A sixteen an angry and frightened girl running away from a home where
the necessity for work must cheat her youth of its just rights--at
sixteen such a girl cannot analyze her emotions, and Mary's were in
sheer panic. She had never before been farther from her own town
than the ten miles' distant county-seat, had never before been at
more than verbal odds with her parents. Philadelphia had stood for
the City of Lanterns, and a quick retort for revolution. Now she was
bound for New York and marriage.
There was none of the few persons on the trolley-car that knew her,
yet she kept her face to the window and away from them. There was no
chance of capture, yet she trembled whenever the brakes creaked and a
new passenger came aboard. It might, perhaps, be truly said that she
did not feel at all, and that the power of poignant realization was
still paralyzed by her own action. It was as if she had amputated a
portion of her spiritual being, and wras still numb from the shock.
Whatever Max's own feelings, he at any rate conducted himself in the
manner least calculated to rouse his companion. He spoke only to
give the few necessary directions, and then in a low tone, not facing
her, but looking straight ahead. He had slipped her the money to pay
her own fare and, the better to deceive whoever might follow them,
had told her to buy a round-trip ticket to a point beyond that for
which they were bound. With his lemon-colored shoes planted upon his
suitcase, he sat beside her, but he kept as wide a space between them
as the short seat would permit; and it was only under the discreet
covering of the light overcoat upon his knee that he kept a tight and
reassuring grasp of her firm hand.
At a mile from the county-town they left the car--Mary first and Max
twenty yards behind--and then, for the competent young man seemed to
have prepared for everything, walked across the fields, under the
stars, to a flag-station where, within a few minutes, they could
catch a New York express. Arm in arm they walked, but Max never once
frightened her by a burst of affection, never once did more than to
encourage her by plain statements of his loyalty and more ornate
descriptions of the life before her.
"You vill _like_ it," he concluded. "I know you vill be happy, Mary."
Mary's breath caught a little in her throat.
"Ye--yes," she answered. "Only, I can't help thinking some about
mom."
"Sure you can't," Max immediately agreed. "You mustn't led her vorry
longer than you can help it. I tell you vhat ve'll do. Ofer here in
the station, you wride her a letter und I'll haf it mailed."
"Oh, but then pop would see it, an' he might follow us!"
"Don' gif no names or say vhere ve're goin', und how can he? By the
time he gets it, ve'll be safe married, anyways. Here ve are at the
station. I've got some paper un' pencil und an envellup: I'll tell
you chust vhat to wride."
He did tell her, and this note, given to the train-porter, was mailed
farther along the line:
"_Dear Mother_: Don't please worry about me. I will soon be back for
a visit, only I have gone to Buffalo to get married. He is a nice
young man and his father is rich, for I could not stand to have Pop
beat me, nor do other people's work any more.
"Your aff. daughter,
"MARY DENBIGH."
The train, which Max had duly signaled, had stopped just as the
writing was ended, and the pair of runaways had hurried into the last
seat of the rear car.
During the journey that followed, Mary's nerves, accustomed to early
hours, gave way not to tears, but to the exhaustion consequent upon
the strain of her crowded day. Her hat in her lap, her russet hair
made a pillow for her against the sharp window-sill, and, with Max's
coat piled at the pane to protect her from the keen arrows of the
inrushing night air, she lay back, the pink cheeks and the red mouth
paler than an hour since, and the blue eyes closed. She did not seem
to sleep, and yet it was in a dream that the ride ended, in a dream
that she found herself one of a hurrying crowd stamping down the
platform and into the huge elevator at the Jersey City station, in a
dream that she clung faithfully to Max's arm as the sudden lights and
damp odors struck her and as she dropped upon a straw-covered bench
of a swaying car, which shot them immediately through a tunneled
darkness into the very depths of the earth.
She knew from her geography that New York was separated from New
Jersey by water.
"When do we cross the ferry, Max?" she asked.
Max smiled, his thin lips showing his white teeth in sharp contrast
to his olive skin.
"We're crossing it now," he answered.
"But where's the water?"
