too. The three departed in high spirits, Alice detaining the radiant and excited Norma long enough to exact from her the promise of another visit soon, and to send an affectionate message to Mrs. Sheridan from "Miss Alice." Then they went down to the big car, an exciting and delightful experience to Norma.

Leslie was left first, and Acton, pleading that he was already late for another engagement, was dropped at his club. Then Norma had the car to herself, and as it smoothly flew toward the humble doorway of the Sheridans, could giggle, almost aloud, in her pleasure and exhilaration at an afternoon that had gone without a single awkward minute, all pleasant, harmonious, and vaguely flattering. And the wonderful Mrs. Liggett had asked her to come soon again, and had made that delightful suggestion about the concert. The name of Yvette Guilbert meant little to Norma, but the thought that Alice Liggett really wanted to hold her friendship was nothing less than intoxicating.

She looked out of the car, the streets were bare of snow now, there was not a leaf showing in the park, and the ground was dark and unpromising. But a cool, steady wind was blowing through the lingering twilight, men were running after rolling hats, and at least the milliners' windows were radiant with springtime bloom. Children were playing in Norma's street, wrapped and muffled children, wild with joy to be out of doors again, and a tiny frail little moon was floating in the opal sky just above the grim line of roofs. Norma looked up at it, and the pure blowing air touched her hot face, and her heart sang with the sheer joy of living.

CHAPTER VII

Christopher had gone down to the door with his brother and the girls, and had sent a glance up and down the quiet, handsome block, feeling in the moving air what Norma felt, what all the city felt—the bold, wild promise of spring. He turned back into the house with something like a sigh; Acton and Leslie in their young happiness were somehow a little haunting to-night.

The butler was starting upstairs with the papers; Christopher took them from him, and went back to Alice's room with his eyes idly following the headlines. The pretty apartment was somewhat disordered, and looked dull and dark in the half light. Christopher walked to a window, and pushed it open upon its railed balcony.

"Chris!" whispered his wife's voice, thick and dry in the gloom.

Aghast in the instant apprehension of something wrong, he sprang to her couch, dropped to his knees, and put an arm about her.

"Alice! What is it, my darling?"

She struggled for speech, and he could see that her face was ashen.

"Chris—no, don't ring. Chris, who is that girl?"

Christopher touched the chain that flooded the couch with rosy light. He bent in eager sympathy over his wife's relaxed form.

"Alice, what is it?" he asked, tenderly. "Don't worry, dear, don't try to talk too fast! Just tell Chris what frightened you——"

Alice laughed wretchedly as she detached the fingers he had pressed anxiously upon her forehead.

"No, I'm not feverish!" she assured him, holding tight to his hand. "But I want you to tell me, Chris, I must know—and no matter what promise you have given Mother—or given any one——"

"Now, now, now!" he soothed her. "I'll tell you anything, sweetheart, only don't let yourself get so excited. Just tell me what it is, Alice, and I'll do anything in the world for you, of course!"

"Chris," she said, swallowing with a dry throat, and sitting up with an air of regaining self-control, "you must tell me. You know you can trust me, you know——! That girl——"

"But what girl—what are you talking about, dear? Do—do try to be just a little clearer, and calmer——"

"Who"—said Alice, with a ghastly look, sweeping the hair back from her damp forehead—"who is that Norma Sheridan?"

"Why, I told you, dear, that I don't know," her husband protested. "I told you weeks ago, after your mother made that scene, the night of Hendrick's speech, that I couldn't make head or tail of it!"

"Chris"—Alice was regarding him fixedly—"you must know!"

"Dearest, couldn't your mother simply wish to befriend a girl whose parents——"

Alice flung her loosened hair back, and at her gesture and her glance at the little carafe on her table he poured her a glass of cold water. Drinking it off, and raising herself in her cushions, she stretched her hand to touch the chair beside her, and still without a word indicated that he was to take it. With a face of grave concern Christopher sat down beside her, holding her hands in both his own.

"Chris," she said, clearly and quickly, if with occasional catches of breath, "the minute that girl came into the room I knew that—I knew that horror had come upon us all! I knew that she was one of us—one of us Melroses, somehow——"

"Alice!" he said, pleadingly.

"But Mama," she said, with a keen look, "didn't tell you that?"

"She told me only what I told you that night, on my honour as a gentleman! Alice, what makes you say what you do?"

"Ah, Chris," his wife cried, almost frantically, "look at her! Look at her! Why, her voice is Annie's, the same identical voice—she looks like my father, like Theodore—she looks like us all! She and Leslie were so much alike, as they sat there, in spite of the colouring, that I almost screamed it at them! Surely—surely, you see it—everyone sees it!"

He stared at her, beginning to breathe a little quickly in his turn.

"By George!" she heard him whisper, as if to himself.

"Do you see it, Chris?" Alice whispered, almost fearfully.

"But—but——" He got up and walked restlessly to the window, and came back to sit down again. "But there's a cousinship somewhere," he said, sensibly. "There's no reason to suppose that the thing can't be explained. I do think you're taking this thing pretty hard, my dear. What can you possibly suppose? There might be a hundred girls——"

His voice fell. Alice was watching him expectantly.

"Mama felt it—saw it—as I do," she said. "You may be very sure that Mama wouldn't have almost lost her mind, as she did, unless something had given her cause!"

They looked at each other in silence, in the utter silence of the lovely, cool-toned room.

"Alice," Chris said in a puzzled voice after awhile, "you suspect me of keeping something from you. But on my honour you know all that your mother told me—all that I know!"

"Oh, Chris," she said, with a sort of wail. "If I don't know more!"

Her husband's slow colour rose.

"How could you know more?" he asked, bewilderedly.

Alice was unhappily silent.

"Chris, if I tell you what I'm afraid of—what I fear," she said, presently, after anxious thought, "will you promise me never, never to speak of it—never even to think of it!—if it—if it proves not to be true?"

"I don't have to tell you that, Alice," he said.

"No, of course you don't—of course you don't!" she echoed with a nervous laugh. "I'll tell you what I think, Chris—what has been almost driving me mad—and you can probably tell me a thousand reasons why it can't be so! You see, I've never understood Mama's feverish distress these last weeks. She's been to see me, she's done what had to be done about Leslie's engagement, but she's not herself—you can see that! Yesterday she began to cry, almost for nothing, and when I happened to mention—or rather when I mentioned very deliberately—that Miss Sheridan was coming here, she almost shrieked. Well, I didn't know what to make of it, and even then I rather wondered——

"Even then," Alice began again, after a painful pause, and with her own voice rising uncontrollably, "I suspected something. But not this! Oh, Chris, if I'm wrong about this, I shall be on my knees for gratitude for the rest of my life; I would die, I would die to have it just—just my wretched imagination!—A thing like this—to us—the Melroses—who have always been so straight—so respected!"

"Now, Alice—now, Alice!"

"Yes, I know!" she said, quickly. "I know!" And for a moment she lay back quietly, stroking his hand. "Chris," she resumed, composedly, after a moment, "you know the tragedy of Annie's life?"

Chris, taken by surprise, frowned.

"Why, yes, I suppose so," he admitted, unwillingly.

"Chris, did it ever occur to you that she might have had a child—by that fiend?"

Chris looked at his wife a moment, and his eyes widened, and his mouth twitched humorously.

"Oh, come now, Alice—come now!"

"You think it's folly!" she asked, eagerly.

"Worse!" he answered, briefly, his eyes smiling reproach.

Alice's whole tense body relaxed, and she stared at him with light dawning in her eyes.

"Well, probably it is," she said, very simply.

"Of course it is," Chris said. "Now, you are dead tired, dear, and you have let the thing mill about in your head until you can't see anything normally. I confess that I don't understand your mother's mysterious nervousness, but then I am free to say that I don't by any means always understand your mother! You remember the pearl episode, and the time that she had Annie and Hendrick cabling from Italy—because Hendrick Junior had a rash! And then there was Porter—a boy nineteen years old, and she actually had everyone guessing exactly what she felt toward him——"

"Oh, Chris, no, she didn't! She simply felt that he was a genius, and he hadn't a penny," Alice protested, reproachful and hurt.

"Well, she had him there at the house until his mother came after him, and then, when he finally was sent abroad, she asked me seriously if I thought two hundred dollars a month was enough for his musical education!"

"Yes, I know!" Alice said, ruefully, shaking her head.

"Now this comes along," said Christopher, encouraged by the effect of his words, "and you begin to fret your poor little soul with all sorts of wild speculations. I wish to the Lord that your mother was a little bit more trusting with her confidences, but when it all comes out it'll prove to be some sister of your grandfather who married a tailor or something, and left a line of pretty girls to work in Biretta's——"

"But, Chris, she reminded me so of Annie to-day I almost felt sick," Alice said, still frightened and dubious.

"Well, that merely shows that you're soft-hearted; it's no reflection on Annie!" Chris said, giving her her paper, and opening his own. But Alice did not open her paper.

A maid came in, and moved about noiselessly setting chairs and rugs in order. Another soft light was lighted and the little square table set before the fire. The cool fresh air drifted in at the half-open window, and sent a delicate breath, from Alice's great bowl of freesia lilies, through the peaceful room. The fire snapped smartly about a fresh log, and Alice's great tortoise-shell cat came to make a majestic spring into her lap.

"Chris—I'm so worried!" said his wife.

"As a matter of fact," said Christopher, quietly, after a while, "did——Annie was very ill, I know, but was there—was there any reason to suppose that there might have been—that such a situation as to-day's might have arisen?"

Alice looked at him with apprehension dawning afresh.

"Oh, yes—that is, I believe so. I didn't know it then, of course."

"I never knew that," Christopher said, thoughtfully.

"Well, I didn't at the time, you know. It was—of course it was sixteen—eighteen years ago," Alice said. And in a whisper she added, "Chris, that girl is eighteen!"

Christopher pursed his lips to whistle, but made no sound, and looked into the fire.

"You see I was only about thirteen or fourteen," Alice said. "I was going to Miss Bennet's school, and we were all living in the Madison Avenue house. Papa had been dead only a year, or less, for I remember that Annie was eighteen, and wasn't going out much, because of mourning. Theodore had been worrying Mama to death, and had left the house then, and Mama was sending him and his wife money, I believe, but of course lots of that was kept from me. Annie was terribly wild and excitable then, always doing reckless things; I can remember when she and Belle Duer dressed up as boys and had their pictures taken, and once they put a matrimonial advertisement in the papers—of course they were just silly—at least that was. But then she began to rave about this man Müller——"

"The acrobat!" Christopher, who was listening intently, supplied.

"No, dearest! He was their riding master—I suppose that isn't much better, really. But he was an extremely handsome man—really stunning. Carry Winchester's mother forbade her taking any more lessons because she was so wild about him, and Annie told me once that that was why Ida Burnett was popped into a boarding school. He was big, and dark, and he had a slight foreign accent, and he was ever so much older than Annie—forty, at least. She began to spend all her time at the riding club; it used to make Mama wild—especially as Annie was so headstrong and saucy about it! Poor Mama, I remember her crying and complaining!"

"And how long did this go on?" Christopher asked.

"Oh, weeks! Well, and then one hot day, just before Easter vacation it was, I remember, I came home early from school with a headache, and when I reached the upper hall I could hear Mama crying, and Annie shouting out loud, and this Kate—this very same Kate Sheridan!—trying to quiet Mama, and everything in an uproar! Finally I heard Annie sobbing—I was frightened to death of course, and I sat down on the stairs that go up to the nursery—and I heard Annie say something about being eighteen—and she was eighteen the very day before; and she ran by me, in her riding clothes, with the derby hat that girls used to wear then, and her hair clubbed on her neck, and she ran downstairs, and I could hear her crying, and saying to herself: 'I'll show them; I'll show them!' And that was the last I saw of her," Alice finished sadly, "for almost two years."

"She went out?" Christopher asked.

"Yes; she slammed the door. Mama fainted."

"Of course!"

"Oh, Chris," said his wife, half crying, "wasn't that enough to make any one faint?—let alone Mama. Anyway, she was dreadfully ill, and they rather shut me up about it, and told everyone that Annie had gone abroad. We had been living very quietly, you know, and nobody cared much what Annie did, then. And she really had gone abroad, she wrote Mama from Montreal, and she had been married to Emil Müller in Albany. They had taken a train there, and were married that same afternoon. They went to London, and they were in Germany, and then—then it all broke up, you know about that!"

"How much later was that?"

Alice considered.

"It was about Christmas time. Don't you remember that I went to your mother, and Acton and I got measles? Mama was abroad then."

"And this Kate went with her?"

"Yes. That was—that was one of the things I was—just thinking about! Annie wrote Mama that she was very ill, in Munich, and poor Mama just flew. Müller had left her; indeed there was a woman and two quite big girls that had a claim on him, and if Mama hadn't been so anxious to shut it all up, she might have proved that he was a bigamist—but I don't know that she was ever sure. Judge Lee put the divorce through for Annie, and Mama took her to the Riviera and petted her, and pulled her through. But all her hair came out, and for weeks they didn't think she would live. She had brain fever. You see, Annie had had some money waiting for her on her eighteenth birthday, and your own father, who was her guardian, Chris, had given her the check—interest, it was, about seven or eight thousand dollars. And he told her to open her own account, and manage her own income, from then on. And we thought—Mama and I—that in some way Müller must have heard of it. Anyway, she never deposited the check, and when her money gave out he just left her."

"But what makes you think that her illness didn't commence—or wasn't entirely—brain fever?"

"That she might have had a baby?" Alice asked, outright.

Christopher nodded, the point almost insufferably distasteful to him.

"Oh, I know it!" Alice said.

"You know it?" the man echoed, almost in displeasure.

"Yes, she told me herself! But of course that was years later. At the time, all I knew was that Kate Sheridan came home, and came to see me at school, and told me that Mama and Annie were very well, but that Annie had been frightfully sick, and that Mama wouldn't come back until Annie was much stronger. As a matter of fact, it was nearly two years—Theodore took me over to them a year from that following summer, and then Annie stayed with some friends in England; she was having a wonderful time! But years afterward, when little Hendrick was coming, in fact, she was here one day, and she seemed to feel blue, and finally I happened to say that if motherhood seemed so hard to a person like herself, whose husband and whose whole family were so mad with joy over the prospect of a baby, what on earth must it be to the poor girls who have every reason to hate it. And she looked at me rather oddly, and said: 'Ah, I know what that is!' Of course I guessed right away what she meant, and I said: 'Annie—not really!' And she said: 'Oh, yes, that was what started my illness. I had been so almost crazy—so blue and lonesome, and so sick with horror at the whole thing, that it all happened too soon, the day after Mama and Kate got there, in fact!' And then she burst out crying and said: 'Thank God it was that way! I couldn't have faced that.' And she said that she had been too desperately ill to realize anything, but that afterward, at Como, when she was much better, she asked Mama about it, and Mama said she must only be glad that it was all over, and try to think of it as a terrible dream!"

"Well, there you are," said Chris, "she herself says that no child was born!"

"Yes, but, Chris, mightn't it be that she didn't know?" Alice submitted, timidly.

Her husband eyed her with a faint and thoughtful frown.

"It seems to me that that is rather a fantastic theory, dear! Where would this child be all this time?"

"Kate" Alice said, simply.

"Kate!" he echoed, struck. And Alice saw, with a sinking heart, that he was impressed. After a full moment of silence he said, simply: "You think this is the child?"

