Winter came early that year. Even in November the cold was steady and
relentless. Cecily felt her isolation more as she was shut up with her
children in the house, except for their periods of exercise. She dreaded
the winter, especially the approach of Christmas, and the long winter
evenings, which seemed so endless after the children were abed, dragged
wearily--reading and reading, learning things, thinking things which her
limited activities gave her no chance to put into practice. She had
passed the point where she was in agony about her own troubles. Every
book, every newspaper told her of tragedies much worse. And resolutely
she tried not to think of Dick, although the news of him filtered
through to her now and then. Some one had sent her a marked newspaper,
the kind of paper to which she had no ordinary access, reeking with
gossip and scandal. She did not want to read it, but of course she did,
and in the smirking, veiled allusions, all nameless, she gathered that
her story had filtered through to the public. She heard through Della
that Dick was “going a pace.” She knew from the daily papers that he
must be having trouble in the mining country. The winter had come early
there, too, and the price of food and fuel had soared, fanning into a
flame of irritation the discontents which were always smoldering. There
were petty strikes already, with the threat of a big one hanging fire
all the time. Cecily wondered how Dick was going to tackle all these
problems with Matthew away, especially if he were not living well. It
surprised her to find that the personal rancor at the intimations of
Dick’s wildness did not arise. What she felt was rather this vague
uninformed worry about his ability to handle these big affairs if he
were in bad shape. She knew that he and Matthew were rich themselves,
but that they had no great standing in comparison with the great
financiers of the country who had tied up enormous sums of money in
these mining ranges. Her stepfather told her that Dick had his hands
full. She hated to ask further, telling herself that she had
deliberately made it none of her business. But she searched the papers
for news, none the less.
Allenby, the little town named for Matthew, where Dorothea had been
born, seemed to be one source of trouble. She wondered sometimes if Dick
went there often and if, when he passed Mrs. Olson’s gaunt little house,
he remembered the time she had spent there. That reminded her of Fliss
again.
Her father and Della had asked her to spend Christmas with them, but she
could not make up her mind to do that. The children were to have a
Christmas with the kind of spirit she wanted, even if it would revive
all sorts of painful memories for her. She had decided that and Della
had shrugged her pretty shoulders and regretted and said that she and
Walter would be sorry, for Gerald was going to a house party and
wouldn’t be home and that they wouldn’t bother with a tree if Cecily
wasn’t coming and that she thought that she would give Walter a bathrobe
and that she thought further that Walter was going to get her a platinum
wrist watch, which she knew he couldn’t afford but which she wanted
“awfully.” Cecily thought he probably would. Little use as she had for
Della’s methods she was reluctantly and truthfully admitting that Della
had a way of keeping Walter happy. It reminded her of Fliss’s way with
Matthew. Both of them put their husbands in the foreground, flattered
them, coaxed them, played with them. And as Matthew had been amused and
relaxed by such treatment, Walter was amused and impassioned. He
quarreled with Della. That Cecily knew. But they could quarrel one hour
and be absolutely and publicly enamored of each other during the next.
The catastrophe of Walter’s marriage had somehow not come to pass. And
the bitterest drop in Cecily’s cup was that she, who held marriage in
deeper respect than either Della or Fliss, had been the only one of the
three whose husband was left desolate and alone. Walter was working hard
to make money for his Della. In spite of late hours and concentrated
excitement he was making good in his father’s business. While Fliss was
in Washington sending back or having sent back little items to adorn the
social pages of Carrington’s newspapers already. “Senator and Mrs.
Allenby were in attendance at” this and that function. Odd how Cecily
could miss none of those little items, no matter how she tried to ignore
them.
On the first of December after looking over a horde of frightening
bills, Cecily went to see her stepfather at his office. She chose the
office as affording a chance for a less intimate meeting than one at her
house. The array of clerks and stenographers and glazed doors made her
feel very impersonal and keyed her up until she found herself
confronting her stepfather over a glass-topped table and looked straight
into his grave keen eyes.
“What is it, Cecily? Do you need some money?”
“I can’t get along on what I have. That house won’t run on two hundred
and fifty dollars a month.”
“Of course you can’t. I could have told you that. Do you know how much
it costs to run mine? Well, I won’t tell you. I’ll place a check to
your credit to-day, my dear. And it will make me very happy.”
“That wasn’t what I came about, but it’s what I knew you’d suggest,” she
said, smiling at him. “I want to mortgage my house.’