Max, mopping his dark forehead with a purple-bordered handkerchief,
pointed to the roof of the car.
"Up there," he said. "Ve're in the tube, you know."
She did not know, but she was too much ashamed of her rural ignorance
further to discover it by unconsidered questions, and so full of a
pulsing wonder at what was to come next, so full of the expectation
of the child at her first melodrama that she had place for no
backward thought. She sat silent until they had come out of the
tunnel, climbed a windy stair, and emerged upon a thoroughfare as
much ablaze as if all the stars of heaven had descended to light it,
and as brimming with moving life as her father's mill at ten o'clock
in the morning.
Max regarded the girl's open-eyed wonder.
"Now," he said, "ve'll chust chump in a taxi un' go get a good
supper, un' then, vhile the vaiter's filling our order, I'll first do
a little delephoning."
He put up his dark hand; a passing automobile, its tin flag raised,
hummed up to the curb, and Mary, clinging timidly to the arm of her
betrothed, began her first ride in a taxicab.
The street--it was Fourteenth Street, he told her--flared and seethed
and spluttered before them. As if leaning over the head of a runaway
horse, they shot in and out among clanging cable-cars, dashed by
snorting vehicles of their own sort, and nearly grazed jostling cabs
driven by cursing Jehus. Even at that late hour, some of the shops
were still open, and the wide pavements on either side were black
with countermarching processions of people, moving with the steady
rapidity and stolidity of a swarm of ants. When the street ran by a
tree-sprinkled square, its houses seemed to burst into still greater
brightness to atone for the darkness of the park. Every second
building was a restaurant, a theater for moving-pictures, or a
saloon. Their electric-signs now winked from nothingness to light,
now flashed forth a word, one letter at a time, and now were
surrounded with wriggling snakes of fire.
It came upon her--this vision of the absolutely new, of the city's
immensity and teeming life--at a moment when her heart was ready for
reaction, when memory was prepared to reassert itself, and when,
anger gone and regret poised like a runner at the starting-line, her
quick determination might have failed her. But it came with
stupefying force. The dream of pleasure gave place for the moment to
a certainty of dread. Vaguely, unreasoningly, but with the
unquestioning acceptance of a child, she felt New York as a terrible,
solidified unity; as a vast, malevolent consciousness; as a living
prison that implacably and resistlessly raised itself on every hand
and on every hand shut her in forever.
She trembled and clung the tighter to her companion's arm, and her
companion was alert to note her agitation.
"Vhat's the matter?" he inquired, in a voice that he well meant to be
tender.
"I--I don't know," she began, her red underlip indrawn. "I--aren't
we goin' pretty fast?"
"Who? Us? Vhy, I was chust thinking I'd tell him to hit up the pace
a little. Are you scared?"
Her pride would not permit confession.
"Oh, no," she lied; "I'm not scared."
"But you are shivering."
"I guess I'm kind of chilly."
"All righd. Chust vait a minute un' ve'll soon be at the restaurant
un' varm up. You'll like that restaurant: it's von of the swellest
in town."
"But it's pretty late," she ventured. "Your friend--are you sure
he----"
"Who? The minister?" Max patted her hand with reassuring affection.
"Don't you vorry about him. He's all for me, und I'll get him out of
bed chust as soon as ve've ordered our supper."
A few blocks more, and Max, aided by a marvelously tall person in a
wonderful uniform, was helping her, with what she considered an
elaborate courtesy, to dismount from the taxi, pass under a glass
awning and, through a changing stream of hurrying waiters and
arriving and departing guests terribly arrayed, to climb a softly
carpeted stair and enter a brilliant balcony open to the street and
full of chattering men and women eating and drinking at a score of
tables. Even in her fright, it was with a touch of admiration that
she observed how Max--her Max--seemed to be known to the immediately
attentive waiters, and how, smiling, they hurried to make way for him.
They secured a corner table, a relatively quiet corner table, and
there, with a servant standing by, pencil in hand, and with a huge
double-paged menu-card before each of them, made ready for their meal.