"Chris," his wife cried, appealingly, "I don't say I think so! But it occurred to me that it might be. I hope, with all my soul, that you don't think so!"

"I'm afraid," he answered, thoughtfully, "that I do!"

Alice's eyes filled with tears, and she tightened her fingers in his without speaking.

"The idea being," Christopher mused, "that Mrs. Sheridan brought the baby home, and has raised her. That makes Miss Sheridan—Norma—the child of Annie and that German blackguard!"

"I suppose so!" Alice admitted, despairingly.

"But why has it been kept quiet all this time!"

"Well, that," Alice said, "I don't understand. But this I am sure of: Annie hasn't the faintest suspicion of it! She supposes that the whole thing ended with her terrible illness. She was only eighteen, and younger and more childish even than Leslie is! Oh, Chris," said Alice, her eyes watering, "isn't it horrible! To come to us, of all people! Will everybody know?"

"Well, it all depends. It's a nasty sort of business, but I suppose there's no help for it. How much does Hendrick know?"

"About Annie? Oh, everything that she does; I know that. Annie told him, and Judge Lee told him about Müller and the divorce, or nullification, or whatever it was! There was nothing left unexplained there. But if the child lived, she didn't know that—only Mama did, and Kate. Oh, poor Annie, it would kill her to have all that raked up now! Why Kate kept it secret all these years——"

"I must say," Christopher exclaimed, "that——By George, I hate this sort of thing! No help for it, I suppose. But if it gets out we shall all be in for a sweet lot of notoriety. We shall just have to make terms with these Sheridans, and keep our mouths shut. I didn't get the idea that they were holding your mother up. I believe it's more that she wants justice done; she would, you know, for the sake of the family. The girl herself, this Norma, evidently hasn't been raised on any expectations—probably knows nothing about it!"

"Oh, I'm sure of that!" Alice agreed, eagerly. "And if she has Melrose blood in her, you may be sure she'll play the game. But, Chris, I can't stand the uncertainty. Mama's coming to have luncheon with me to-morrow, and I'm going to ask her outright. And if this Norma is really—what we fear, what do you think we ought to do?"

"Well, it's hard to say. It's all utterly damnable," Christopher said, distressed. "And Annie, who let us all in for it, gets off scot free! I wish, since she let it go so long, that your mother had forgotten it entirely. But, as it is, this child isn't, strictly speaking, illegitimate. There was a marriage, and some sort of divorce, whether Müller deceived Annie as to his being a bachelor or not!"

A maid stood in the doorway.

"Mrs. Melrose, Mrs. Liggett."

"Oh," Alice said, in an animated tone of pleasure, "ask her to come upstairs!" But the eyes she turned to her husband were full of apprehension. "Chris, here's Mama now! Shall we——? Would you dare?"

"Use your own judgment!" he had time to say hastily, before his wife's mother came in.

CHAPTER VIII

Mrs. Melrose frequently came in to join Alice for dinner, especially when she was aware, as to-night, that Christopher had an evening engagement. She was almost always sure of finding Annie alone, and enjoying the leisurely confidences that were crowded out of the daytime hours.

She had had several weeks of nervous illness now, but looked better to-night, looked indeed her handsome and comfortable self, as she received Chris's filial kiss on her forehead, and bent to embrace her daughter. Freda carried away her long fur-trimmed cloak, and she pushed her veil up to her forehead, and looked with affectionate concern from husband to wife.

"Now, Chris, I'm spoiling things! But I thought Carry Pope told me that you were going to her dinner before the opera!"

"I'm due there at eight," he said, reassuringly. "And by the same token, I ought to be dressing! But Alice and I have been loafing along here comfortably, and I'd give about seven dollars to stay at home with my wife!"

"He always says that!" Alice said, smilingly. "But he always has a nice time; and then the next night he plays over the whole score, and tells me who was there, and so I have it, too!"

Chris had walked to the white mantelpiece, and was lighting a cigarette.

"Alice had that little protégée of yours here, to-day, Aunt Marianna," he said, casually.

There was no mistaking the look of miserable and fearful interest that deepened instantly in the older woman's eyes.

"Miss Sheridan?" she said.

"Mama," Alice exclaimed, suddenly, clasping a warm hand over her mother's trembling one, and looking at her with all love and reassurance, "you know how Chris and I love you, don't you?"

Tears came into Mrs. Melrose's eyes.

"Of course I do, lovey," she faltered.

"Mama, you know how we would stand behind you—how anxious we are to share whatever's worrying you!" Alice went on, pleadingly. "Can't you—I'm not busy like Annie, or young like Leslie, and Chris is your man of business, after all! Can't you tell us about it? Two heads—three heads," said Alice, smiling through a sudden mist of tears, "are better than one!"

"Why," Mrs. Melrose stammered, with a rather feeble attempt at lightness, "have I been acting like a person with something on her mind? It's nothing, children, nothing at all. Don't bother your dear, generous hearts about it another second!"

And she looked from one to another with a gallant smile.

Chris eyed his wife with a faint, hopeless movement of the head, and Alice correctly interpreted it to mean that the situation was worse instead of better.

"You remember the night you sent for me, some weeks ago, Aunt Marianna?" he ventured. Mrs. Melrose moistened her lips, and swallowed with a dry throat, looking at him with a sort of alert defiance.

"I confess that I was all upset that night," she admitted, bravely. "And to tell you children the truth, Kate Sheridan coming upon me so unexpectedly——"

"Joseph quite innocently told me that evening that you had anticipated her coming!" Christopher said, quietly, as she paused.

"Joseph was mistaken!" Mrs. Melrose said, warmly, with red colour beginning to burn in her soft, faded old face. "Kate had been associated with a terrible time in my life," she went on, almost angrily. "And it was quite natural—or at least it seems so to me!—I don't know what other people would feel, but to me——But what are you two cross-examining me for?" she interrupted herself to ask, with a sudden rush of tears, as Chris looked unconvinced, and Alice still watched her sorrowfully. "Little do you know, either of you, what I have been through——"

"Mama," entreated Alice, earnestly, "will you answer me one question? I promise you that I won't ask another. You know how anxious we are only to help you, to make everything run smoothly. You know what the family is—to us. Don't you see we are?" Alice asked suddenly, seeing that the desire for sympathy and advice was rapidly breaking up the ice that had chilled her mother's heart for long weeks. "Won't you tell me just this—it's about Annie, Mama. When she was so ill in Munich. Was—was her little baby born there?"

"Yes!" Mrs. Melrose whispered, with fascinated eyes fixed on her daughter's face.

Alice, ashen faced, fell back against her pillows without speaking.

"Kate Sheridan brought the child home," Christopher stated, rather than asked, very quietly. His mother-in-law looked at him apathetically.

"Kate—yes!"

"Does Annie know it, Mama?" Alice whispered, after a silence.

"Annie? Oh, my God, no!" The mother's voice rose almost to a wail. "Oh, Chris—Alice—if you love me, Annie must not know! So proud, so happy; and she would never bear it! I know her—I know her! She would kill herself before——"

"Darling, you must be quiet!" Alice said, commandingly. "No one shall know it. What we do for this child shall be done for—well, our cousin. Chris will help you manage everything, and no one shall ever suspect it from me. It will all work out right, you'll see. Other people aren't watching us, as we always think they are; it's nobody's business if a cousin of ours suddenly appears in the family. No one would dare whisper one word against the Melroses. Only be quiet, Mama darling, and don't worry. Now that we know it, we will never, never allude to it again, will we, Chris? You can trust us."

Mrs. Melrose had sunk back into her chair; her face was putty-coloured, beads of water stood on her forehead.

"Oh, the relief—the relief!" she kept whispering, as she clung to Alice's hand. "Alice, for the sake of the name—dear—for all our sakes!——"

"Now, if you two girls will take my advice!" Christopher suggested, cheerfully, "you'll stop talking about all this, and let it wait until to-morrow. Then we'll consult, and see just what proposition we can make to little Miss Sheridan, and what's best to be done. Alice, why don't you go over that wedding list of Leslie's with your mother? And ring for dinner. I'm going to dress."

"We will!" Alice agreed, sensibly. "As a family we've always faced things courageously. We're fighters—we Melroses—and we'll stand together!"

CHAPTER IX

This was on Friday, and it was on the following Monday that Wolf and Rose Sheridan came home to find news awaiting them. The day before had been surprisingly sunny and sweet, and Wolf and Harry Redding had taken the girls to Newark, where Wolf's motor-car had been stored all winter, and they had laughed, and joked, and chattered all the way like the care-free young things they were. Mrs. Sheridan, urged to join them, had pleaded business: she had promised old Mrs. Melrose to go and see her. So she had left them at the church door, after Mass, and they had gone their way rejoicing in sunshine and warm breezes, a part of the streaming holiday crowds that were surging and idling along the drying pavements.

Wolf was neither of an age nor type for piety, but to-day he had prayed that this little Norma kneeling beside him, with the youth and fire and audacity shining in her face even while she prayed, might turn that same mysterious and solemn smile upon him again some day, as his wife. And all day long, as she danced along by his side, as she eagerly debated the question of luncheon, as she enslaved the aged coloured man in the garage, the new thrill of which he had only recently become so pleasantly conscious, stirred in his heart, and whatever she touched, or said, or looked, was beautified almost beyond recognition.

He had thought, coming home Monday night, that he and she would take a little walk, in the lingering dusk of the cool spring evening, and perhaps see the twelfth installment of "The Stripe-Faced Terror," which was playing in the near-by moving-picture house.

But he found her in a new mood, almost awed with an unexpected ecstasy in which he had no part—would never have a part. She and Aunt Kate had been to see Mrs. Melrose again.

"And, Wolf, what do you think! They want me to go live there—with the Liggetts, to help with lists and things for Leslie's wedding. Mrs. Melrose kissed me, Wolf, and said—didn't she, Aunt Kate?—that I must try to feel that I belong to them; and she was so sweet—she put her arm about me, and said that I must have some pretty clothes! And the car is coming for me on Wednesday; isn't it like a dream? Oh, Rose, if I'm thankful enough! And I'm to come back here for dinner once a week, and of course you and Rose are to come there! Oh, Rose, but I wish it was us both—I wish it was you, you're so good!"

"I wouldn't have it, Norma," Rose said, in her honest, pleasant voice. "You know I'd feel like a fool."

"Oh, but I am so happy!" And Norma, who had gotten into Aunt Kate's lap, as the marvellous narrative progressed, dug her face into Aunt Kate's motherly soft shoulder, and tightened her arms about her neck, and cried a little, for sheer joy.

But Wolf said almost nothing, and when he went to wash his hands for supper he went slowly, and found himself staring absently at the towel, and stopping short in the hall, still staring. He seemed himself at dinner, and his mother, at first watching him anxiously, could resume her meal, and later, could fall asleep, in the confident hope that it would all come right, after all. But Wolf slipped from the house after awhile, and walked the streets until almost dawn.

It was almost dawn, too when the old mistress of the Melrose mansion fell asleep. She had called Regina more than once, she had tried the effect of reading, and of hot milk, and of a cold foot-bath. But still the crowded, over-furnished room was filled with ghosts, and still she watched them, pleaded with them, blamed them.

"I've done all I could!" she whispered at last, into the heavy dark before the dawn. "It isn't my fault if they think she's Annie's child! I've never said so—it was Alice and Chris who said so. Annie and Leslie will never know anything more, and the girl herself need never know anything at all. Perhaps, as Kate said yesterday, it will all work out right, this way! At least it's all we can do now!"

CHAPTER X

So it came about quite naturally that the little unknown cousin of the Melroses was made a familiar figure in their different family groups, and friends of the house grew accustomed to finding pretty little Norma Sheridan lunching with Leslie, reading beside Alice's couch in the late summer afternoons, or amusing and delighting the old head of the family in a hundred charming ways. Norma called Mrs. Melrose "Aunt Marianna" now, as Chris and Acton did. She did not understand the miracle, it remained a marvel still, but it was enough that it continued to deepen and spread with every enchanted hour.

She had longed—what girl in Biretta's Bookstore did not?—to be rich, and to move and have her being "in society." And now she had her wish, a hundred times fulfilled, and of course she was utterly and absolutely happy.

That is, except for the momentary embarrassments and jealousies and uncertainties, and for sometimes being bored, she thought that she might consider herself happy. And there were crumpled rose-leaves everywhere! she reminded herself sternly. She—Norma Sheridan—could spend more money upon the single item of shoes, for example, than Miss Smith, head of Biretta's Bookshop, could earn in a whole long year of hot months and cold, of weary days and headachy days.

That part of it was "fun", she admitted to herself. The clothes were fun, the boxes and boxes and boxes that came home for her, the petticoats and stockings, the nightgowns heavy with filet lace, and the rough boots for tramping and driving, and the silk and satin slippers for the house. Nothing disappointing there! Norma never would forget the ecstasies of those first shopping trips with Aunt Marianna. Did she want them?—the beaded bag, the woolly scarf, the little saucy hat, were all to be sent to Miss Sheridan, please. Norma lost her breath, and laughed, and caught it again and lost it afresh. They had so quickly dropped the little pretence that she was to make herself useful, these wonderful and generous Melroses; they had so soon forgotten everything except that she was Leslie's age, and to be petted and spoiled as if she had been another Leslie!

And now, after more than half a year, she knew that they liked her; that all of them liked her in their varying degrees. Old Mrs. Melrose and Alice—Mrs. Christopher Liggett—were most warmly her champions, perhaps, but Leslie was too unformed a character to be definitely hostile, and the little earlier jealousies and misunderstandings were blown away long ago, and even the awe-inspiring Annie had shown a real friendliness of late. Acton Liggett and Hendrick von Behrens were always kind and admiring, and Norma had swiftly captivated Annie's little boys. But of them all, she still liked Chris Liggett the best, and felt nearest Chris even when he scolded her, or hurt her feelings with his frank advice. And she knew that Chris thoroughly liked her, in spite of the mistakes that she was continually making, and the absurd ways in which her ignorance and strangeness still occasionally betrayed her.

It had been a time full of mistakes, of course. Chris often told her that she had more brains in her little finger than most of the girls of her set had in their whole bodies, but that had not saved her. If she was pretty, they were all pretty, too. If she wore beautiful clothes, they wore clothes just as beautiful, and with more assurance. If her wit was quick, and her common sense and human experience far greater than theirs, these were just the qualities they neither needed nor trusted. They spoke their own language, the language of youthful arrogance and ignorance, the language of mutual compliments and small personalities, and Norma could not speak this tongue any more than she could join them when they broke easily into French or German or Italian. She could ride, because she was not afraid of the mild-mannered cobs that were used at the riding school and in the park, but she knew little of correct posture and proper handling of reins. She could swim, as Wolf had taught her, in the old river years ago, but she knew nothing of the terms and affectations of properly taught swimming. When she went to see Aunt Kate, she was almost ashamed of the splendour of her clothing and the utter luxury of the life she led, but with Leslie and her friends she often felt herself what perhaps they thought her, an insignificant little poor relation of the Melroses, who had appeared from nobody knew where, and might return unchallenged at any moment to her original obscurity.