“Why? Mortgage? You’ll do nothing of the sort”
“Well, I could sell it, but I’d like to live there during the winter,
you see. Then I could sell it later. I thought of a mortgage in bed last
night. I don’t quite know how to do it, but I’m sure that would be a way
out. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
The old man got up and walked about the office angrily.
“You’re making me very angry, Cecily. Very angry.”
“I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. But I’ve got to do this the fair way.
I can’t take money under these circumstances.”
“You’re obsessed,” said Mr. Warner. “Now, look here, Cecily, I’m your
father, you know.”
“I know you are--and you’re more than most fathers ever could be, and so
you must see that----”
“I’ve a right to support my own grandchildren.”
“If they were in need,” said Cecily, slowly, “it would be different. But
they aren’t. They could live on my money easily if we had a flat or a
little house. I’d sooner have a little house than a flat. But to keep
that big house running on your money--I can’t do it. Don’t you see that
the children are my job--all I have left! I want them to be mine, and I
can’t feel that they are unless I do it.”
Mr. Warner looked at her with his brows knit.
“How much is the house worth? Fifty thousand?”
“Forty-five, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll see about your mortgage, Cecily, but you must promise not to sell
it or do anything further without consulting me.”
She thanked him and promised and left the office, conscious as she was
nowadays that a buzz of comment and gossip followed her. Mr. Warner,
watching from the window, saw that she was not driving a car, saw her
cross the street on foot.
“Steel underneath,” he said aloud.
At noon he met Dick at the club and called him. “Do you know Cecily is
mortgaging her house?”
“Hell! And I deposited money to her credit last month.”
“She won’t touch it, Dick.”
“One of those ridiculous notions. The money isn’t important. I argued
about that, Mr. Warner. I did my level best. It makes me feel a fool,
you know.”
“You haven’t argued any more than I have. But I guess she’s got an idea
back of it all. She wants to feel that it’s she who looks after the
kids.”
A dull flush crept up into Dick’s cheeks.
“She looks after them, anyway, no matter whether I pay a bill here and
there or not, doesn’t she? And it puts me in a rotten position.”
Mr. Warner laid a comradely arm over Dick’s shoulders.
“You are in a rotten position,” he agreed, “and you got yourself into
it--wanting to have everything in the world. Cecily is worth sacrificing
some things for, my boy.”
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to give up anything,” Dick shrugged
away. “What’s the use of going over it? The thing’s threadbare.”
“How are things with you now, Dick?”
“Hell to pay on the ranges. Matthew wants me to spend part of the winter
there and I think I may. It was well enough to keep your hand on from
here in the old days, but things are different now. It’s going to take
brains to handle that yapping crowd of Slovaks up there.”
“How can you handle it on the ground?”
“Watch things. Let them know you’re there. Be a bit more friendly. They
like the idea of the city men being on the ground, you know. And I could
keep an eye on some of these raw superintendents. There’s a good deal of
mishandling, you know.”
“Well, I’m telling you, Dick, that if things get any worse we’ll have a
time handling every one.”
Dick nodded and went away. He was in a nasty temper. He was becoming
increasingly resourceless out of actual working hours. While he was at
work he was all right. It was after six o’clock that things wore out. He
plowed through diversions too quickly, try as he might to make them
last. The crowd he had been “traveling with,” he told himself, were
becoming very tiresome. He knew exactly when they would do everything
they did--at what stage of the evening each one of them would change his
temper or his way of talking, and it was all boring. He drifted into
cafés, but the acquaintances whom he met there all knew about him and
Cecily, and though plenty of groups tried to attach him, and would
gladly have done so, he had an irritated sense of the comments about him
that kept him from wanting to draw down the fire of more of them.
It irritated him, too, to know that his gayety was becoming more and
more perfunctory and that he was not getting fun out of things which
should have been fun. Several deliberate efforts to amuse himself had
failed completely, ending with reaction and disgust. He had tried, in
company with some men who were used to that sort of thing, to pick up
some girls at a public dance hall--and long before the expected end of
the evening, found himself so let down and bored that he left the
crowd, with the flimsiest excuse. He had tried a bit of joyriding, but
the seductions of that experience with the almost professional joyriding
girl who knew just how to curve into the arm of the man at the wheel of
the car had left him not only cold, but amused in a kind of sarcastic,
unsmiling way. There were times when he felt that he had lost his youth
and his power to be amused--his ability to enjoy things. Cecily had
taken the verve out of the very things which had been contested points
and for the right to enjoy which he had so stubbornly contended.