"Chust you order vhatever you like," said Max. "Pretty near
everything in the vorld's on there, but if you vant anything that you
can't see, chust you ask for it."
Mary looked at the card. In spite of all that had passed, and all
that now filled her heart, she was young, and youth is so fortunate
as to be able to eat in the trough of any emotional sea. She was a
child, and, by the sure logic of childhood, who-so thought to feed
her could be nothing but a friend.
The card, however, was of small assistance. Its very size was
appalling, and its offerings were made in an unfamiliar tongue.
"You get what you like," she at last submitted. "I'm so hungry I can
eat anything."
He saw her difficulty so well that he could rescue her from it
without seeming to see it at all.
"Vell, I'm vith you there," he said cheerfully, and proceeded to obey
her, rattling off a list of dishes of no one of which she had ever
heard before. "Un' have the Martinis dry," he cautioned in
conclusion, "vith a dash of absinthe in them--un' bring them righd
avay: I'm spittin' gotten."
The waiter left, and, as he did so, Max again addressed the girl.
"Excuse me for von minute," he said.
But Mary's blue eyes opened wide in instant alarm, and she put a
detaining hand upon his wrist.
"Don't!" she quavered. "Don't go away! I--I don't want to be left
alone."
Max laughed outright.
"Haf you forgot our minister?" he demanded. "Ve don't vant to go to
his house vithout first giffin' him a chanc't to get some _clothes_
on. Efen up your vay, the ministers vear a suit under their
nighd-gowns vhen they marry people."
She smiled faintly at his labored wit, and, as her heart fluttered at
this definite approach to the end of her journey, permitted him to go.
Had he been absent for only the minute that he had promised, the time
would have seemed long to the waiting girl, but he remained invisible
for much longer, and to Mary, watching the laughing, uncaring
strangers from another life, the terror of the city in her soul and
the sense of all that she had done lurking in the shadows of her
brain, the quarter of an hour appeared to be four times that period.
Once she feared that he had met with some accident; once she was
saved from starting in search of him only by the knowledge that, in
so doing, she must infallibly lose herself. She would have made
inquiries of a waiter, but the waiters were too imposing. She would
have cried, but she was afraid to cry. She would have ended,
perhaps, by some utter betrayal of all that was battling within her;
but, just when she was sure, for the thousandth time, that she could
endure no more, she saw Max coming toward her from the long-watched
door.
As soon as she noticed his strangely stern face, the old fear gave
place to a fresh one.
"What's happened?" she asked.
He pulled back his chair spitefully and flung himself into it.
"These crazy laws of your America," he snarled, "there ain't no sense
in them!"
"What's the matter?" she repeated.
"Vhy, it's this way. Of course, it don' make no difference; it only
puts things off till _mor_nin'; but it's this vay: I got my minister
friend on the 'phone, un' he's all ready to marry us, only he says
the law says ve must haf a license from City Hall first, un' if ve
don't get von, he can go to chail because of marryin' us vith_out_
it."
"Well," said Mary, "let's get a license."
Max spread forward the palms of his dark hands.
"How can ve?" he demanded. "The City Hall closes in the afternoon
un' don't open till _mor_nin'."
Here, apparently, was tragedy. Specific reasons for its tragic
elements the girl would, perhaps, have found it hard to give, but
that it was tragic she knew instinctively. Her blue eyes opened wide
in fright.
"What are we to do?" she pleaded.
But Max, the resourceful, had been, it appeared, only temporarily
checkmated.
"I thought of that," he said. "Ve can't get married now till
to-morrow; but my modder has a good friend un' I delephone _her_.
She told me she'd be glad to have you her guest ofer to-nighd. I'll
take you there in a taxi, un' go home for my own sleep. I'd take you
vith me, but it vouldn't do to spring a new vife on the family
vithout varnin'. Then I'll have talked vith my own people, und I'll
bring them around to the veddin', first thing in the mornin'."
Mary, however, quailed.
"I don't want to do that," she inconsequently responded. "I don't
want to go to strange people's alone."
