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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.
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
KATHLEEN NORRIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT 1920, 1921, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY
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----"