Also Christmas was approaching and the nervous effort to banish all
thought of the holiday from his mind was wearing. With problems all day
and little relaxation anywhere, Dick was beginning to show baggy pouches
under his eyes and little lines trailed down from the corners of his
mouth. In his office that afternoon he was so exacting that his
exasperated stenographer, escaping finally from his criticism, told her
friend in the next office that she “didn’t wonder Mr. Harrison’s wife
wouldn’t live with him. He’s got a terrible temper--fierce.”
Poor Dick, when the office was empty and he had to leave it, strolling
back to the club to a choice of chicken casserole or English muttonchop,
without enthusiasm, trying not to notice that the shop windows were hung
with tinsel and gaudy with that gaudiness which is so beautiful at
Christmas time, swinging past the toyshops with carelessness, and then
turning back to look into the window of one of them.
* * * * *
Then came the day before the holiday with one of those fine pictorial
snowstorms to make it all the more festive, with the unavoidable truce
with work and struggle which pervaded even the world of business, with
the greeting on every one’s lips. It seemed to Dick that he could not
turn around without stirring up some memory of his home. He could see it
so clearly, decorated for Christmas with a green English holly wreath
below the brass knocker on the white door, poinsettias in the hall, the
tree in its corner of the long living-room and the fire blazing;
Dorothea’s little mind aflame like her cheeks with excitement; Leslie
walking stumblingly among his presents; the baby walking now, too,
probably. He would catch himself wondering what new words Leslie had
learned. He wondered if Cecily would have a Christmas celebration this
year. Yes, she would. It was like her to uphold things for the children
even if her own fun were shattered. But she must be short of money. At
that thought the glimmer of tenderness in his heart went out. It was bad
enough not to see the children, but not to be allowed to support them!
To be treated as a criminal outcast! Well, he’d left of his own free
will, he reminded himself, and went on to the embittering thought that
he’d tried to solve things without a break. They couldn’t have gone
on--silent evenings, the constant sense that he wasn’t pleasing his
wife, that she felt he was deteriorating, the slight that her rigorous
standards, single track virtues put upon him. He wasn’t happy; she
wasn’t happy. It couldn’t go on. Matthew had said it couldn’t go on as
it was. Probably not. Probably end in a divorce. That would be a nasty
business; no worse than lots of other people went through, but Cecily
would hate it. Poor Cecily! And in its endless track his mind pondered
again whose was the fault and where the remedy.
He had a stupid supper at the almost deserted club, fancying sensitively
that the few men sitting at nearby tables were pitying him. Then,
following instinct rather than intention as he started out for his usual
walk, he found himself headed in the direction of his former home. It
was several miles, but he walked them quickly. In the familiar street
which he had avoided since he had left Cecily, he felt a desire to
escape notice. But he would not yield to that and kept his head up as he
went along the side of the street opposite his own house.
There were lights in the house. That made him feel a little queer. He’d
known of course that the place was inhabited, that life was going on
there as usual, but the sight of the lights made it so much more real.
The wrought iron porch lanterns brought out the holly on the door. It
was not a wreath this year. A sprig of green tied to the knocker.
With the strangest clandestine feeling, Dick crossed the street and
stood beside the gate. Three months and more since he had opened that
high iron gate whose beautiful workmanship had made him so proud. He
opened it now softly and went up the side of the brick walk, in the
shadow cast by the great fir trees. There, under the living-room
windows, he saw them all--Ellen holding the baby, Dorothea and Leslie on
the floor beside the tree and Cecily in the corner of the big couch. As
he saw, he knew what he had been hoping. There was no one else there.
The children had grown so unbelievably in three months!
Cecily heard the door open. She and Ellen turned their heads
simultaneously, and then at a swift movement of Cecily’s, Ellen sat
still and let Cecily go through the hall.
“Dropped in to see the tree,” said Dick, trying to be jocular.
Then he held out his arms and Cecily crept into them, both of them too
glad for the blessed relief which had come to their starved emotions to
question the right or safety of such an end to their separation. It was
such sheer joy to be together again, to see each other, to deliberately
forget all issues in the hour of delight. Dick had not let himself think
of his hunger for the children. But to hold them now, play the old games
with them, hear them laugh, try their toys----
“I wasn’t sure you’d let me in,” he said apologetically, “or I’d have
brought some presents for all of you.”
The tears in her eyes and the joy of her smile were consolation for
that.