This phase of the new life was disappointing, and Norma realized herself that she spent a quite disproportionate amount of time in thinking about it. Wasn't it enough, she would ask herself impatiently, to be one of them at all, to see one's picture in the fashionable weeklies, as a member of the family, at the Liggett-Melrose wedding; to have clothes and motor-cars, and a bedroom that was like a picture; to know Newport at first-hand; to have cruised for a week in the Craigies' yacht, and have driven to Quebec and back in the Von Behrens' car? A year ago, she reminded herself, it would have seemed Paradise to have had even a week's freedom from the bookshop; now, she need never step into Biretta's again!

But it was not enough, and Norma would come impatiently to the end of her pondering with the same fretted sense of dissatisfaction. It was not enough to be tremulously praised by old Aunt Marianna, to be joked by Chris, greeted by Alice, his wife, with a friendly smile. Norma wanted to belong to this life, to be admired and sought by Leslie, rather than endured; to have the same easy familiarity with Duers, and Alexanders, and Rutgers that Leslie had.

As was quite natural, she and Leslie had eyed each other, from the very beginning, somewhat as rivals. But Leslie, even then preparing for her marriage, had so obviously held all the advantages, that her vague resentment and curiosity concerning the family's treatment of the unknown newcomer were brief. If Aunt Alice liked Norma to come in and talk books and write notes, if Chris chose to be gallant, if Grandma lavished an unusual affection upon this new protégée, well, it robbed Leslie of nothing, after all.

But with Norma it was different. She was brought into sharp contact with another girl, only slightly her senior, who had everything that this new turn of fortune had given Norma herself, and a thousand times more. Norma saw older women, the important and influential matrons of the social world, paying court to the promised wife of Acton Liggett. Norma knew that while Alice and Chris were always attentive to her own little affairs, the solving of Leslie's problems they regarded as their own sacred obligation. Norma had hours and hours of this new enchanting leisure to fill; she could be at anybody's beck and call. But Leslie, she saw, was only too busy. Everybody was claiming Leslie; she was needed in forty places at once; she must fly from one obligation to another, and be thanked for sparing just a few minutes here and there from her crowded days.

Mrs. Melrose had immediately made Norma an allowance, an allowance so big that when Norma first told Aunt Kate about it, it was with a sense of shame. Norma had her check-book, and need ask nobody for spending money. More than that her generous old patron insisted that she use all the family charge accounts freely: "You mustn't think of paying in any shop!" said Aunt Marianna and Aunt Alice, earnestly.

But Leslie was immensely rich in her own right. The hour in which Norma realized this was one of real wretchedness. Chris was her innocent informant.

It was only two or three days before the wedding, a warm day of rustling leaves and moving shadows, in late May. The united families were still in town, but plans for escape to the country were made for the very day after the event. Norma had been fighting a little sense of hurt pride because she was not to be included among Leslie's wedding attendants. She knew that Aunt Marianna had suggested it to Leslie, some weeks before, and that the bride had quite justifiably reminded her grandmother that the eight maids, the special maid and matron of honour, and the two little pages, had all been already asked to perform their little service of affection, and that a readjustment now would be difficult. So Norma had been excluded from the luncheons, the discussions of frocks and bouquets, and the final exciting rehearsals in the big Park Avenue church.

She had chanced to be thinking of all these things on the day when Chris made a casual allusion to "needing" Leslie.

"The poor kid has got a stupid morning coming to-morrow, I'm afraid!" he had said, adding, in answer to Norma's raised eyebrows, "Business. She has to sign some papers, and alter her will—and I want all that done before they go away!"

"Has Leslie a will?" Norma had asked.

"My child, what did you suppose she had? Leslie inherited practically all of her Grandfather Melrose's estate. At least, her father, Theodore, did, and Leslie gets it direct through him. Of course your Aunt Annie got her slice, and my wife hers, but the bulk was left to the son. Poor Teddy! he didn't get much out of it. But during her minority the executors—of which I happen to be one—almost doubled it for Leslie. And to-morrow Judge Lee and I have got to go over certain matters with her."

He had been idling at the piano, while Alice dozed in the heat, and Norma played with a magazine. Now he had turned back to his music, and Norma had apparently resumed her reading. But she really had been shaken by a storm of passionate jealousy.

Jealousy is in its nature selfish, and the old Norma of Aunt Kate's little group had not been a selfish girl. But Norma had had a few weeks now of a world governed by a different standard. There was no necessity here, none of the pure beauty of sacrifice and service and insufficiency. This was a world of superfluities, a standard of excess. To have merely meals, clothing, comfort, and ease was not enough here. All these must be had in superabundance, and she was the best woman and the happiest who had gowns she could not wear, jewels lying idle, money stored away in banks, and servants standing about uselessly for hours, that the momentary needs of them might be instantly met.

The poison of this creed had reached Norma, in spite of herself. She was young, and she had always been beloved in her own group for what she honestly gave of cheer and service and friendship. It hurt her that nobody needed what she could give now, and she hated the very memory of Leslie's wedding.

But when that was over, Mrs. Melrose had taken her to Newport, whither Alice was carefully moved every June. Leslie was gone now, and Norma free from pricking reminders of her supremacy, and as old friends of Mrs. Melrose began to include her in the summer's merrymaking, she had some happy times. But even here the cloven hoof intruded.

Norma had always imagined this group as being full of friendly women and admiring men, as offering her a hundred friendships where the old life had offered one. She discovered slowly, and with pained surprise, that although there were plenty of girls, they were not especially anxious for intimacy with her, and that the men she met were not, somehow, "real." They were absorbed in amusement, polo and yachting, they moved about a great deal, and they neither had, nor desired to have, any genuine work or interest in life. She began to see Leslie's wisdom in making an early and suitable marriage. As a matron, Leslie was established; she could entertain, she had dignified duties and interests, and while Norma felt awkward and bashful in asking young men to dine with Aunt Marianna, Acton brought his friends to his home, and Leslie had her girl friends there, and the whole thing was infinitely simpler and pleasanter.

CHAPTER XI

Norma had indeed chanced to make one girl friend, and one of whom Leslie and Alice, and even Annie, heartily approved. Caroline, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Peter Craigies, was not a débutante yet, but she would be the most prominent, because the richest, of them all next winter. Caroline was a heavy-lidded, slow-witted girl, whose chief companions in life had been servants, foreign-born governesses, and music-masters. Norma had been seated next to her at the international tennis tournament, and had befriended the squirming and bashful Caroline from sheer goodness of heart. They had criticized the players, and Caroline had laughed the almost hysteric, shaken laugh that so worried her mother, and had blurted confidences to Norma in her childish way.

The next day there had been an invitation for Norma to lunch with Caroline, and Mrs. von Behrens had promptly given another luncheon for both girls. Norma was pleased, for a few weeks, with her first social conquest, but after that Caroline became a dead weight upon her. She hated the flattery, the inanities, the utter dulness of the great Craigie mansion, and she began to have a restless conviction that time spent with Caroline was time lost.

The friendship had cost her dear, too. Norma hated, even months later to remember just what she had paid for it.

In August a letter from Rose had reached her at Newport, announcing Rose's approaching marriage. Harry Redding's sister Mary was engaged to a most satisfactory young man of Italian lineage, one Joe Popini, and Mrs. Redding would hereafter divide her time between the households of her daughter and her son. Harry, thus free to marry, had persuaded Rose to wait no longer; the event was to be on a Monday not quite two weeks ahead, and Norma was please, please, please to come down as soon as she could.

Norma had read this letter with a sensation of pain at her heart. She felt so far away from them nowadays; she felt almost a certain reluctance to dovetail this life of softness and perfume and amusement in upon the old life. But she would go. She would go, of course!

And then she had suddenly remembered that on the Monday before Rose's wedding, the Craigies' splendid yacht was to put to sea for a four- or five-days' cruise, and that Caroline had asked her to go—the only other young person besides the daughter of the house. And great persons were going, visiting nobility from England, a young American Crœsus and his wife, a tenor from the Metropolitan. Annie had been delighted with this invitation; even Leslie, just returned from California and Hawaii, had expressed an almost surprised satisfaction in the Craigies' friendliness.

If they got back Friday night, then Norma could go down to the city early Saturday morning, and have two days with Rose and Aunt Kate. But if the yacht did not return until Saturday—well, even then there would be time. She and Rose could get through a tremendous lot of talking in twenty-four hours. And the voyage certainly would not be prolonged over Saturday, for had not Mrs. Craigie said, in Norma's hearing, that Saturday was the very latest minute to which she could postpone the meeting for the big charity lawn party?

So Norma and the enslaved Caroline continued to plan for their sea trip, and Norma commissioned Chris to order Rose's wedding present at Gorham's.

Mrs. von Behrens had been a trifle distant with the newcomer in the family until now, but the day before the cruise began she extended just a little of her royal graciousness toward Norma. Like Leslie, Norma admired her Aunt Annie enormously, and hungered for her most casual word.

"You've plenty of frocks, Kiddie?" asked Annie. "One uses them up at the rate of about three a day!"

"Oh!"—Norma widened her innocent eyes—"I've a wardrobe trunk full of them: white skirts and white shoes and hats!"

"Well, I didn't suppose you had them tied in a handkerchief!" Annie had responded, with her quiet smile. "See if that fits you!"

They had been up in Mrs. von Behrens's big bedroom, where that lady was looking at a newly arrived box of gowns. "That" was the frail, embroidered coat of what Norma thought the prettiest linen suit she had ever seen.

"It's charming on you, you little slender thing," Annie had said. "The skirt will be too long; will you pin it, Keating? And see that it goes at once to my mother's house."

Keating had pinned, admired. And Norma, turning herself before the mirror, with her eyes shy with pleasure and gratitude, had known that she was gaining ground.

So they had started radiantly on the cruise. But after the first few miraculous hours of gliding along beneath the gay awnings that had all been almost astonishingly disappointing, too. Caroline, to begin with, was a dreadful weight upon her young guest. Caroline for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner; Caroline retiring and rising, became almost hateful. Caroline always wanted to do something, when Norma could have dreamed and idled in her deck chair by the hour. It must be deck golf or deck tennis, or they must go up and tease dignified and courteous Captain Burns, "because he was such an old duck," or they must harass one or two of the older people into bridge. Norma did not play bridge well, and she hated it, and hated Caroline's way of paying for her losses almost more than paying them herself.

Norma could not lie lazily with her book, raising her eyes to the exquisite beauty of the slowly tipping sea, revelling in coolness and airiness, because Caroline, fussing beside her, had never read a book through in her life. The guest did not know, even now, that Caroline had been a mental problem for years, that Caroline's family had consulted great psycho-analysts about her, and had watched the girl's self-centredness, her odd slyness, her hysteric emotions, with deep concern. She did not know, even now, that the Cragies were anxious to encourage this first reaching out, in Caroline, toward a member of her own sex, and that her fancies for members of the opposite sex—for severely indifferent teachers, for shocked and unresponsive chauffeurs—were among the family problems, a part of the girl's unfortunate under-development. Caroline's family was innocently surprised to realize that her mind had not developed under the care of maids who were absorbed in their own affairs, and foreigners who would not have been free to attend her had they not been impecunious and unsuccessful in more lucrative ways. They had left her to Mademoiselles and Fräuleins quite complacently, but they did not wish her to be like these too-sullen or too-vivacious ladies.

So they welcomed her friendship with Norma, and Caroline's passionate desire to be with her friend was not to find any opposition on the part of her own family. Little Miss Sheridan had an occasional kindly word from Caroline's mother, a stout woman, middle-aged at thirty-five, and good-natured smiles from Caroline's father, a well-groomed young man. And socially, this meant that the Melroses' young protégée was made.

But Norma did not realize all this. She only knew that all the charm and beauty of the yacht were wasted on her. Everyone ate too much, talked too much, played, flirted, and dressed too much. The women seldom made their appearance until noon; in the afternoons there was bridge until six, and much squabbling and writing of checks on the forward deck, with iced drinks continually being brought up from the bar. At six the women loitered off to dress for dinner, but the men went on playing for another half hour. The sun sank in a blaze of splendour; the wonderful twilight fell; but the yacht might have been boxed up in an armoury for all that her passengers saw of the sea.

After the elaborate dinner, with its ices and hot rolls, its warm wines and chilled champagne, cards began again, and unless the ocean was so still that they might dance, bridge continued until after midnight.

Norma's happiest times had been when she arose early, at perhaps seven, and after dressing noiselessly in their little bathroom, crept upstairs without waking Caroline. Sunshine would be flooding the ocean, or perhaps the vessel would be nosing her way through a luminous fog—but it was always beautiful. The decks, drying in the soft air, would be ordered, inviting, deserted. Great waves of smooth water would flow evenly past, curving themselves with lessening ripples into the great even circle of the sea. A gentle breeze would stir the leaves of the potted plants on the deck and flap the fringes of the awnings.

Norma, hanging on the railing, would look down upon a group of maids and stewards laughing and talking on the open deck below. These were happy, she would reflect, animated by a thousand honest emotions that never crept to the luxurious cabins above. They would be waiting for breakfast, all freshly aproned and brushed, all as pleased with the Seagirl as if they had been her owners.

On the fifth day, Friday, she had been almost sick with longing to hear some mention of going back. Surely—surely, she reasoned, they had all said that they must get back on Friday night! If the plan had changed, Norma had determined to ask them to run into harbour somewhere, and put her on shore. She was so tired of Caroline, so tired of wasting time, so headachy from the heavy meals and lack of exercise!

Late on Friday afternoon some idle remark of her hostess had assured her that the yacht would not make Greble light until Monday. They were ploughing north now, to play along the Maine coast; the yachting party was a great success, and nobody wanted to go home.

Norma, goaded out of her customary shyness, had pleaded her cousin's marriage. Couldn't they run into Portland—or somewhere?—and let her go down by train? But Caroline had protested most affectionately and noisily against this, and Caroline's mother said sweetly that she couldn't think of letting Norma do that alone—Annie von Behrens would never forgive her! However, she would speak to Captain Burns, and see what could be done. Anyway, Mrs. Craigie had finished, with her comfortable laugh, Norma had only to tell her cousin that she was out with friends on their yacht, and they had been delayed. Surely that was excuse enough for any one?

It was with difficulty that Norma had kept the tears out of her eyes. She had not wanted an excuse to stay away from Rose's wedding. Her heart had burned with shame and anger and helplessness. She could hardly believe, crying herself to sleep on Friday night, that two whole days were still to spare before Monday, and that she was helpless to use them. Her mind worked madly, her thoughts rushing to and fro with a desperation worthy an actual prisoner.

On Saturday evening, after a day of such homesickness and heavy-heartedness as she had never known before in her life, she had realized that they were in some port, lying a short half mile from shore.

It was about ten o'clock, warm and star-lighted; there was no moon. Norma had slipped from the deck, where Caroline was playing bridge, and had gone to the lowered gang-plank. Captain Burns was there, going over what appeared to be invoices, with the head steward.

"Captain," Norma had said, her heart pounding, "can't you put me on shore? I must be in New York to-morrow—it's very important! If I get a coat, will you let me go in when you go?"

He had measured her with his usual polite, impersonal gaze.

"Miss Sheridan, I really could not do it, Miss! If it was a telegram, or something of that sort——But if anything was to happen to you, Miss, it would be—it really would be most unfortunate!"

Norma had stood still, choking. And in the starlight he had seen the glitter of tears in her eyes.