"Oh, don't you vorry, now," Max soothed her. "I'll go vith you for a
liddle vhile un' see that you make yourself at home. This friend of
my modder's is a fine voman, un' she's _rich_. She is Mrs. Légère.
She lives in a fine house: you'll like her."
He persisted in his persuasions, and, in the end, he won her
acquiescence. After all, here were the walls of the city about her,
and she had no choice.
While they had been talking, the waiter had returned and had placed
before each of them one of the stemmed glasses full of the pale
yellow concoction that Max had ordered.
"Vell," grinned the host, "here's happy returns of the day un' many
_of_ them."
He took his glass in his hairy hand and flung the contents down his
throat.
But Mary looked at the drink in growing alarm.
"Isn't it whiskey?" she asked.
"No-o-o! I don't drink vhiskey. This is only vermout' un' tchin."
"Gin's just the same as whiskey," the girl protested.
"Not by a long sighd it ain't."
"It's liquor, anyhow."
"Sure, it's liquor; but drink a liddle of it; it vill gif you an
appetite."
Mary shook her russet head.
"I don't need no appetite," she said; "I'm half starved as it is."
"You'll need something to grind up these here Hungarian things,
though."
"No," said Mary; "I'd rather not."
"But efferybody does here in New York."
"Then I guess I'll wait till I'm a regular New Yorker."
"Don't your fader drink?"
"Sometimes he does," said the girl, conclusively; "an' that's why I
don't."
He urged her no further; he even denied himself a glass of the wine
that he had ordered, and he succeeded, by this abstinence, in
regaining whatever he had lost of her faith in him. He ate heartily
himself, and if his manner of eating was not precisely that most
common in restaurants of a more careful sort, this was something that
the girl would have failed to note even had she not been so busily
engaged by wonder at the service and consumption of the novel food.
It was not until, contentedly sighing, she had sunk back from the
wreck of her second ice, that she remembered again the lateness of
the hour.
With a display of his large bills and another flurry of attendants,
they left the restaurant, walking among the gayly dressed and loudly
laughing people at the tables, passing down the heavily carpeted
stairs, and entering another pulsing motor-car. Max leaned out of
the door and gave an address that Mary did not hear; the chauffeur
threw forward the metal clutch, and the automobile shot ahead on its
journey.
They went for some time under the still hammering elevated; then
turned through a quieter and darker street; threaded rapidly,
twisting hither and yon, a dozen other highways and byways and at
length drew up at their destination. Max leaped lightly to the
pavement and tossed the driver a bill.
"Neffer mind the change," he said, and had scarcely helped Mary to
dismount before the car had snorted away into the night, leaving the
pair of young lovers in the scarcely broken darkness and in a silence
that seemed surrounded by a dim, distant rumble of city-sound.
The girl could see little of her whereabouts. She observed only that
she was in a slumbering block of blinded dwelling-houses, a scene
different from any that New York had thus far presented to her. One
distant, sputtering arc-light succeeded only in accentuating the
gloom; underfoot the way resounded to the slightest tread; from the
little patch of inky sky into which the roofs blended above, a bare
handful of anæmic stars twinkled drowsily, and, on both sides, from
corner to corner, the uniform, narrow houses rose in somber
repetition, each with its brief, abrupt flight of steps, each with
its blank windows, each seemingly asleep behind its mask.
More than this, indeed, Mary's tired eyes could have had no time to
observe, for Max's strong fingers were at once curled under her
armpit, and she was hurried up to one of the innumerable mute
doorways. He pressed a button hidden somewhere in the wall, and,
almost immediately, the door swung open.
The pair looked from darkness upon a rosy twilight. Under the feeble
rays of the pink-shadowed stairway, there were just visible the
outlines of a full-blown form.
"Hello, Rosie!" cried Max as, quickly snapping the door behind him,
he passed by his charge and seized an invisible hand. "You vaited up
for us un' come to the door yourself! That vas good of you."
In spite of her Gallic cognomen, Mrs. Rose Légère replied in the tone
and vernacular of Manhattan Island.