Because the children were so small and ready to accept all events and
because Ellen’s eyes never pried, it was very easy for them. After a
while the children had to go to bed and Dick and Cecily took them up
together in a riot of fun. It was all as it had been, thought Dick. He
drew the familiar blue blanket up over Leslie, who was too tired to
struggle and resent being put to bed. And Dorothea put her arms around
his neck in that same baby way.
When they went down again they found that Ellen had spread a cloth on a
little table before the fire and left supper there for them. She went
out. They heard the back door close and her firm heavy footsteps crunch
through the snow. And embarrassment settled over the man and the woman
sitting in such apparent comfort there. They were paying already for
that leap to emotional conclusions. Each of them asking fearfully what
all this meant and what was passing in the mind of the other, each
trying to avoid subjects which might hurt the other and conscious of the
multitude of dangerous subjects. The supper gave them something more to
do, but that, too, came to an end and Dick carried the little table out
through the dining-room to the kitchen. Cecily tried to busy herself
with something, unsettling things that she might settle them again. It
was horrible, she told herself, that she should be so afraid of Dick’s
presence. Why did he have that air of half-apology, of intrusion?
He did not help her when he came back, but stood, looking curiously
about the room.
“Same place,” said Cecily, trying pathetically to be light.
“Did you mind my coming?”
“It was a dreadful evening until you came,” she answered.
They were conscious that several hours lay before them. It was only
half-past eight o’clock. And on both of them, afraid to begin to talk,
hung those two hours for which they were so hungry and yet which were so
oppressive. They sat down beside each other on the long davenport and
talked of the children--anecdote after anecdote--but stories of them led
to plans, and as plans began to be suggested in their minds they became
wary again. Dick drew his wife’s head down against him finally, and for
a long time they rested so. Odd, that the mere contact could give them
such security. Farther and farther drifted their thoughts from
discussion and analysis; back to memories of each other.
* * * * *
In the morning, while they were at breakfast with the children, the
telephone rang.
“It’s father,” said Cecily, returning from answering it, “wanting to
wish me a Merry Christmas. He was so upset because he couldn’t get here
for the tree last night. He’s coming to get us for dinner. We’re dining
with him. Della and Walter are going out. Will you come too, Dick?” The
last a little hesitantly for, after all, Dick had not declared his
plans.
“Did you tell him I was here?” countered Dick.
She flushed. “I didn’t like to tell over the telephone.”
Dick looked at her gravely. She realized as his eyes met hers that he
looked older--and harder.
“I’ll tell grandfather for a surprise,” said Dorothea complacently.
They both winced. “We must talk things over this morning.”
“But it’s Christmas day,” protested Cecily.
He frowned that old familiar frown, the frown that always came when she
had sought to lay down a rule as to when he should or should not do a
thing.
“Better right away.”
In answer she rang for Ellen and asked her to take the children out.
“Take them for a walk before their naps, will you, since we’ll be out
for dinner.”
Ellen nodded and hurried them out, all smiles. It was a true holiday for
Ellen, appealing to all her romantic sense. The quarrel was over; the
husband had come home.
They did not seek to leave the room. Dick wandered to the window and
looked out at the children stumbling down the snowy path. Then he turned
to Cecily, sitting so slim and erect in her breakfast place.
“I suppose it was silly to come back,” he blundered.
“Silly?”
There she was, tripping him over a triviality again.
“Well, perhaps not silly, but unwise.”
“Why? Didn’t you want to?”
“You know I wanted to. But we’ve settled nothing, dear.”
“Why did you come?” asked Cecily.
“I suppose I was called by the holiday,” answered Dick with simple
truthfulness. “I came instinctively. I--couldn’t help it.”
“But you feel just the same?”
“The same as what?”
“As you did when you went.”
Dick seemed to search his memory. “Well, it never was very clear to me
just what the issue was. If you mean that I feel terribly in the wrong
now, terribly culpable for all those misunderstandings which broke us
up, I don’t believe I do feel that. I still don’t know quite where I was
wrong. I was stupid about things, little things, of course.”
“But, Dick, don’t you feel that--that this life is the best? With me,
with the children? Don’t you see that the things I wanted to avoid had
to be avoided?”
He scrutinized the dogmatism of her face carefully, painfully. It was
such an exalted face. It seemed such a pity that he couldn’t put it at
rest. All she wants, he thought, is a whale of an apology for sins I may
not be conscious of, but which I may have committed.