"Couldn't you put it to Mrs. Craigie, Miss? I'm sure she'd send someone—one of the maids——"

But Norma shook her head. It would anger Caroline, and perhaps Caroline's mother, and Annie, too, to have her upset the cruise by her own foolish plans. There was no hope of her hostess's consent. What!—send a girl of eighteen down to New York for dear knows what fanciful purpose, without a hint from parent or guardian? Mrs. Craigie knew the modern girl far too well for that, even if it had not been personally extremely inconvenient to herself to spare a maid. They were rather short of maids, for two or three of them had been quite ill.

The launch had put off, with Captain Burns in the stern. Norma had stood watching it, with her heart of lead. Oh, to be running away—flying—on the train—in the familiar streets! They could forgive her later—or never——

"Norma, aren't you naughty?" Caroline had interrupted her thoughts, and had slipped a hand through her arm. "Buoso is going to sing—do come in! My dear, you know that last hand? Well, we made it——!"

The next two days were the slowest, the hardest, the bitterest of Norma's life. She felt that nobody had ever had to bear so aching a heart as hers, as the most beautiful yacht in the world skimmed over the blue ocean, and the sun shone down on her embroidered linen suit, and her white shoes, and the pearl ring that Caroline had given her for her birthday.

What were they doing at Aunt Kate's? What were they saying as the hours went by? At what stage was the cake—and the gown? Was Rose really to be married to-morrow—to-day?

In New Brunswick she had managed to send a long wire, full of the disappointment and affection and longing she truly felt, and after that she had been happier. But it was a very subdued little Norma who had come quietly into Aunt Kate's kitchen three weeks later, and had relieved her over-charged heart with a burst of tears on Aunt Kate's shoulder.

Aunt Kate had been kind, kind as she always was to the adored foster-child. And Norma had stayed to dinner, and made soft and penitent eyes at Wolf until the agonized resolutions of the past lonely months had all melted out of his heart again, and they had all gone over to Rose's, for five minutes of kissing and crying, before the big car came to carry Norma away.

So the worst of that wound was healed, and life could become bright and promising to Norma once more. Autumn was an invigorating season, anyway, full of hope and enchantment, and Caroline Craigie, by what Norma felt to be a special providence, was visiting her grandmother in Baltimore for an indefinite term. The truth was that there was a doctor there whose advice was deemed valuable to Caroline, but Norma did not know that. Norma did not know the truth, either, about Mrs. von Behrens's sudden graciousness toward her, but it made her happy. Annie had become friendly and hospitable toward the newcomer in the family for only one reason. As a social dictator, she was accustomed to be courted and followed by scores of women who desired her friendship for the prestige it gave them. Annie was extremely autocratic in this respect, and could snub, chill, and ignore even the most hopeful aspirants to her favour, with the ease of long practice. It made no difference to Annie that dazzling credentials were produced, or that past obscurity was more than obliterated by present glory.

"One truly must be firm," Annie frequently said. "It devolves upon a few of us, as an actual duty, to see that society is maintained in its true spirit. Let the bars down once——!"

Norma, a negligible factor in Annie's life when she first appeared, had quite innocently become a problem during that first summer. While not a Melrose, she was a member of the Melrose family, making her home with one of the daughters of the house. Annie might ignore Norma, but there were plenty of women, and men, too, who saw in the girl a valuable social lever. To become intimate with little Miss Sheridan meant that one might go up to her, at teas and dinners, while she was with Mrs. Melrose, or young Mrs. Liggett, or even Mrs. von Behrens herself, in a casual, friendly manner that indicated, to a watching world, a comfortable footing with the family. Norma was consequently selected for social attention.

Annie saw this immediately, and when all the families were settled in town again, she decided to take Norma's social training in hand, as she had done Leslie's, and make sure that no undesirable cockle was sown among the family fields. She would have done exactly the same if Norma had been the least attractive of girls, but Norma fancied that her own qualities had won Annie's reluctant friendship, and was accordingly pleased.

CHAPTER XII

Eight months later, in the clear sunshine of a late autumn morning, a slender young woman came down the steps of the Melrose house, after an hour's call on the old mistress, and turned briskly toward Fifth Avenue. In figure, in carriage, and even in the expression of her charming and animated face, she was different from the girl who had come to that same house to make a call with Aunt Kate, on the day after the big blizzard, yet it was the same Norma Sheridan who nodded a refusal to the driver of the big motor-car that was waiting, and set off by herself for her walk.

The old Norma, straight from Biretta's Bookshop, had been pretty in plain serge and shabby fur. But this Norma—over whose soft thick belted coat a beautiful silver-fox skin was linked, whose heavy, ribbed silk hose disappeared into slim, flat, shining pumps that almost caressed the slender foot, whose dark hair had the lustre that comes from intelligent care, and whose handsome little English hat was the only one of its special cut in the world—was a conspicuously attractive figure even in a world of well-groomed girls, and almost deserved to be catalogued as a beauty. From the hat to the shoes she was palpably correct, and Norma knew, and never could quite sufficiently revel in the knowing, that the blouse and the tailored skirt that were under the coat were correct, too, and that under blouse and skirt were cobwebby linens and perfumed ribbons and sheerest silks that were equally perfect in their way. Leslie's bulldog, pulling on his strap, kept her moving rapidly, and girl and dog exacted from almost all the passers-by that tribute of glances to which Norma was now beginning to be accustomed.

She was walking to Mrs. von Behrens's after an unusually harmonious luncheon with old Mrs. Melrose. This was one of Norma's happy times, and she almost danced in the crisp November air that promised snow even now. Leslie had asked her to come informally to tea; Annie had sent a message that she wished to see Norma; and Alice, who, like all invalids, had dark moods of which only her own household was aware, had been her nicest self for a week. Then Christopher was coming home to-night, and Norma had missed him for the three weeks he had been away, duck-shooting in the South, and liked the thought that he was homeward bound.

She found Leslie with Annie to-day, in Annie's big front bedroom. Leslie was in a big chair by the bed where Annie, with some chalky preparation pasted in strips on those portions of her face that were most inclined to wrinkle, was lying flat. Her hair, rubbed with oils and packed in tight bands, was entirely invisible, and over her arms, protruding from a gorgeous oriental wrap, loose chamois gloves were drawn. Annie had been to a luncheon, and was to appear at two teas, a dinner, and the theatre, and she was making the most of an interval at home. She looked indescribably hideous, as she stretched a friendly hand toward Norma, and nodded toward a chair.

"Look at the child's colour—Heavens! what it is to be young," said Annie. "Sit down, Norma. How's Alice?"

"Lovely!" Norma said, pulling off her gloves. "She had a wire from Chris, and he gets back to-night. I had luncheon with your mother, and I am to go to stay with her for two or three nights, anyway. But Aunt Alice said that she would like to have me back again next week for her two teas."

"How old are you, Norma?" Annie asked, suddenly. Any sign of interest on her part always thrilled the girl, who answered, flushing:

"Nineteen; twenty in January, Aunt Annie."

"I'm thinking, if you'd like it, of giving you a little tea here next month," Annie said, lazily. "You know quite enough of the youngsters now to have a thoroughly nice time, and afterward we'll have a dinner here, and they can dance!"

"Oh, Aunt Annie—if I'd like it!" Norma exclaimed, rosy with pleasure.

"You would?" Annie asked, looking at a hand from which she had drawn the glove, and smiling slightly. "It means that you don't go anywhere in the meantime. You're not out until then, you know!"

"Oh, but I won't be going anywhere, anyway," Norma conceded, contentedly.

"You'll have a flood of invitations fast enough after the tea," Annie assured her, pleased at her excitement, "and until then, you can simply say that you are not going out yet."

"Chris said he might take me to the opera on the first night; I've never been," Norma said, timidly. "But I can explain to him!"

"Oh, that won't count!" Annie assured her, carelessly. "We'll all be there, of course! Have you worn the corn-coloured gown yet?"

"Oh, no, Aunt Annie!"

"Well, keep it for that night. And you and Chris might——No, he'll want to dine with Alice, and she'll want to see you in your new gown. I was going to say that you might dine here, but you'd better not."

"I think Leslie and Acton are going to be asked to dine with us," Norma said. "Aunt Alice said something about it!"

"Well," Annie agreed indifferently. "Ring that bell, Norma—I've got to get up! Where are you girls going now?"

"Some of the girls are coming to my house for tea," Leslie answered, listlessly. "I've got the car here. Come on, Norma!"

"But you're not driving, Kiddie?" her aunt asked, quickly.

Leslie, who neither looked nor felt well, raised half-resentful eyes.

"Oh, no, I'm not driving, and I'm lying in bed mornings, and I don't play squash, or ride horseback, or go in for tennis!" she drawled, half angrily. "I'm having a perfectly lovely time! I wish Acton had a little of it; he wouldn't be so pleased! Makes me so mad," grumbled Leslie, as she wandered toward the door, busily buttoning her coat. "Grandma crying with joy, and Aunt Alice goo-gooing at me, and Acton——"

"Come, now, be a little sport, Leslie!" her aunt urged, affectionately, with her arm about her. "It's rotten, of course, but after all, it does mean a lot to the Liggetts——"

"Oh, now, don't you begin!" Leslie protested, half-mollified, with her parting nod. "Don't—for pity's sake!—talk about it," she added, rudely, to Norma, as Norma began some consolatory murmur on the stairs. But when they were before her own fire, waiting for the expected girls, she made Norma a rather ungracious confidence.

"I don't want Aunt Alice or any one to know it, but if Acton Liggett thinks I am going to let him make an absolute fool of me, he's mistaken!" Leslie said, in a sort of smouldering resentment.

"What has Acton done?" Norma asked, flattered by the intimation of trust and not inclined to be apprehensive. She had seen earlier differences between the young married pair, and now, when Leslie was physically at a disadvantage, she and Alice had agreed that it was not unnatural that the young wife should grow exacting and fanciful.

"Acton is about the most selfish person I ever knew," Leslie said, almost with a whimper. "Oh, yes, he is, Norma! You don't see it—but I do! Chris knows it, too; I've heard Chris call him down a thousand times for it! I am just boiling at Acton; I have been all day! He leaves everything to me, everything; and I'm not well, now, and I can't stand it! And I'll tell him I can't, too."

"I suppose a man doesn't understand very well," Norma ventured.

"He doesn't!" Leslie said, warmly. "All Acton Liggett thinks of is his own comfort—that's all! I do everything for him—I pay half the expenses here, you know, more than half, really, for I always pay for my own clothes and Milly, and lots of other things. And then he'll do some mean, ugly thing that just makes me furious at him—and he'll walk out of the house, perfectly calm and happy!"

"He's always had his own way a good deal," Norma who knew anything except sympathy would utterly exasperate Leslie conceded, mildly.

"Yes," Leslie agreed, flushing, and stiffening her jaw rather ominously, "and it's just about time that he learned that he isn't always going to have it, too! It's very easy for him to have me do anything that is hard and stupid——Do you suppose," she broke off, suddenly, "that I'm so anxious to go to the Duers' dinner? I wouldn't care if I never saw one of them again!"

Norma gathered that a dinner invitation from the Duers had been the main cause of the young Liggetts' difference, and framed a general question.

"That's Saturday night?"

"Friday," Leslie amended. "And what does he do? He meets Roy Duer at the club, and says oh, no, he can't come to the dinner Friday, but Leslie can! He has promised to play bridge with the Jeromes and that crowd. But Leslie would love to go! So there I am—old lady Duer called me up the next morning, and was so sorry Acton couldn't come! But she would expect me at eight o'clock. It's for her daughter, and she goes away again on Tuesday. And then"—Leslie straightened herself on the couch, and fixed Norma with bright, angry eyes;—"then Spooky Jerome telephoned here, and said to tell Acton that if he couldn't stir up a bridge party for Friday, he'd stir up something, and for Acton to meet him at the club!"

Norma laughed.

"And did you give Acton that message?" she inquired.

"No, indeed, I didn't—that was only this morning!" Leslie said, in angry satisfaction. "I telephoned Mrs. Duer right away, and said that Acton would be so glad to come Friday, and if Acton Liggett doesn't like it, he knows what he can do! You laugh," she went on with a sort of pathetic dignity, "but don't you think it's a rotten way for a man to treat his wife, Norma? Don't you, honestly? There's nothing—nothing that I don't give way in—absolutely nothing! And I don't believe most men——Oh, hello, Doris," Leslie broke off, gaily, as there was a stir at the door; "come in! Come in, Vera—aren't you girls angels to come in and see the poor old sick lady!"

Norma was still lingering when Acton came home, an hour later. She heard his buoyant voice in the hall, and began to gather her wraps and gloves as he came to the tea table.

"Acton," Leslie said, firmly, "the bridge party is off for Friday, and you're going to Mrs. Duer's with me, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

"Whew! I can see that I'm popular in the home circle, Norma!" Acton said, leaning over the big davenport to kiss his wife. "How's my baby? All right, dear, anything you say goes! I was going to cancel the game, anyway. Look what Chris brought you, Cutey-cute! Say, Norma, has she been getting herself tired?"

Leslie, instantly mollified, drew his cold, firm cheek against hers, and looked sidewise toward Norma.

"Isn't he the nice, big, comfy man to come home to his mad little old wife?" she mumbled, luxuriously.

"Yes," Acton grumbled, still half embracing her, "but you didn't talk that way at breakfast, you little devil!"

"Am I a devil?" Leslie asked, lazily. And looking in whimsical penitence at Norma, she added, "I am a devil. But you were just as mean as you could be," she told him, widening her eyes and shaking her head.

"I know it. I felt like a dog, walking down town," her husband admitted promptly. "I tried to telephone but you weren't here!"

"I was at Aunt Annie's," Leslie said, softly. Her husband had slipped in beside her on the wide davenport, and she was resting against his shoulder, and idly kissing the little rebel lock of hair that fell across one temple. "He's a pretty nice old husband!" she murmured, contentedly.

"And she's a pretty nice little wife, if she did call me some mean names!" Acton returned, kissing the top of her head without altering her position. Norma looked at them with smiling contempt.

"You're a great pair!" she conceded, indulgently.

Leslie now was free to examine, with a flush and a laugh, the microscopic pair of beaded Indian moccasins that Chris had brought from Florida. Norma asked about Chris.

"Oh, he's fine," Acton answered, "looks brown and hard; he had a gorgeous time! He said he might be round to see Grandma to-morrow morning!"

"I'll tell her," Norma said, getting up to go. She left them still clinging together, like a pair of little love-birds, with peace fully restored for the time being.

Mrs. Melrose's car had been waiting for some time, and she was whirled home through the dark and wintry streets without the loss of a second. Lights were lighted everywhere now, and tempered radiance filled the old hall as she entered it. It was just six o'clock, but Norma knew that she and the old lady were to be alone to-night, and she went through the long drawing-room to the library beyond it, thinking she might find her still lingering over the teacups. Dinner under these circumstances was usually at seven, and frequently Mrs. Melrose did not change her gown for it.

There was lamplight in the library, but the old lady's chair was empty, and the tea table had been cleared away. Norma, supposing the room unoccupied, gave a little gasp of surprise and pleasure as Chris suddenly got to his feet among the shadows.

She was so glad to see him, so much more glad than she would have imagined herself, that for a few minutes she merely clung tight to the two hands she had grasped, and stood laughing and staring at him. Chris back again! It meant so much that was pleasant and friendly to Norma. Chris advised her, admired her, sympathized with her; above all, she knew that he liked her.

"Chris; it's so nice to see you!" she exclaimed.

The colour came into his face, and with it an odd expression that she had never seen there before. Without speaking he put his arm about her, and drew her to him, and kissed her very quietly on the mouth.