"Sure I waited for you," she answered. "But don't talk so loud:
you'll wake the whole family.--And is this the little lady, eh?"
Half disposed to resist, Mary felt herself gently propelled forward
by Max, and then enveloped in an ample, strangely perfumed embrace,
while two full warm lips printed a kiss upon her cool young cheek.
"Come into the back parlor," said Rose Légère, lightly seizing the
girl's hand. "I want to get a look at the bride."
She led the way past the closed double doors of the front room on the
ground floor, and into a rear apartment that, though not brilliantly
illuminated, was far better lighted than the hall.
It was a room the like of which Mary had never seen, decorated in
colors that outshone the rainbow and filled to overflowing with
furniture that, to the undiscriminating eyes of the girl, gave it the
air of a chamber in the Cave of Monte Cristo. Gilt-framed pictures
of beautiful men and women--she supposed they must be Grecian men and
women--flamed, in more than lifelike hues, from the crimson walls.
The tall lamp on the blue-clothed table was shaded in red; the thick
rug flowered gorgeously; the deep chairs were upholstered in pale
brown, and the lazy sofa on which, as Max closed the inner door upon
their entrance, Mrs. Légère seated herself with her guest, was
stuffed with soft pillows of bewildering radiance.
Nor, when Mary came to look at her, did the hostess seem out of
keeping with her surroundings. To the girl's home Owen Denbigh had
once brought a large, lithographed calendar, issued by a brewery, and
depicting, at its top, a woman of the elder Teutonic days, very red
and white, with long yellow hair, and a body of rounded proportions,
which threatened to grind to powder the rock on which she sat, and
desperately endangered the filmy garments that enfolded without
clothing her. It was of this picture that Mary instantly thought
when she got her first full view of Mrs. Légère.
The hostess was clad in a long, fluttering, baby-blue kimona, spotted
by embroidered white dragons, with sleeves that fell despairingly
from her puckered elbows, disclosing thick white arms with rolls of
fat at the wrists, and plump hands and fingers the almond shaped
nails of which gleamed like the points of daggers. The folds of
light silk, held by a large amethyst pin at the base of her sturdy
throat, bulged broadly over her capacious breasts and trailed, across
frou-frouing lace, far beyond her heels.
All this Mary saw first, and then, looking upward across the figure
that, literally, overshadowed her, she saw a large, round,
good-enough-natured face, surmounting a white double chin. The
corn-colored hair was massed in an intricate maze of puffs and coils
and braids, which made the girl wonder how much was its owner's
natural growth and how much was due to the artifices that Mary had
always longed for and had always been denied. The forehead was low
and calm; the violet eyes of a more than natural brightness, with
crowsfeet beside them and pouches below, only just discernible in
lamplight. The brows and lashes were of a blackness that contrasted
with the coiffure; the skin, here like snow and there as red as
roses, and the full, easy-going mouth as crimson as a wound. Mary
thought that here at last was a beautiful woman.
"I sure am glad to see you," purred Mrs. Légère, as, having divested
the guest of hat and coat, she whisked these into the hall and,
returning, again seated herself and fondled the visitor's passive,
but flattered, hand between her own extensive, well-cared-for palms.
"Max raved about you over the telephone--just raved--and, now that I
get to a clinch with you, I begin to think that he knew what he was
talking about."
Max was seating himself on an orange-colored ottoman opposite them.
He grinned broadly, his narrowed lips showing his even, sparkling
teeth.
"Sure I knew vhat I vas talkin' about," he declared.
Mary was not used to compliments, but she was too honest not to show
that she liked them. She blushed, and was all the prettier for it;
but she did manage to deprecate the sentiments of the better known of
her critics.
"Mr. Grossman is crazy," she modestly observed.
"About you he is," said Mrs. Légère; "and," she added, "I doo't blame
him.--But look here"--she placed a crooked forefinger under the
girl's chin and turned the blushing face upward--"look here, what a
tired little woman it is!--Max, you're so careless, I'll bet you've
never thought to give this poor child a drop of wine to strengthen
her after all that traveling!"