“Can’t we be happy together--as we were last night--after this?”
He felt now that she was trying to pledge him. The fury of her ideals
was pursuing him again.
“Do you mean spend every night sitting on the davenport together?” He
meant to lighten it, but as usual he failed. Her face showed her
shrinking.
“Don’t mock,” she said.
Dick took a restless turn or two around the room and came back to stand
over his wife.
“Cecily, I was a fool to disturb you last night. I was worse. I was a
robber. I robbed you of the peace that was beginning to come to you. I
shan’t ask you to forgive me. It was because I couldn’t help it. But I
won’t repeat it. I’ll not bother you again.”
“Are you going away again?”
“It’s better, I think. We aren’t closer--aren’t easy together--aren’t
really happy. Isn’t it better that I go?”
There was pleading in his voice, but she was too hurt to hear it; pain,
but she was deaf to that, too.
She could only see that he could go; that his going was an insult to her
desire that he should stay.
She got up, clutching the edge of the table.
“Then, go--go quickly!”
Dick put his hands to his head. They’d done it again. Again. Well, this
time she meant it. But to go without a caress---- He went towards her.
“Can’t I kiss you once before I go?”
And because she yearned for it, she taunted him.
“Your kisses aren’t love,” she said bitterly. “They’re desire!”
Ellen, returning with the children from the walk, found that Cecily was
shut in with the baby. When she finally came from her room she was
dressed to go out.
“Mr. Warner will be here any moment,” she said. “I’ll dress Dorothea.
Put that white dress with the yellow embroidery on Leslie. Don’t forget
to lock up the house when you go out, will you? And Ellen, don’t say
anything to any one about Mr. Harrison’s having been here. He won’t be
here again.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Ellen irrepressibly.
Dorothea, hearing her mother’s sentence, had set up a howl, and Leslie
joined her for company.
“My father is gone again,” wailed Dorothea with spirit, making comedy
out of tragedy, until Ellen, contrary to all discipline, presented her
with an irrelevant chocolate cream which distracted her temporarily.
Ellen did not say anything more, but she kept her eyes on Cecily’s
drooping figure and Cecily smiled at her rather pathetically.
“I suppose it’s all my fault, Ellen. Something’s gone wrong with the
world and I’m tangled up in the machinery.”
Ellen never spoke in metaphors.
“It’s not what should be with a loving couple like you and Mr.
Harrison.”
There came to Mr. Warner’s house a few hours later an A. D. T.
messenger, weighted with an immense box of flowers. In the depths of the
layers of roses, so fragrant and cool, was Dick’s note. “Cecily dear, I
had no right to come, no right surely when I had come, to hurt you so.
Please try to forget it and me; and if you can’t quite do that think of
me as having a heart full of gratitude and respect and affection which
expresses itself badly, but as best it can. To-morrow I want to send the
children some Christmas things. Please let me do that, and if there’s
any way I can help you--anything you will let me do for you--it will
make me happy. Merry Christmas! Dick.”
He wrote that, after many drafts of its wording, sitting in his room at
the club, and he hunted all over the city for flowers, finding some at
length in a hotel flower-shop. If Cecily could have seen him as he
wrote, his big hand thoughtfully penning the words, his face drawn and
set, she would have known that it was not she alone who was humiliated
and outraged by the turn of things. When he had sent the flowers he
wrote other letters, one of them to Matthew, telling him that he
contemplated going at once into the mining towns.
* * * * *
“It’s necessary, gentlemen,” he told a certain group of men a few days
later as he outlined his plans. “We’ve put roughnecks up there in
charge; we’ve let the social workers in and paid their salaries; we’ve
put young fellows out of college up there, and none of it has worked.
There’s more trouble all the time. The only thing we haven’t tried is
for one of us who really is responsible to go up himself. At the present
moment I can see my way to spending some time there. I won’t bring
about a reformation, you know. I don’t promise to stop all the strikes,
or to clean out the I. W. W. But I can promise you accurate information
after a few months as to what all the trouble is about, and if anything
can be done about the situation other than let it go to pot and save
what we can of our money. How about it?”
They listened to him with interest--all these men who had money and all
the things dependent on money at stake; seeming not too serious, as is
the usual way of men of big affairs, showing no great enthusiasm, no
excitement.