"Hello, you dear little girl!" he said, freeing her, and smiling at her, somewhat confusedly. "You're not half so glad to see me as I am to be back! You're looking so well, Norma," he went on, with almost his usual manner, "and Alice tells me you are making friends everywhere. What's the news?"

He threw himself into a large leather chair, and, hardly knowing what she was doing, in the wild hurrying of her senses, Norma sat down opposite him. Her one flurried impulse was not to make a scene. Chris was always so entirely master of a situation, so utterly unemotional and self-possessed, that if he kissed her, upon his return from a three-weeks' absence, it must be a perfectly correct thing to do.

Yet she felt both shaken and protestant, and it was with almost superhuman control that she began to carry on a casual conversation, giving her own report upon Alice and Leslie, Acton and the world in general.

When Mrs. Melrose, delighted at the little attention from her son-in-law, came smilingly in, five minutes later, Norma escaped upstairs. She had Leslie's old room here when she spent the night, but it was only occasionally that Alice spared her, for her youth and high spirits, coupled with the simplicity and enthusiasm with which she was encountering the new world, made her a really stimulating companion for the sick woman.

Regina came in to hook her into a simple dinner gown, but Norma did not once address her, except by a vague smile of greeting. Her thoughts were in a whirl. Why had he done that? Was it just brotherly—friendliness? He was much older than she—thirty-seven or eight; perhaps he had felt only an older man's kindly——

But her face blazed, and she flung this explanation aside angrily. He had no business to do it! He had no right to do it! She was furious at him!

She stood still, staring blankly ahead of her, in the centre of the room. The memory came over her in a wave; the odd, half-hesitating, half-confident look in his eyes as his arms enveloped her, the faint aroma of talcum powder and soap, the touch of his smoothly shaven cheek.

It was almost an hour later that she went cautiously downstairs. He was gone—had been gone since half-past six o'clock, Joseph reported. Norma went in to dinner with Mrs. Melrose, and they talked cheerfully of Chris's return, of Leslie and Annie.

By eight o'clock, reading in Mrs. Melrose's upstairs sitting-room, that first room that she had seen in this big house, eight months ago, Norma began to feel just a trifle flat. Chris Liggett was one of the most popular men in society, in demand everywhere, spoiled by women everywhere. He had quite casually, and perhaps even absent-mindedly, kissed his wife's young protégée upon meeting her after an absence, and she had hastily leaped to conclusions worthy of a schoolgirl! He would be about equally amused and disgusted did he suspect them.

"He likes you, you little fool," Norma said to herself, "and you will utterly spoil everything with your idiocy!"

"What did you say, lovey?" the old lady asked, half closing her book.

"Nothing!" Norma said, laughing. She reopened her novel, and tried to interest herself in it. But the thought of that quarter hour in the study came back over and over again. She came finally to the conclusion that she was glad Chris liked her.

The room was very still. A coal fire was glowing pink and clear in the grate, and now and then the radiators hissed softly. Norma had one big brilliant lamp to herself, and over the old lady's chair another glowed. Everything was rich, soft, comfortable. Regina was hovering in the adjoining room, folding the fat satin comforters, turning down the transparent linen sheets with their great scroll of monogram, and behind Regina were Joseph and Emma, and all the others, and behind them the great city and all the world, eager to see that this old woman, who had given the world very little real service in her life, should be shielded and warmed and kept from the faintest dream of need.

Money was a strange thing, Norma mused. What should she do, if—as her shamed and vague phrase had it—if "something happened" to Aunt Marianna, and she was not even mentioned in her will? Of course it was a hateful thing to think of, and a horrible thing, sitting here opposite Aunt Marianna in the comfortable upstairs sitting-room, but the thought would come. Norma wished that she knew. She would not have shortened the old lady's life by a single second, and she would have died herself rather than betray this thought to any one, even to Wolf—even to Rose! But it suddenly seemed to her very unjust that she could be picked out of Biretta's bookstore to-day, by Aunt Marianna's pleasure, and perhaps put back there to-morrow through no fault of her own. They were all kind, they were all generous, but this was not just. She wanted the delicious and self-respecting feeling of being a young woman with "independent means."

Such evenings as this one, even in the wonderful Melrose house, were undeniably dull. She and Rose had often grumbled, years ago, because there were so many of these quiet times, in between the Saturday and Sunday excitements. But Norma, in those days, had never supposed that dulness was ever compatible with wealth and ease.

"Cards?" said old Mrs. Melrose, hopefully, as the girl made a sudden move. She loved to play patience, but only when she had an audience. Norma, who had just decided to give her French verbs a good hour's attention, smiled amiably, and herself brought out the green table. She sat watching the fall of kings and aces, reminding her companion of at least every third play. But her thoughts went back to Chris, and the faint odour of powder and soap, and the touch of his shaved cheek.

CHAPTER XIII

Norma met Chris again no later than the following afternoon. It was twilight in Alice's room, and she and Norma were talking on into the gloom, discussing the one or two guests who had chanced to come in for tea, and planning the two large teas that Alice usually gave some time late in November.

Chris came in quietly, kissed his wife, and nodded carelessly to Norma. The girl's sudden mad heartbeats and creeping colour could subside together unnoticed, for he apparently paid no attention to her, and presently drifted to the piano, leaving the women free to resume their conference.

Alice was a person of more than a surface sweetness; she loved harmony and serenity, and there was almost no inclination to irritability or ugliness in her nature. Her voice was always soothing and soft, and her patience in the unravelling of other people's problems was inexhaustible. Alice was, as all the world conceded, an angel.

But Norma had not been a member of her household for eight months without realizing that Alice, like other household angels, did not wish an understudy in the rôle. She did not quite enjoy the nearness of another woman who might be all sweet and generous and peace-making, too. That was her own sacred and peculiar right. She could gently and persistently urge objections and find inconsistencies in any plan of her sister or of Norma, no matter how advantageous it sounded, and she could adhere to a plan of her own with a tenacity that, taken in consideration with Alice's weak body and tender voice, was nothing less than astonishing.

Norma, lessoned in a hard school, and possessing more than her share of adaptability and common sense, had swiftly come to the conclusion that, since it was not her part to adjust the affairs of her benefactors, she might much more wisely constitute herself a sort of Greek chorus to Alice's manipulations. Alice's motives were always of the highest, and it was easy to praise them in all honesty, and if sometimes the younger woman had mentally arrived at a conclusion long before Alice had patiently and sweetly reached it, the little self-control was not much to pay toward the comfort of a woman as heavily afflicted as Alice.

For Norma knew in her own heart that Alice was heavily afflicted, although the invalid herself always took the attitude that her helplessness brought the best part of life into her room, and shut away from her the tediousness and ugliness of the world.

"'Aïda' two weeks from to-night!" Alice said this evening, with her sympathetic smile.

"Oh, Aunt Alice—if you could go! Didn't you love it?"

"Love the opera? Do you hear her, Chris? But I didn't love people talking all about me—and they will do it, you know! And that makes one furious!"

"I see you getting furious," Norma observed, incredulously.

"You don't know me! But I was a bashful, adoring sort of little person, on my first night——"

"Yes, you were," Chris teased her, over a lazy ripple of thirds. "She was such a bashful little person at the Mardi Gras dance she promised Artie Peyton her first cotillion the following season."

"Oh, Aunt Alice—you didn't!"

Alice's rather colourless face flushed happily, and she half lowered her lids.

"Chris thinks that is a great story on me. As a matter of fact, I did do that; I was just childish enough. But I can't think how the story got out, for I was desperately ashamed of it."

"I told Aunt Annie and Leslie to-day that you wanted the Liggetts to dine here that night," Norma said, suddenly. Instantly she realized that she had made a mistake. And there was no one in the world whose light reproof hurt her as Alice's did.

"You—you gave my invitation to Leslie?" Alice asked, quietly.

"Well—not quite that. But I told her that you had said that you meant to ask them," Norma replied, uncomfortably.

"But, Norma, I did not ask you to mention it." Alice was even smiling, but she seemed a little puzzled.

"I'm so sorry—if you didn't want me to!"

"It isn't that. But one feels that one——"

"What is Norma sorry about?" Chris asked, coming back to the fire. "Norma, you're up against a terrible tribunal, here! Alice has been known—well, even to give new hats to the people who make her angry!"

This fortunate allusion to an event now some months old entirely restored Alice's good humour. Norma had accepted a certain almost-new hat from Leslie just before the wedding, and Alice, burning with her secret suspicion as to Norma's parentage, and in the first flush of her affection for the girl, had told Norma that in her opinion Leslie should not have offered it. It was not for Norma to take any patronage from her cousin, Alice said to herself. But Norma's distress at having disappointed Alice was so fresh and honest that the episode had ended with Alice's presenting her with a stunning new hat, to wipe out the terrible effect of her mild criticism.

"You're a virago," said Chris, seating himself near his wife. "Tell me what you've been doing all day. Am I in for that dinner at Annie's to-night? I wish I could stay here and gossip with you girls."

"Dearest, you'd get so stupid, tied here to me, that you wouldn't know who was President of the United States!" Alice smiled. "Yes, I promised you to Annie two weeks ago. To-morrow night Norma goes to Leslie, and you and I have dinner all alone, so console yourself with that."

"Très bien," Christopher agreed. And as if the phrase suggested it, he went on to test Norma's French. Norma was never self-conscious with him, and in a few seconds he and Alice were laughing at her earnest absurdities. When husband and wife went on into a conversation of their own, Norma sat back idly, conscious that the atmosphere was always easy and pleasant when Chris was at home, there were no petty tensions and no sensitive misconstructions while Chris was talking. Sometimes with Annie and Alice, and even with Leslie, Norma could be rapidly brought to the state of feeling prickly all over, afraid to speak, and equally uncomfortable in silence. But Chris always smoothed her spirit into utter peace, and reëstablished her sense of proportion, her sense of humour.

Neither he nor Alice noticed her when she presently went away to change her gown for dinner, but when she came out of her room, half an hour later, Chris was just coming up to his. Their rooms were on the same floor—his the big front room, and hers one of the sunny small ones at the back of the house. Norma's and that of Miss Slater, Alice's nurse, were joined by a bathroom; Chris had his own splendid dressing-room and bath, fitted, like his bedroom, with rugs and chests and highboys worthy of a museum.

"Aren't you going to be late, Chris?" Norma asked, when they met at the top of the stairs. Fresh from a bath, with her rich dark hair pushed back in two shining wings from her smooth forehead, and her throat rising white and soft from the frills of a black lacy gown, she was the incarnation of youth and sweetness as she looked up at him. "Seven o'clock!" she reminded him.

For answer he surprised her by catching her hand, and staring gravely down at her.

"Were you angry at me, Norma?" he asked, in a quiet, businesslike voice.

"Angry?" she echoed, surprised. But her colour rose. "No, Chris. Why should I be?"

"There is no reason why you should be, of course," he answered, simply, almost indifferently. And immediately he went by her and into his room.

CHAPTER XIV

On the memorable night of her first grand opera Norma and Chris dined at Mrs. von Behrens's. It was Alice who urged the arrangement, urged it quite innocently, as she frequently did the accidental pairing of Norma and Chris, because her mother was going for a week to Boston, the following day, and they wanted an evening of comfortable talk together.

Norma, with Freda and Miss Slater as excited accomplices, laid out the new corn-coloured gown at about five o'clock in the afternoon, laid beside it the stockings and slippers that exactly matched it in colour, and hung over the foot of her bed the embroidered little stays that were so ridiculously small and so unnecessarily beautiful. On a separate chair was spread the big furred wrap of gold and brown brocade, the high carriage shoes, and the long white gloves to which the tissue paper still was clinging. The orchids that Annie had given Norma that morning were standing in a slender vase on the bureau, and as a final touch the girl, regarding these preparations with a sort of enchanted delight, unfurled to its full glory the great black ostrich-feather fan. Norma amused Alice and Mrs. Melrose by refusing tea, and disappeared long before there was need, to begin the great ceremony of robing.

Miss Slater manicured her hands while Freda brushed and dressed the dark thick hair. Between Norma and the nurse there had at first been no special liking. Both were naturally candidates for Alice's favour. But as the months went by, and Norma began to realize that Miss Slater's position was not only far from the ideally beautiful one it had seemed at first, but that the homely, elderly, good-natured woman was actually putting herself to some pains to make Norma's own life in the Liggett house more comfortable than it might have been, she had come genuinely to admire Alice's attendant, and now they were fast friends. It was often in Norma's power to distract Alice's attention from the fact that Miss Slater was a little late in returning from her walk, or she would make it a point to order for the invalid something that Miss Slater had forgotten. They stood firmly together in many a small domestic emergency, and although the nurse's presence to-night was not, as Norma thought with a little pang, like having Rose or Aunt Kate with her, still it was much, much better than having no one at all.

She sat wrapped luxuriously in a brilliant kimono, while Freda brushed and rolled busily, and Miss Slater polished and clipped. Then ensued a period of intense concentration at the mirror, when the sparkling pins were put in her hair, and the little pearl earrings screwed into her ears, and when much rubbing and greasing and powdering went on, and even some slight retouching of the innocent, red young mouth.

"Shall I?" Norma asked, dubiously eyeing the effect of a trace of rouge.

"Don't be an idiot, Miss Sheridan!" Miss Slater said. "You've got a lovely colour, and it's a shame to touch it!"

"Oh, but I think I look so pale!" Norma argued.

"Well, when you've had your dinner——Now, you take my advice, my dear, and let your face alone."

"Well, all the girls do it," Norma declared, catching up the little girdle, and not unwilling to be over-persuaded. She gave an actual shiver of delight as Freda slipped the gown over her head.

It fell into shape about her, a miracle of cut and fit. The little satiny underskirt was heavy with beads, the misty cloud of gauze that floated above it was hardly heavy enough to hold its own embroideries. Little beaded straps held it to the flawless shoulders, and Norma made her two attendants laugh as she jerked and fussed at the gold lace and tiny satin roses that crossed her breast.

"Leave it alone!" Miss Slater said.

"Oh, but it seems so low!"

"Well, you may be very sure it isn't—Lenz knows what he's doing when he makes a gown.... Here, now, what are you going to do with your flowers?"

"Oh, I'm going to wrap the paper round them, and carry them until just before I get to Aunt Annie's. Wouldn't you?"

"Wouldn't I? I like that!" said Miss Slater, settling her eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose with a finger and thumb. Norma had a momentary pang of sympathy; she could never have been made to understand that a happy barnyard duck may look contentedly up from her pool at the peacock trailing his plumes on the wall.

"Norma—for the love of Allah!" Chris shouted from downstairs.

Norma gave a panicky laugh, snatched her fan, wrap, and flowers, and fled joyously down to be criticized and praised. On the whole, they were pleased with her: Alice, seizing a chance for an aside to tell her not to worry about the lowness of the gown, that it was absolutely correct she might be very sure, and Mrs. Melrose quite tremulously delighted with her ward. Chris did not say much until a few minutes before they planned to start, when he slipped a thin, flat gold watch from his vest pocket, and asked speculatively:

"Norma, has your Aunt Kate ever seen you in that rig?"

"No!" she answered, quickly. And then, with less sparkle, "No."

"Well, would you like to run in on her a moment?—she'd probably like it tremendously!" said Chris.

"Oh, Chris—I would love it!" Norma exclaimed, soberly, over a disloyal conviction that she would rather not. "But have we time?"