"I tried to get her to," said Max, "but she vouldn't take it."
"What?"
"I don't drink," explained Mary.
"Of course you don't, but," Mrs. Légère elucidated, "taking a glass
or two of wine after a railroad ride isn't drinking."
"No-o," Mary granted; "but I don't care for it."
"I hope not--only taken this way it's medicine. I don't blame you
for not drinking in a restaurant with a bad boy like Max; but you
need it now; you're all played out. This is as good as your home
till to-morrow, you know. Just have a little with me; I'm old enough
to be your mother, and we won't give Max a drop--just to punish
him.--Cassie!"
She had run through the speech with a rapidity that had left the girl
no chance for reply, and now, before Mary could move her lips, she
had, with amazing agility, leaped to a back door, opened it, called
an order into the darkness beyond, and as quickly returned to her
former position on the sofa.
"It will be the best thing in the world for you," she said. "The
doctor orders it for me, and so I always have it ready on ice."
As she concluded speaking, the door through which she had called was
reopened and there entered a tall, raw-boned, glum, colored girl,
whose shining ebony skin was darkened by the white apron that she
wore. She bore a tray on which was a gilt-topped bottle and two
narrow glasses.
"Put it there, Cassie," said Mrs. Légère, pointing to the table.
The girl obeyed and left the room. Max seized the bottle, ripped off
the gilding and, wrapping his purple-bordered handkerchief about the
neck, with one dexterous twist, drew out the resounding cork.
A living foam gushed from the neck as the self-appointed butler
poured into the two glasses a pale gold fluid, which creamed angrily
to their edges, and then subsided until first one addition and then
another set them boiling again.
Mrs. Légère took a glass in each hand and pressed the foremost into
the passive palm of the girl.
"Well," said she, in a phrase new to Mary, "here we are."
Mary hesitated, the glass to her lips. She could hear the liquid
whispering to her, and particles seemed to jump from it and sting her
eyes.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Vine," said Max.
"But what kind of wine?" she weakly delayed.
"My dear," her entertainer informed her, "there is only one kind of
wine in New York."
"It's tchampagne," hissed Max, as if the name were something too
sacred to be spoken in the tone of ordinary conversation. "Un' this
kind costs eighd dollars a bottle."
The words and the connotation had their lure. Champagne--she had
heard of it as the beverage of the rich; and eight dollars for one
bottle--the price of two winter dresses!
"Come on," smiled Mrs. Légère.
The girl still hesitated.
"Here's to the wedding!" prompted the hostess, and drank the entire
contents of her glass.
Mary took a mouthful and swallowed it. At first she nearly choked.
Then the fiery liquid brought fresh tears to her blue eyes, still
smarting from the gas that had, a moment before, assailed them. But
finally, there began to spread through her weary body a grateful
glow, and, half in apology for what she feared had been a clownish
exhibition, she looked up with red lips pleasantly parted.
"Now, wasn't I right?" inquired Mrs. Légère. "Don't you feel better
already?"
"I--I believe I do, thank you," Mary admitted. "Anyhow, it is pretty
good, I guess--when you get used to it."
She took, bravely and with an ease now gained by experience, a second
drink, and, as she held the glass before her, Max gallantly
replenished it.
A bell rang and the glum, ebony maid passed through the room, closing
both doors behind her.
Mary, alarmed at this nocturnal interruption, started a little, but
neither of her companions seemed to regard the incident as unusual.
"You look much better," Mrs. Légère asseverated. "Finish that glass,
dearie, and you'll be all to the good again."
"Do you think I'd better take so much?"
Both Max and Mrs. Légère laughed unaffectedly.
"Vhy, there ain't enough here to hurt a baby," declared the former.
Mary accepted the assurance. She did not like the taste of the
champagne, but she knew now that she had been very tired, and the
wine sent fresh life and energy through her sleepy limbs. She
emptied the glass and felt, joyfully, all her fears and regrets
slipping for her. Doubt and difficulty were resolved into a
shimmering mist, were overcome, were forgotten.