They liked Dick because he was, compared to most of them, so young and
yet so sane and so successful, and they knew he’d “had trouble” with his
wife, L. A. Warner’s stepdaughter, and they were sorry for that because,
though the age of romance was past for them and the word love had lost
its magnetism, they knew that a domestic upset was a serious thing for a
young man. “Might send him to the dogs,” they would have said.
“The point is that with the ‘Senator’ away (that was their jovial term
for Matthew), we can’t really spare our other young man, can we? When
Allenby went he assured us he was turning everything over to you to
handle, and that you’d look out for us,” said old Mr. Cox, tilting his
chair back and looking at Dick astutely.
“The more I look at the work there is to be done, the more I see that
the machinery of distribution, which is here, is in such good shape that
any one of three fellows in the office, whom I could mention, could look
out for it. The big problem is the problem of production, and that needs
to be investigated from the ground up--not on the basis of what things
were ten years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago--but as they are
now.”
“Let him do it,” said A. C. Miller, who spoke briefly.
“Some I. W. W.’ll put a bomb under him, and we can’t spare him.”
“Gentlemen,” said the chairman, with the ponderosity which had given him
his position on so many boards, “may we have a motion?”
They were given a motion and Dick had his way. He heard the chairs
scrape back, saw the discussion break up into fragments, saw the men go
out, with their friendly, terse nods to each other and a wave of energy
swept over him. Mare’s nest, chimera, windmills--whatever it was that he
was going to find or to tilt with, at least he had a job that was fresh
and that would take him out of town.
He scribbled on a telegraph blank, “Put it over all right,” and
addressed it to Senator Matthew Allenby.
In his delight he wanted to do something for somebody, and his thoughts
turned to Cecily.
He sought a florist’s again.
“Every morning,” he said, to the dapper young clerk who waited on him,
“every morning I want you to make a selection of the flowers which you
have which are suitable--suitable for the middle of a table,
centerpiece, you know. Ever have an order like that?”
“Yes, sir,” said the omniscient clerk. “Several ladies have left
standing orders for their tables.”
“Good line, that last. Well, you do as you do to them. This address for
the flowers; that for the bills.”
“Any length of time, sir?”
“Oh, yes,” said Dick. “Always. As long as we both (you and I, my friend)
shall live. Always. Why not? Sure.”
“Kind of a nut,” said the clerk, gratefully regarding the departing
figure of the man who had given him the biggest order he’d ever booked.
“Sweet on her now, you know. But he’ll get sick of that. Wait till he
gets a bill or two.”
Dick went out and jumped into the roadster which stood by the curb, and
started for the garage. He wouldn’t sell the car, but he would put it
up. He couldn’t take it up to the range and play the game he wanted to
play.
He skirted the main streets, for the traffic was heavy during this late
afternoon hour. Just off one of the big commercial streets he turned
down an avenue always of doubtful repute, even in these days of
supposedly high city morals--a street of ramshackle buildings which were
supposed to be apartments, but behind whose dingy lace curtains quack
doctors and dentists had their lucrative offices, spiritualists held
cheap séances and other money-making transients had their headquarters.
Just in front of his car, held up by a confusion of trucks in front of
it, Dick saw a singularly well-dressed woman whom he looked at with
interest and then amazement as he recognized her. It was Della. No doubt
of it. They had all criticized that short white fur coat when she bought
it. She was going along slowly, close in to the walls which bordered the
sidewalk, looking for something in some window. It struck Dick that she
wanted to avoid detection. Then he turned to put on his brakes and when
he looked up again she had gone--through one of those dingy wood framed
doorways. Dick pulled up his car and waited farther down the street. It
was growing darker now and he was worried. No place for a girl to be
alone. What could she be up to? After half an hour he saw her again, the
white fur coat starting out of the dusky street. He followed her with
the car and hailed her when she was four or five blocks away from the
place she had stopped.
“Hey, Della. Can I bring you home?”
She got in with an attempt at her usual hilarity, which struck him as
very forced. He maneuvered until they stopped under an arc light and
then shot a swift glance at her face. She had been crying, all right.
Crying her eyes out.
“Where have you been all afternoon?” he asked her casually.
“Just shopping. I was late for dinner. Awfully nice of you to pick me
up, Dick.”
So she didn’t mean to be communicative. Dick dropped her at her door and
went on, pondering. Well, it might have been some obscure relative, some
crazy notion to see a fortune-teller who told her she was going to die
young. It wasn’t any love affair, anyhow. Not from the look of those
eyes. She looked as if she’d been beaten. Dick decided to dismiss it
from his mind. It wasn’t his business, after all.