"Tons of time. Annie's dinners are a joke!"

Norma glanced at the women; Mrs. Melrose looked undecided, but Alice said encouragingly:

"I think that would be a sweet thing to do!"

So it was decided: and Norma was bundled up immediately, and called out excitedly laughing good-byes as Chris hurried her to the car.

"You know, it means a lot to your own people, really to see you this way, instead of always reading about it, or hearing about it!" Chris said, in his entirely prosaic, big-brotherly tone, as the car glided smoothly toward the West Sixties.

"I know it!" Norma agreed. "But I don't know how you do!" she added, in shy gratitude.

"Well, I'm nearly twice your age, for one thing," he replied, pleasantly. And as the car stopped unhesitatingly at the familiar door he added: "Now make this very snappy!"

She protested against his getting out, but he accompanied her all the way upstairs, both laughing like conspirators as they passed somewhat astonished residents of the apartment house on the way.

Aunt Kate and Wolf, and Rose and Harry, as good fortune would have it, were all gathered under the dining-room lamp, and there was a burst of laughter and welcome for Norma and "Mister Chris." Norma's wrap was tossed aside, and she revolved in all her glory, waving her fan at arm's length, pleasantly conscious of Wolf's utter stupefaction, and conscious, too, a little less pleasantly, that Aunt Kate's maternal eye did not agree with Aunt Annie's in the matter of décolletage.

Then she and Chris were on their way again, and the legitimate delights of being young and correctly dressed and dining with the great Mrs. von Behrens, and going to Grand Opera at the Metropolitan, might begin. Norma had perhaps never in her life been in such wild spirits as she was to-night. It was not happiness, exactly, not the happiness of a serene spirit and a quiet mind, for she was too nervous and too much excited to be really happy. But it was all wonderful.

She was the youngest person at the long dinner table, at which eighteen guests sat in such stately and such separated great carved chairs as almost to dine alone. Everyone was charmingly kind to the little Melrose protégée, who was to be introduced at a formal tea next week. The men were all older than Leslie's group and were neither afraid nor too selfishly wrapped up in their own narrow little circle to be polite. Norma had known grown young men, college graduates, and the sons of prominent families, who were too entirely conventional to be addressed without an introduction, or to turn to a strange girl's rescue if she spilled a cup of tea. But there was none of that sort of thing here.

To be sure, Annie's men were either married, divorced, or too old to be strictly eligible in the eyes of unsophisticated nineteen, but that did not keep them from serving delightfully as dinner partners. Then Aunt Annie herself was delightful to-night, and joined in the general, if unexpressed, flattery that Norma felt in the actual atmosphere.

"Heavens—do you hear that, Ella?" said Annie, to an intimate and contemporary, when Norma shyly asked if the dress was all as it should be—if the—well, the neck, wasn't just a little——? "Heavens!" said Mrs. von Behrens, roundly, "if I had your shoulders—if I were nineteen again!—you'd see something a good deal more sensational than that!"

This was not the sort of thing one repeated to Aunt Kate. It was, like much of Annie's conversation, so daring as to be a little shocking. But Annie had so much manner, such a pleasant, assured voice, that somehow Norma never found it censurable in her.

To-night, for the first time, Hendrick von Behrens paid her a little personal attention. Norma had always liked the big, blond, silent man, with his thinning fair hair, and his affection for his sons. It was of his sons that he spoke to her, as he came up to her to-night.

"There are two little boys up in the nursery that don't want to go to sleep until Cousin Norma comes up to say good-night," said Hendrick, smiling indulgently. Norma turned willingly from Chris and two or three other men and women; it was a privilege to be sufficiently at home in this magnificent place to follow her host up to the nursery upstairs, and be gingerly hugged by the little silk-pajamed boys.

Chris watched her go, the big fan and the blue eye and the delightful low voice all busy as she and Hendrick went away, and an odd thought came to him. That was her stepfather upon whom she was turning the battery of those lovely eyes; those little boys who were, he knew, jumping up and down in their little Dutch colonial beds, and calling "Norma—Norma—Norma!" were her half-brothers.

He glanced toward Annie; her beautiful figure wrapped in a sparkling robe that swept about her like a regal mantle, her fair hair scalloped like waves of carved gold, her fingers and throat and hair and ears sparkling with diamonds. Annie had on the famous Murison pearls, too, to-night; she was twisting them in her fingers as her creditable Italian delighted the ears of the Italian ambassador. Her own daughter to-night sat among her guests. Chris liked to think himself above surprise, but the strangeness of the situation was never absent a second from his thoughts. He drifted toward his hostess; he was proud of his own languages, and when Norma came back she came to stand wistfully beside them, wondering if ever—ever—ever—she would be able to do that!

It was all thrilling—exhilarating—wonderful! Norma's heart thumped delightfully as the big motor-cars turned into Broadway and took their place in the slowly moving line. She pressed her radiant face close to the window; snow was fluttering softly down in the darkness, and men were pushing it from the sidewalks, and shouting in the night. There was the usual fringe of onlookers in front of the opera house, and it required all Norma's self-control to seem quite naturally absorbed in getting herself safely out of the motor-car, and quite unconscious that her pretty ankles, and her pretty head, and the great bunched wrap, were not being generally appraised.

Women were stepping about gingerly in high heels; lights flashed on quivering aigrettes, on the pressed, intense faces of the watchers, and on the gently turning and falling snow, against the dark street. Norma was caught in some man's protecting arm, to push through into the churning crowd in the foyer; she had a glimpse of uniformed ushers and programme boys, of furred shoulders, of bared shoulders, of silk hats, of a sign that said: "Footmen Are Not Allowed in This Lobby."

Then somehow through, criss-crossed currents in the crowd, they reached the mysterious door of the box, and Norma saw for the first time the great, dimly lighted circle of the opera house, the enormous rise of balcony above balcony, the double tiers of boxes, and the rows of seats downstairs, separated by wide aisles, and rapidly filling now with the men and women who were coming down to their places almost on a run.

The orchestra was already seated, and as Norma stood awed and ecstatic in the front of the Von Behrens box, the conductor came in, and was met with a wave of applause, which had no sooner died away than the lights fanned softly and quickly down, there was the click of a baton on wood, and in the instantly ensuing hush the first quivering notes of the opera began.

"Sit down, you web-foot!" Acton Liggett whispered, laughing, and Norma sank stiffly upon her chair, risking, as the curtain had not yet risen, a swift, bewildered smile of apology toward the dim forms that were rustling and settling behind her.

"Oo—oo—ooo!" was all that she could whisper when presently Chris murmured a question in her ear. And when the lights were on again, and the stars taking their calls, he saw that her face was wet, and her lashes were caught together with tears.

"It is wonderful music; the best of Verdi!" he said to Annie; and Annie, agreeing, sent him off with "that baby," to have her dry her eyes. Norma liked his not speaking to her, on her way to the great parlour where women were circling about the long mirrors, but when she rejoined him she was quite herself, laughing, excited, half dancing as he took her back to the box.

She sat down again, her beautiful little head, with its innocent sweep of smooth hair, visible from almost every part of the house, her questions incessant as the blue eyes and the great fan swept to and fro. Once, when she turned suddenly toward him, in the second entr'acte, she saw a look on Chris's face that gave her an odd second of something like fear, but the house darkened again before she could analyze the emotion, and Norma glued her eyes to the footlights.

What she did not see was a man, not quite at ease at his own first grand opera, not quite comfortable in his own first evening dress, lost—and willingly lost, among the hundreds who had come in just to stand far at the back, behind the seats, edging and elbowing each other, changing feet, and resting against any chair-back or column that offered itself, and sitting down, between acts, on the floor.

Wolf was not restless. He was strong enough to stand like an Indian, and tall enough to look easily over the surrounding heads. More than that, "Aïda" did not interest him in itself, and at some of its most brilliant passages he was guilty of slipping away to pace the hallways in solitude, or steal to the foyer for a brief cigarette. But when the house was lighted again, he went back into the auditorium, and then his eyes never left the little dark head of the girl who sat forward in one of the lower tier of boxes, waving her big fan, and talking over her bare shoulder to one or another of the persons beside or behind her.

CHAPTER XV

It was long afterward that Norma dated from the night of "Aïda" a new feeling in herself toward Chris, and the recognition of a new feeling in Chris toward her. She knew that a special sort of friendship existed between them from that time on.

He had done nothing definite that night; he had never done or said anything that could be held as marking the change. But Norma felt it, and she knew that he did. And somehow, in that atmosphere of fragrant flowers and women as fragrant, of rustling silks and rich furs, of music and darkness, and the old passion of the story, it had come to her for the first time that Chris was not only the Chris of Alice's room, Aunt Marianna's son-in-law and Leslie's brother-in-law, but her own Chris, too, a Chris who had his special meaning for her, as well as for the rest.

She liked him, it was natural that she should especially and truly like him. Almost all women did, for he was of the type that comes closest to understanding them, and he had made their favour an especial study. Chris could never be indifferent to any woman; if he did not actively dislike her, he took pains to please her, and, never actively disliking Norma, he had from the first constituted himself her guide and friend.

Long before he was conscious that there was a real charm to this little chance member of their group, Norma had capitulated utterly. His sureness, his pleasant suggestions, his positive approval or kindly protests, had done more to make her first months among the Melroses happy than any other one thing. Norma loved him, and was grateful to him, even when he hurt her. In the matter of a note of acceptance, of a little act of thanks, of a gown or hat, his decision was absolute, and she had never known it mistaken.

Besides this, she saw him everywhere welcome, everywhere courted and admired, and everywhere the same Chris—handsome, self-possessed, irreproachably dressed whether for golf or opera, adequate to the claims of wife, mother, family, or the world. She had heard Acton turn to him for help in little difficulties; she knew that Leslie trusted him with all her affairs, and he was as close as any man could be to an intimacy with Hendrick von Behrens. Quietly, almost indifferently, he would settle his round eyeglasses on their black ribbon, narrow his fine, keen eyes and set his firm jaw, and take up their problems one by one, always courteous, always interested, always helpful.

Then Chris had charm, as visible to all the world as to Norma. He had the charm of race, of intelligence and education, the charm of a man who prides himself upon his Italian and French, upon his knowledge of books and pictures, and his capacity for holding his own in any group, on any subject. He was quite frankly a collector, a connoisseur, a dilettante in a hundred different directions, and he had had leisure all his life to develop and perfect his affectations. In all this new world Norma could not perhaps have discovered a man more rich in just what would impress her ignorance, her newness, to the finer aspects of civilization.

For a few weeks after "Aïda," as other operas and Annie's tea, and the opening social life of the winter softened the first impression, Norma tried to tell herself that she had imagined a little tendency, on Chris's part, too—well, to impress her with his friendliness. She had seen him flirt with other women, and indeed small love affairs of all sorts were constantly current, not only in Annie's, but in Leslie's group. A certain laxity was in the air, and every month had its separation or divorce, to be flung to the gossips for dissection.

Norma was not especially flattered at first, and rather inclined to resent the assurance with which Chris carried his well-known tendency for philandering into his own family, as it were. But as the full days went by, and she encountered in him, wherever they met, the same grave, kindly attention, the same pleasant mouth and curiously baffling eyes, in spite of herself she began to experience a certain breathless and half-flattered and half-frightened pride in his affection.

He never kissed her again, never tried to arrange even the most casual meeting alone with her, and never let escape even a word of more than brotherly friendliness. But in Leslie's drawing-room at tea time, or at some studio tea or Sunday luncheon in a country house, he always quietly joined her, kept, if possible, within the sound of her voice, and never had any plan that would interfere with possible plans of hers. If she was ready to go, he would drive her, perhaps to discourse impersonally upon the quality of the pictures, or the countryside mantled with snow, upon the way. If she wanted a message telephoned, a telegram sent, even a borrowed book returned, it was "no trouble at all"; Chris would of course attend to it.

At dinner parties he was rarely placed beside her; hers was naturally the younger set. But he found a hundred ways to remind her that he was constantly attentive. Norma would feel her heart jump in her side as he started toward her across a ball-room floor, handsome, perfectly poised, betraying nothing but generous interest in her youthful good times as he took his place beside her.

So Christmas came and went, and the last affairs of the brief season began to be announced: the last dances, the last dinners, the "pre-Lenten functions" as the papers had it. Norma, apologizing, in one of her flying calls on Aunt Kate, for the long intervals between visits, explained that she honestly did not know where the weeks flew!

"And are you happy, Baby?" her aunt asked, holding her close, and looking anxiously into her eyes.

"Oh—happy!" the girl exclaimed, with a sort of shallow, quick laugh that was quite new. "Of course I am. I never in my life dreamed that I could be so happy. I've nothing left to wish for. Except, of course, that I would like to know where I stand; I would like to have my own position a little more definite," she added. But the last phrases were uttered only in her own soul, and Mrs. Sheridan, after a rather discontented scrutiny of the face she loved so well, was obliged to change the subject.

CHAPTER XVI

In mid-Lent, when an early rush of almost summery warmth suddenly poured over the city, Chris and Norma met on the way home from church. Norma walked every Sunday morning to the big cathedral, but Chris went only once or twice a year to the fashionable Avenue church a few blocks away. This morning he had joined her as she was quietly leaving the house, and instantly it flashed into her mind that he had deliberately planned to do so, knowing that Miss Slater, who usually accompanied her, was away for a week's vacation.

Their conversation was impersonal and casual, as always, as they walked along the drying sidewalks, in the pleasant early freshness, but as Chris left her he asked her at about what time she would be returning, and Norma was not surprised, when she came out of the cathedral, a little later than the great first tide of the outpouring congregation, to see him waiting for her.

The thought of him had been keeping her heart beating fast, and her mind in confusion, even while she tried to pray. And she had thought that she might leave the church by one of the big side doors, and so at least run a fair risk of missing him. But Norma half feared an act that would define their deepening friendship as dangerous, and half longed for the fifteen minutes of walking and chatting in the sunshine. So she came straight to him, and with no more than a word of greeting they turned north.

It was an exquisite morning, and the clean, bare stretches of the Avenue were swimming in an almost summerlike mist of opal and blue. Such persons as were visible in the streets at all were newsboys, idle policemen, or black-clad women hurrying to or from church, and when they reached the Park, it was almost deserted. The trees, gently moving in a warm breeze, were delicately etched with the first green of the year; maples and sycamores were dotted with new, golden foliage, and the grass was deep and sweet. A few riders were ambling along the bridle-path, the horses kicking up clods of the damp, soft earth.

Norma and Christopher walked slowly, talking. The girl was hardly conscious of what they said, realizing suddenly, and almost with terror, that just to be here, with Chris, was enough to flood her being with a happiness as new and miraculous as the new and miraculous springtime itself. There was no future and no past to this ecstasy, no Alice, no world; it was enough, in its first bloom, that it existed.

"You've had—what is it?—a whole year of us, Norma," Chris said, "and on the whole, it's been happy, hasn't it?"

"Fourteen months," she corrected him. "Fourteen months, at least, since Aunt Kate and I called on Aunt Marianna. Yes, it's been like a miracle, Chris. I never will understand it. I never will understand why a friendless girl—unknown and having absolutely no claim—should have been treated so wonderfully!"

"And you wouldn't want to go back?" he mused, smiling.

"No," she said, quickly. "I am afraid, when I think of ever going back!"