The black maid thrust her head in at the hall-doorway.
Mrs. Légère rose.
"Excuse me," she said, leaving the room. "I'll be right back."
Max, the instant she was gone, rose in his turn.
"I'm going to fool her," he said. "I'm going to graft her drink!"
He took the glass that his hostess had placed upon the table, poured
more of the wine into it, replenished the glass of his now
unresisting companion and sat down by her side, his arm stretched
behind her.
Mary, with refreshed courage, broke the silence. She was feeling
like a naughty child triumphantly successful in her naughtiness.
"Do you know, Max," she said, "I gave a jump when that bell rang? I
thought for a minute they might be after us."
"Nix on that," chuckled Max. "They couldn't catch us if they tried.
Here's to the runavays!"
They clinked glasses and drank.
"I guess," the young man pursued, "it was chust von of Rosie's
boarders."
"Her boarders? Does she run a boarding-house?" There was a note of
dignified scorn in Mary's climbing voice.
"Sure she keeps boarders."
"But I----" Mary hesitated. She was tasting wine for the first time
in her life, she had been tired and nerve-wracked, and now, though
thoughts danced through her mind with unfamiliar rapidity, utterance
seemed to her suddenly, and somewhat amusingly, to have become too
clumsy to keep pace with them. "I thought," she elaborately
persisted, "that--you--said--she--was rich."
"She is," said Max; "only she's got a big house she can't all use
herself. Lots of people fill their houses that vay in N'York."
Mary started to formulate a reply that came glistening along the dim
horizon of her mind; but just then there was a light tap at the door.
"Come in!" called Max, and Mrs. Légère re-entered.
The precaution of her hostess forced a smile from Mary.
"Why did you knock?" she asked.
But Mrs. Légère shook her corn-colored locks wisely.
"I don't ever disturb lovers," she said.
She sat down opposite the pair she was addressing and, without
noticing that Max had appropriated her glass, discovered a fresh one
on the mantelpiece, poured herself a mouthful of the wine and then
decanted the rest for Mary.
She had just put down the empty bottle when the bell rang a second
time.
"Good Lord," she sighed, "there it goes again! These people will be
the death of me, losing their keys and coming in at all hours. Never
mind, Cassie," she called through the rear door, "I'll go myself!"
And then, to Mary, she concluded: "I'll attend to this and then I'll
come right back and send Max home and show you to your room."
She left them seated on the sofa, Max's dark hand encircling the
soft, young fingers of the girl as gently as if he had been a rustic
wooer.
"Shall I go graft another bottle from the _kit_chen?" he asked,
grinning impishly.
Mary shook her russet head.
"Not for me," she said; "I guess I've had enough."
Max again refrained from insistence. Instead, he remained beside
her, and fell once more into the story that she had learned best to
like,--the beautiful pictures of the wonderful city, of the work-free
life that she should lead there, and of their marriage on the fast
approaching morning.
Gradually, as his voice ran smoothly on, the words he was then saying
became confused in her brain with other words that he had said
earlier in the evening. Her eyelids grew heavy. The mood of
exhilaration passed, and a weariness far more compelling than that
from which she had previously suffered stole upon her. Mrs. Légère
was absent for an unconscionable time. The girl yawned.
"I wonder when she's comin' back," said Mary, "I'm--I'm awful tired."
Max's hand slipped to her unresisting head and pressed it down upon
his shoulder. He had not yet so much as kissed her, and he did not
kiss her now.
"Don't vorry about her," he said softly. "You're tired out. Chust
close your eyes for a minute, Mary, un' I'll vake you vhen she comes."
His shoulder was very comfortable. She closed her blue eyes.
"You will wake me?" she murmured.
"Sure I vill," said Max. "I'll have you clean avake before she's
through knockin'."
But he must have forgotten that promise, for when Mrs. Légère at last
returned, he was still sitting there among the pillows, Mary's hair
fallen over his green coat, her cheeks pinker than ever, and her
girlish breast rising and falling rhythmically in sleep.