"I don't see why you should," Chris said. "You will inherit, through your grandmother's will——"

He had been following a train of thought, half to himself. Norma's round eyes, as she stopped short in the path, arrested him.

"My grandmother!" she exclaimed.

"Your Aunt Marianna," he amended, flushing. But their eyes did not move as they stared at each other.

A thousand remembered trifles flashed through Norma's whirling brain; a thousand little half-stilled suspicions leaped to new life. She had accepted the suggested kinship in childish acquiescence, but doubt was aflame now, once and for all. The man knew that there was no further evading her.

"Chris, do you know anything about me?" she asked, directly.

"Yes, I think—I know everything," he answered, after a second's hesitation.

Norma looked at him steadily. "Did you know my father and mother?" she demanded, presently, in an odd, tense voice.

There was another pause before Chris said, slowly:

"I have met your father. But I knew—I know—your mother."

"You know her?" The world was whirling about Norma. "Is Aunt Kate my mother?" she asked, breathing hard.

"No. I don't know why you should not know. You call her Aunt Annie," Chris said.

Norma's hands dropped to her sides. She breathed as if she were suffocating.

"Aunt Annie!" she whispered, in stupefaction.

And she turned and walked a few steps blindly, her eyes wide and vacant, and one hand pressed to her cheek. "My God!—my God!" he heard her say.

"Annie eloped when she was a girl," Chris began presently, when she was dazedly walking on again. "She was married, and the man deserted her. She was ill, in Germany——But shall I talk now? Would you rather not?"

"Oh, no—no! Go on," Norma said, briefly.

"Alice was the first to guess it," Christopher pursued. "Her sister doesn't know it, or dream it!"

"Aunt Annie doesn't! She does not know that I'm her own daughter!... But what does she think?"

"She supposes that her baby died, dear. I'm sorry to tell you, Norma, but I couldn't lie to you! You'll understand everything, now—why your grandmother wants to make it all up to you——"

"Does Leslie know?" Norma demanded, suddenly, from a dark moment of brooding.

"Nobody knows! Your Aunt Kate, your grandmother, Alice, and I, are absolutely the only people in the world! And Norma, nobody else must know. For the sake of the family, for everyone's sake——"

"Oh, I see that!" she answered, quickly and impatiently. And for awhile she walked on in silence, and apparently did not hear his one or two efforts to recommence the conversation. "Aunt Annie!" she said once, half aloud. And later she added, absently: "Yes, I should know!"

They had walked well up into the Park, now they turned back; the sun was getting hot, first perambulators were making their appearance, and Norma loosened her light furs.

"So I am a Melrose!" she mused. And then, abruptly: "Chris, what is my name?"

"Melrose," he answered, flushing.

Her eyes asked a sudden, horrified question, and she took the answer from his look without a word. He saw the colour ebb from her face, leaving it very white.

"You said—they—my parents—were married, Chris?" she asked, painfully.

"Annie supposed they were. But he was not free!"

Norma did not speak again. In silence they crossed the Avenue, and went on down the shady side street. Chris, with chosen words and quietly, told her the story of Annie's girlhood, who and what her father had been, the bitter grief of her grandmother, the general hushing up of the whole affair. He watched her anxiously as he talked, for there was a drawn, set look to her face that he did not like.

"Why did Aunt Kate ever decide to bring me to my—my grandmother, after so many years?" she asked.

"I'm sure I don't know that. Alice and I have fancied that Kate might have kept in touch with your father all this time, and that he might be dead now, and not likely to—make trouble."

"That is it," Norma agreed, quickly. "Because not long before she came to see Aunt Marianna she had had some sort of news—from Canada, I think. An old friend was dead; I remember it as if it were yesterday."

"Then that fits in," Chris said, glad she could talk.

"But I can't believe it!" she cried in bewilderment. And suddenly she burst out angrily: "Oh, Chris, is it fair? Is it fair? That one girl, like Leslie, should have so—so much! The name, the inheritance, the husband and position and the friends—and that another, through no fault of hers, should be just—just—a nobody?"

She choked, and Christopher made a little protestant sound.

"Oh, yes, I am!" she insisted, bitterly. "Not recognized by my own mother—she's not my mother! No mother could——"

"Listen, dear," Chris begged, really alarmed by the storm he had raised. "Your grandmother, for reasons of her own, never told Annie there was a baby. It is obvious why she kept silent; it was only kindness—decency. Annie was young, younger than you are, and poor old Aunt Marianna only knew that her child was ill, and had been ill-treated, and most cruelly used. You were brought up safely and happily, with good and loving people——"

"The best in the world!" Norma said, through her teeth, fighting tears.

"The best in the world. Why, Norma, what a woman they've made you! You—who stand alone among all the girls I know! And then," Chris continued quickly, seeing her a little quieter, "when you are growing up, your aunt brings you to your grandmother, who immediately turns her whole world topsy-turvy to make you welcome! Is there anything so unfair in that? Annie made a terrible mistake, dear——"

"And everyone but Annie pays!" Norma interrupted, bitterly.

"Norma, she is your mother!" Chris reminded her, in the tone that, coming from him, always instantly affected her. Her eyes fell, and her tone, when she spoke, was softer.

"Just bearing a child isn't all motherhood," she said.

"No, my dear; I know. And if Annie were ever to guess this, it isn't like her not to face the music, at any cost. But isn't it better as it is, Norma?"

The wonderful tone, the wonderful manner, the kindness and sympathy in his eyes! Norma, with one foot on the lowest step, now raised her eyes to his with a sort of childish penitence.

"Oh, yes, Chris! But"—her lips trembled—"but if Aunt Kate had only kept me from knowing for ever!" she faltered.

"She wouldn't take that responsibility, dear, and one can't blame her. A comfortable inheritance comes from your grandmother; it isn't the enormous fortune Leslie inherited, of course, but it is all you would have had, even had Annie brought you home openly as her daughter. It is enough to make a very pretty wedding-portion for me to give away with you, my dear, in a few years," Chris added more lightly. The suggestion made her face flame again.

"Who would marry me?" she said, under her breath, with a scornful look, under half-lowered lids, into space.

For answer he gave her an odd glance—one that lived in her memory for many and many a day.

"Ah, Norma—Norma—Norma!" he said—quickly, half laughingly. Then his expression changed, and his smile died away. "I have something to bear," he said, with a glance upward toward Alice's windows. "Life isn't roses, roses, all the way for any one of us, my dear! Now, you've got a bad bit of the road ahead. But let's be good sports, Norma. And come in now, I'm famished; let's have breakfast. My honour is in your hands," he added, more gravely, "perhaps I had no right to tell you all this! You mustn't betray me!"

"Chris," she responded, warmly, "as if I could!"

He watched her eating her breakfast, and chatting with Alice, a little later, and told himself that some of Annie's splendid courage had certainly descended to this gallant little daughter. Norma was pale, and now and then her eyes would meet his with a certain strained look, or she would lose the thread of the conversation for a few seconds, but that was all. Alice noticed nothing, and in a day or two Chris could easily have convinced himself that the conversation in the spring greenness of the Sunday morning had been a dream.

CHAPTER XVII

However, that hour had borne fruit, and in two separate ways had had its distinct effect upon Norma's mind and soul. In the first place, she had a secret now with Chris, and understanding that made her most casual glance at him significant, and gave a double meaning to almost every word they exchanged. It was at his suggestion that she decided to keep the revelation from Alice, even though she knew what Alice knew, for Alice was not very well, and Chris was sure that it would only agitate and frighten the invalid to feel that the family's discreditable secret was just that much nearer betrayal. So she and Chris alone shared the agitation, strain, and bewilderment of the almost overwhelming discovery; and Norma, in turning to him for advice and sympathy, deepened tenfold the tie between them.

But even this result was not so far-reaching as the less-obvious effect of the discovery upon her character. Everything that was romantic, undisciplined, and reckless in Norma was fostered by the thought that so thrilling and so secret a history united her closely to the Melrose family. That she was Leslie's actual cousin, that the closest of all human relationships bound her to the magnificent Mrs. von Behrens, were thoughts that excited in her every dramatic and extravagant tendency to which the amazing year had inclined her. With her growing ease in her changed environment, and the growing popularity she enjoyed there, came also a sense of predestination, the conviction that her extraordinary history justified her in any act of daring or of unconventionality. There was nothing to be gained by self-control or sanity, Norma might tell herself, at least for those of the Melrose blood.

Her shyness of the season before had vanished, and she could plunge into the summer gaiety with an assurance that amazed even herself. Her first meeting with Annie, after the day of Chris's disclosures, was an ordeal at which he himself chanced to be a secretly thrilled onlooker. Norma grew white, and her lips trembled; there was a strained look in her blue, agonized eyes. But Annie's entire unconsciousness that the situation was at all tense, and the presence of three or four total outsiders, helped Norma to feel that this amazing and dramatic moment was only one more in a life newly amazing and dramatic, and she escaped unnoticed from the trial. The second time was much less trying, and after that Norma showed no sign that she ever thought of the matter at all.

Mrs. von Behrens took Norma to her Maine camp in July, and when the girl joined the Chris Liggetts in August, it was for a season of hard tennis, golf, polo, dancing, yachting, and swimming. Norma grew lean and tanned, and improved so rapidly in manner and appearance that Alice felt, concerning her, certain fears that she one day confided to her mother.

It was on an early September day, dry and airless, and they were on the side porch of the Newport cottage.

"You see how pretty she's growing, Mama," Alice said. And then, in a lower tone, with a quick cautious glance about: "Mama, doesn't she often remind you of Annie?"

Mrs. Melrose, who had been contentedly rocking and drowsing in the heat, paled with sudden terror and apprehension, and looked around her with sick and uneasy eyes.

"Alice—my darling," she stammered.

"I know, Mama—I'm not going to talk about it, truly!" Alice assured her, quickly. "I never even think of it!" she added, earnestly.

"No—no—no, that's right!" her mother agreed, hurriedly. Her soft old face, under the thin, crimped gray hair, was full of distress.

"Mama, there is no reason why it should worry you," Alice said, distressed, too. "Don't think of it; I'm sorry I spoke! But sometimes, even though she is so dark, Norma is so like Annie that it makes my blood run cold. If Annie ever suspected that she is—well, her own daughter——"

Mrs. Melrose's face was ashen, and she looked as if touched by the heat.

"No—no, dear!" she said, with a sort of terrified brevity. "You and Chris were wrong there. I can't talk to you about it, Alice," she broke off, pleadingly; "you mustn't ask me, dear. You said you wouldn't," she pleaded, trembling.

Alice was stupefied. For a full minute she lay in her pillows, staring blankly at her mother.

"Isn't——!" she whispered at last, incredulous and bewildered.

"No, dear. Poor Annie——! No, no, no; Norma's mother is dead. But—but you must believe that Mama is acting as she believes to be for the best," she interrupted herself, in painful and hesitating tones, "and that I can't talk about it now, Alice; I can't, indeed! Some day——"

"Mama darling," Alice cried, really alarmed by her leaden colour and wild eyes, "please—I'll never speak of it again! Why, I know that everything you do is for us all, darling! Please be happy about it. Come on, we'll talk of something else. When do you leave for town—to-morrow?"

"Poole drives us as far as Great Barrington to-morrow, Norma and me," the old lady began, gaining calm as she reviewed her plans. Chris needed her for a little matter of business, and Norma was anxious to see her Cousin Rose's new baby. The conversation drifted to Leslie's baby, the idolized Patricia who was now some four months old.

CHAPTER XVIII

Two days later found Norma happily seated beside the big bed she and Rose had shared less than two years ago, where Rose now lay, with the snuffling and mouthing baby, rolled deep in flannels, beside her. Rose had come home to her mother, for the great event, and Mrs. Sheridan was exulting in the care of them both. Just now she was in the kitchen, and the two girls were alone together, Norma a little awed and a little ashamed of the emotion that Rose's pale and rapt and radiant face gave her; Rose secretly pitying, from her height, the woman who was not yet a mother.

"And young Mrs. Liggett was terribly disappointed that her baby was a girl," Rose marvelled. "I didn't care one bit! Only Harry is glad it's a boy."

"Well, Leslie was sure that hers was going to be a boy," Norma said, "and I wish you could have heard Aunt Annie deciding that the Melroses usually had sons——"

"She'll have a boy next," Rose suggested.

Norma glanced at her polished finger-tip, adjusted the woolly tan bag she carried.

"She says never again!" she remarked, airily. Rose's clear forehead clouded faintly, and Norma hastened to apologize. "Well, my dear, that's what she said," she remarked, laughingly, with quick fingers on Rose's hand.

"It's sad that Mrs. Chris Liggett didn't have just one, before her accident. It would make such a difference in her life," Rose mused, with her eyes fixed thoughtfully on Norma's face. There was something about Norma to-day that she did not understand.

"Oh, it's frightfully sad," Norma agreed, easily. And because she liked the mere sound of his name, she added: "Chris is fond of children, too!" Then, with a sudden change of manner that even unsuspicious Rose thought odd, she said, gaily: "Isn't Aunt Kate perfectly delicious about the nurse? I knew she would be. Of course, she does everything, and Miss Miller simply looks on."

"Well, almost," Rose said, with an affectionate laugh. "She didn't want a nurse at all, but Harry and Wolf insisted. And then—night before last—when I was so ill, it almost made me laugh in spite of feeling so badly, to hear Mother with Miss Miller. 'You'd better get out of here, my dear,' I heard her say, 'this is no place for a girl like you——'"

Norma's laugh rang out. But Rose noticed that her face sobered immediately almost into sadness, and that there was a bitter line about the lovely mouth, and a shadow of something like cynicism in her blue eyes.

"Norma," she ventured, suddenly storming the fortress, "what is it, darling? Something's worrying you, Nono. Can't you tell me?"

With the old nursery name Norma's gallant look of amusement and reassurance faltered. She looked suddenly down at the hand Rose was holding, and Rose saw the muscles of her throat contract, and that she was pressing her lips together to keep them from trembling.

A tear fell on the locked hands. Norma kept her eyes averted, shook her head.

"Is it a man, Nono?"

Norma looked up, dashed away the tears, and managed a rueful smile.

"Isn't it always a man?" she asked, bravely.

Rose still looked at her anxiously, waiting for further light.

"But, dearest, surely he likes you?"

The other girl was silent, rubbing her thumb slowly to and fro across Rose's thin hand.

"I don't know," she answered, after a pause.

"But of course he does!" Rose said, confidently. "It'll all come right. There's no reason why it shouldn't!" And with all the interest of their old days of intimacy she asked eagerly: "Nono, is he handsome?"

"Oh, yes—tremendously."

"And the right age?"

Norma laughed, half protestant.

"Rose, aren't you a little demon for the third degree!" But she liked it, in spite of the reluctance in her manner, and presently added: "I don't think age matters, do you?"

"Not in the least," Rose agreed. "Norma, does Mrs. Melrose know?"

"Know what?" Norma parried.

"Know that—well, that you like him?"

Norma raised serious eyes, looked unsmilingly into Rose's smiling face.

"Nobody knows. It—it isn't going right, Rose. I can't tell you about all of it——" She paused.

"Well, I wouldn't know the people if you did," Rose said, sensibly. And suddenly she added, timidly, "Norma, there isn't another girl?"

"Well, yes, there is, in a way," Norma conceded, after thought.

"That he likes better?" Rose asked, quickly.

"No, I don't think he likes her better!" Norma answered.

"Well, then——?" Rose summarized, triumphantly.

But there was no answering flash from Norma, who was looking down again, and who still wore a troubled expression, although, as Rose rejoiced to see, it was less bitter than it had been.

"Rose," she said, gravely, "if he was already bound in honour; if he was—promised, to her?"

Rose's eyes expressed quick sympathy.

"Norma! You mean engaged? But then how did he ever come to care for you?" she followed it up anxiously.

"I don't know!" Norma said, with a shrug.

"But, Nono, why do you think he does like you? Has he said so?"

Norma had freed her hand, and pulled on her rough little cream-coloured gloves. Now she spread her five fingers, and looked at them with slightly raised brows and slightly compressed lips.

"No," she said, briefly and quietly.

Rose's face was full of distress. Again she reached for Norma's fingers.

"Dearest—I'm so sorry! But—but it doesn't make you feel very badly, does it, Norma?"

Norma did not answer.

"Ah, it does!" Rose said, pitifully. "Are you so sure you care?"

At this Norma laughed, glanced for a moment into far space, shook her head. And for a few minutes there was utter silence in the plain little bedroom. Then the baby began to fuss and grope, and to make little sneezing faces in his cocoon of blankets.

"Just one more word, dear," Rose said, later, when Aunt Kate had come flying in, and carried off the new treasure, and when Norma was standing before the mirror adjusting her wide-brimmed summer hat. "If he cares for you, it's much, much better to make the change now, Norma, than to wait until it's too late! No matter how hard, or how unpleasant it is——"

"I know," Norma agreed, quickly, painfully, stooping to kiss her. "We'll be down next month, Rose, and then I'll see you oftener!"

"When do you go?" Rose said, clinging to her hand.

"Go back to Newport? To-morrow. Or at least we get to Great Barrington to-morrow, and we may stay there with the Richies a few days. Aunt Marianna hates to make the trip in one day, so we stayed there last night. But she had to come down to sign some papers. Chris has been down all the week and he wired for her, so she and I drove down together."

"And is the country lovely now?" Rose asked.

"Well—dry. But it is beautiful, too; so hot and leafy and thunderous."

"And where are you—at the old house?"

"No; at a hotel, up near the Park. I wish you and little Peter Pan could get away somewhere, Rose, for we'll have another three weeks of the heat!"

"Oh, my dear, Mother Redding and the baby and I are going to the Berkshires for at least two whole weeks," Rose announced, happily. "And I thought that my bad boy was coming in early August," she added, of the baby, "or I would have gone first. Try to come oftener, Norma," she pleaded, "for we all love you so!"

And again, Norma's manner worried her. What was there in the sisterly little speech to bring the tears again to Norma's eyes?

"I know you do, Rosy," Norma said, very low. "I wish I could go up to the Berkshires with you."

"Well, then, why don't you, dear?"

"Oh"—Norma flung back her head—"I don't know!" she said, with an attempt at lightness. And two minutes later she had kissed Aunt Kate, and greeted Wolf, in the kitchen, and Rose heard their laughter, and then the closing of the front door.

CHAPTER XIX

Wolf walked with her to the omnibus. He had come in tired with the heat of the long day, but Norma thought him his sweetest self, brotherly, good, unsuspicious, and unaffected. He complimented her on her appearance; he had a kind word for Harry Redding, for the baby; he told Norma that he and his mother had gone to Portland by water a few weeks before and had a great spree. Norma, tired and excited, loved him for his very indifference to her affairs and her mood, for the simplicity with which he showed her the book he was reading, and the amusement he found all along the dry and dusty and dirty street. Everything was interesting to Wolf, and he made no apologies for the general wiltedness and disorder of the neighbourhood.

Norma looked down at him, from the top of the omnibus, and thought that he was a friendly and likable big young man, with his rumpled bare head shining reddish-brown in the streaming, merciless sunlight. She had no idea that his last look at her was like some precious canvas that a collector adds to his treasures, that to the thousands of little-girl Normas, and bookshop Normas, and to the memorable picture of a débutante Norma at her first opera, Wolf carried away with him to-night one more Norma: a brown, self-possessed, prettier-than-ever Norma, in a wide English hat and a plain linen suit, and transparent green silk stockings that matched her green silk parasol.

She got down from the omnibus, a few blocks farther away, and walked slowly along the shady side of the burning cross-streets, thinking, thinking, thinking. It was the hottest hour of the afternoon; there would be a storm to-night, but just now the air hung motionless, and the shadows were almost as dazzling, in their baking dimness, as the sunshine. Houses were closed and silent, show windows bare; the omnibuses creaked by loaded with passengers, trying to get cool. There was an odour of frying potatoes; other odours, stale and lifeless, crept through the stale and lifeless air.

Norma was entirely familiar with this phase of city life, for, except for Sundays at Coney Island, or picnicking on some beach or in some meadow or wood of Connecticut, she and the Sheridans had weathered two successive hot seasons very comfortably within two hundred yards of Broadway. It held no particular horrors for her; she reflected that in another hour or two the sun would quite have died away, and then every flight of old brownstone steps would hold its chatting group, and every street its scores of screaming and running children.

Wherever her thoughts carried her, they began and ended with Christopher. He had never kissed her again after the night of his return from Miami; he had hardly touched even her hand, and he had said no word of love. But, as the summer progressed, these two had grown steadily to live more and more for each other, for just the casual friendly looks and words of ordinary intercourse in the presence of other persons, and for the chance hours that Fate now and then permitted them alone.

Norma, in every other relationship grown more whimsical and more restless, showing new phases of frivolity and shallowness to the world, had deepened and developed, under Chris's eyes, into her own highest possibility of womanhood. To him she was earnest, honest, only anxious to be good and to be true. He knew the viewpoint of that wiser self that was the real Norma; he knew how wide open those blue eyes were to what was false and worthless in the world around her.

And Norma had seen him change, too, or perhaps more truly become himself. Still apparently the old Chris, handsome, poised, cynical, and only too ready to be bored, he went his usual course of golf and polo, gave his men's dinners, kissed Alice good-bye and departed for yachting or motoring trips. Even Alice, shut away from reality in her own world of music and sweet airs, flowers and friendship, saw no change.

But Norma saw it. She knew that Chris was no longer ready to respond to every pretty woman's idle challenge to a flirtation; she knew that there was a Chris of high ideals, a Chris capable even of heroism, a Chris who loved simplicity, who loved even service, and who was not too spoiled and too proud to give his time as well as his money, to give himself gladly where he saw the need.

Their hours alone together were hours of enchanting discovery. Memories of the little boy that had been Chris, the little girl that had been Norma, their hopes and ambitions and joys and sorrows, all were exchanged. And to them both every word seemed of thrilling and absorbing interest. To Norma life now was a different thing when Chris merely was in the room, however distant from her, however apparently interested in someone, or something, else. She knew that he was conscious of her, thinking of her, and that presently she would have just the passing word, or smile, or even quiet glance that would buoy her hungry soul like a fresh and powerful current.

It was not strange to her that she should have come to feel him the most vital and most admirable of all the persons about her, for many of the men and women who loved Chris shared this view. Norma had not been in the Melrose house a month before she had heard him called "wonderful", "inimitable", "the only Chris", a hundred times. Even, she told herself sometimes, even the women that Chris quite openly disliked would not return coldness for coldness. And how much less could she, so much younger, resist the generous friendship he offered to her ignorance, and awkwardness, and strangeness?

That he saw in her own companionship something to value she had at first been slow to believe. Sheer pride had driven her to reluctance, to shyness, to unbelief. But that was long ago, months ago. Norma knew now that he truly liked her, that the very freshness and unconventionality of her viewpoint delighted him, and that he gave her a frankness, a simpleness, and an ardour, in his confidences, that would have astonished Alice herself.

Alice! Norma was thinking of Alice, now. Just where did Alice come in? Alice had always been the most generous of wives. But she could not be generous here; no human woman could. She liked Norma, in a sense she needed Norma, but Chris was all her world.

"But, good heavens!" Norma mused, as she walked slowly along, "isn't there to be any friendship for a man but his men friends, or any for a woman except unmarried men? Isn't there friendship at all between the sexes? Must it always be sneaking and subterfuge, unless it's marriage? I don't want to marry Chris Liggett——"

She stopped short, and the blood left her heart suddenly, and rushed back with a pounding that almost dizzied her.

"I don't want to marry Chris Liggett," she whispered, aloud. And then she widened her eyes at space, and walked on blindly for a little way. "Oh, Chris, Chris, Chris!" she said. "Oh, what shall I do?"

An agony almost physical in its violence seized her, and she began to move more rapidly, as if to wear it out, or escape it.

"No, no, no; I can't care for him in that way," said Norma, feeling her throat dry and her head suddenly aching. "We can't—we cannot—like each other that way!"

The rest of the walk was a blank as far as her consciousness was concerned. She was swept far away, on a rushing sea of memories, memories confused and troubled by a vague apprehension of the days to come. That was it; that was it; they loved each other. Not as kinspeople, not as friends, not as the Chris and Norma of Alice's and Leslie's and Annie's lives, but as man and woman, caught at last in the old, old snare that is the strongest in life.

Bewildered and sick, she reached the cool, great colonnaded doorway of the hotel. And here she and Christopher came face to face.

He was coming out, was indeed halfway down the stone steps. They stood still and looked at each other.

Norma thought that he looked tired, that perhaps the hot week in streets and offices had been hard for him. He was pale, and the smile he gave her was strained and unnatural. They had not seen each other for ten days, and Norma, drinking in every expression of the firm mouth, the shrewd, kindly eyes, the finely set head, felt sudden confidence and happiness flood her being again. It was all nonsense, this imagining of hers, and she and Chris would always be the best friends in the world!

"Alice is perfectly splendid," Norma said, in answer to his first questions, "and Leslie's baby is much less fat and solid looking, and getting to be so cunning. Where is Aunt Marianna?"

"Upstairs," he answered with a slight backward inclination of his head. "We had a most satisfactory day, and you and she can get off to Great Barrington to-morrow without any trouble."

"She and I?" Norma said, distressed by something cold and casual in his manner. "But aren't you coming, too? Alice depends upon your coming!"

"I can't, I'm sorry to say. I may get up on Friday night," Chris said, with an almost weary air of politeness.

"Friday! Why, then—then I'll persuade Aunt Marianna to wait," Norma decided, eagerly. "You must come with us, Chris; it's quite lovely up through Connecticut!"

"I'm very sorry," the man repeated, glancing beyond her as if in a hurry to terminate the conversation. "But I may not get up at all this week. And I've arranged with Aunt Marianna that Poole drives you up to-morrow. You'll find her," he added, lightly, "enthusiastic over the baby's pictures. They're really excellent, and I think Leslie will be delighted. And now I have to go, Norma——"

"But you're coming back to have dinner with us?" the girl interrupted, thoroughly uneasy at the change in him.

"Not to-night. I have an engagement! Good-bye. I'll see you very soon. The hat's charming, Norma, I think you may safely order more of them by mail if you have to. Good-bye."

And with another odd smile, and his usually courteous bow, he was gone, and Norma was left staring after him in a state almost of stupefaction.

What was the matter with him? The question framed itself indignantly in Norma's mind as she automatically crossed the foyer of the hotel and went upstairs. Mechanically, blindly, she took off the big hat, flung aside the parasol, and went through the uniting bathroom into Mrs. Melrose's room. What on earth had been the matter with Chris? What right had he—how dared he—treat her so rudely?

Mrs. Melrose was in a flowered chair near a wide-opened window. She had put on a lacy robe of thin silk, after the heat and burden of the day, and her feet were in slippers. Beside her was a tall glass, holding an iced drink, and before her, on a small table, Regina had ranged the beautiful photographs of Leslie's baby that were to be the young mother's birthday surprise next week.

"Hello, dear!" she said, in the pleasant, almost cooing voice with which she almost always addressed the girls of the family, "isn't this just a dreadful, dreadful day? Oh, my, so hot! Look here, Norma, just see my little Patricia's pictures. Aren't they perfectly lovely? I'm so pleased with them. I was just——Regina, will you order Miss Norma something cool to drink, please. Tea, dear? Or lemonade, like your old aunty?—I was just showing them to Chris. Yes. And he thought they were just perfectly lovely; see the little fat hand, and how beautifully the lace took! There—that one's the best. You'll see, Leslie will like that one."

The topic, fortunately for Norma's agitation, was apparently inexhaustible and all-absorbing. The girl could sink almost unnoticed into an opposite chair, and while her voice dutifully uttered sympathetic monosyllables, and her eyes went from the portraits of little Patricia idly about the big room, noting the handsome old maple furniture, and the costly old scrolled velvet carpet, and the aspect of flaming roofs beyond the window in the sunset, her thoughts could turn and twist agonizingly over this new mystery and this new pain. What had been the matter with Chris?

Anger gave way to chill, and chill to utter heartsickness. The cause of the change was unimportant, after all; it was the change itself that was significant. Norma's head ached, her heart was like lead. She had been thinking, all the way down in the car—all to-day—that she would meet him to-night; that they would talk. Now what? Was this endless evening to drag away on his terms, and were they to return to Newport to-morrow, with only the memory of that cool farewell to feed Norma's starving, starving soul?

"Chris couldn't stay and have dinner," Mrs. Melrose presently was regretting, "but, after all, perhaps it's cooler up here than anywhere, and I am so tired that I'm not going to change! You'll just have to stand me as I am."

And the tired, heat-flushed, wrinkled old face, under its fringe of gray hair, smiled confidently at Norma. The girl smiled affectionately back.

Five o'clock. Six o'clock. It was almost seven when Norma came forth from a cold bath, and supervised the serving of the little meal. She merely played with her own food, and the old lady was hardly more hungry.

"Oh, no, Aunt Marianna! I think that Leslie was just terribly nervous, after Patricia was born. But I think now, especially when they're back in their own house, they'll be perfectly happy. No reason in the world why they shouldn't be," Norma heard herself saying. So they had been talking of Acton and Leslie, she thought. Leslie was spoiled, and Acton was extravagant, and the united families had been just a little worried about their attitudes toward each other. Mrs. Melrose was sure that Norma was right, and rambled along the same topic for some time. Then Norma realized that they had somehow gotten around to Theodore, Leslie's father. This subject was always good for half hours together, she could safely ramble a little herself. The deadly weight fell upon her spirit again. What had been the matter with Chris?

At nine o'clock her tired old companion began preparations for bed, and Norma, catching up some magazines, went into her own room. She could hear Regina and Mrs. Melrose murmuring together, the running of water, the opening and shutting of bureau drawers.

Norma went to her open window, leaned out into the warm and brilliant night. There was a hot moon, moving between clouds that promised, at last, a break in the binding heat. Down the Avenue below her omnibuses wheeled and rumbled, omnibuses whose upper seats were packed with thinly clad passengers, but otherwise there was little life and movement abroad. A searchlight fanned the sky, fell and wavered upward again. A hurdy-gurdy, in the side street, poured forth the notes of the "Marseillaise."

Suddenly, and almost without volition, the girl snatched the telephone, and murmured a number. Thought and senses seemed suspended while she waited.

"Is this the Metropolitan Club? Is Mr. Christopher Liggett there?... If you will, please. Thank you. Say that it is a lady," said Norma, in a hurried and feverish voice. The operator would announce presently, of course, that Mr. Liggett was not there. The chance that he was there was so remote——

THEBELOVED WOMAN