“You had better put on that now,” said Sylvia, indicating the fluffy mass on the bed. “I'll help you.”
“I don't like to trouble you,” Rose said, almost pitifully, but she stood still while Sylvia, again with that odd sensation of delight, slipped over the young head a lace-trimmed petticoat, and fastened it, and then the tea-gown. The older woman dressed the girl with exactly the same sensations that she might have experienced in dressing her own baby for the first time. When the toilet was completed she viewed the result, however, with something that savored of disapproval.
Rose, after looking in the glass at her young beauty in its setting of lace and silk, looked into Sylvia's face for the admiration which she felt sure of seeing there, and shrank. “What is the matter? Don't I look nice?” she faltered.
Sylvia looked critically at the sleeves of the tea-gown, which were mere puffs of snowy lace, streaming with narrow ribbons, reaching to the elbow. “Do they wear sleeves like that now in New York?” asked she.
“Why, yes!” replied Rose. “This tea-gown came home only last week from Madame Felix.”
“They wear sleeves puffed at the bottom instead of the top, and a good deal longer, in East Westland,” said Sylvia.
“Why, this was made from a Paris model,” said Rose, meekly. Again sophistication was abashed before the confidence of conservatism.
“I don't know anything about Paris models,” said Sylvia. “Mrs. Greenaway gets all her patterns right from Boston.”
“I hardly think madame would have made the sleeves this way unless it was the latest,” said Rose.
“I don't know anything about the latest,” said Sylvia. “We folks here in East Westland try to get thebest.” Sylvia felt as if she were chiding her own daughter. She spoke sternly, but her eyes beamed with pleasure. The young girl's discomfiture seemed to sweeten her very soul.
“For mercy's sake, hold up your dress going down-stairs,” she admonished. “I swept the stairs this morning, but the dust gathers before you can say boo, and that dress won't do up.”
Rose gathered up the tail of her gown obediently, and she also experienced a certain odd pleasure. New England blood was in her veins. It was something new and precious to be admonished as a New England girl might be admonished by a fond mother.
When she went into the south room, still clinging timidly to her lace train, Horace rose. Henry sat still. He looked at her with pleased interest, but it did not occur to him to rise. Horace always rose when Sylvia entered a room, and Henry always rather resented it. “Putting on society airs,” he thought to himself, with a sneer.
However, he smiled involuntarily; the girl was so very pretty and so very unlike anything which he had ever seen. “Dressed up as if she were going to a ball, in a dress made like a night-gown,” he thought, but he smiled. As for Horace, he felt dazzled. He had scarcely realized how pretty Rose was under the dark-blue mist of her veil. He placed a chair for her, and began talking about the journey and the weather while Sylvia got supper. Henry was reading the local paper. Rose's eyes kept wandering to that. Suddenly she sprang to her feet, was across the room in a white swirl, and snatched the paper from Henry's hands.
“What is this, oh, what is this?” she cried out.
She had read before Horace could stop her. She turned upon him, then upon Henry. Her face was very pale and working with emotion.
“Oh,” she cried, “you only telegraphed me that poor Cousin Eliza was dead! You did not either of you tell me she was murdered. I loved her, although I had not seen her for years, because I have so few to whom my love seemed to belong. I was sorry because she was dead, but murdered!”
Rose threw herself on a chair, and sobbed and sobbed.
“I loved her; I did love her,” she kept repeating, like a distressed child. “I did love her, poor Cousin Eliza, and she was murdered. I did love her.”
Horace was right in his assumption that the case against Lucinda Hart and Hannah Simmons would never be pressed. Although it was proved beyond a doubt that Eliza Farrel had swallowed arsenic in a sufficiently large quantity to cause death, the utter absence of motive was in the favor of the accused, and then the suspicion that the poison might have been self-administered, if not with suicidal intent, with another, steadily gained ground. Many thought Miss Farrel's wonderful complexion might easily have been induced by the use of arsenic.
At all events, the evidence against Lucinda and Hannah, when sifted, was so exceedingly flimsy, and the lack of motive grew so evident, that there was no further question of bringing them to trial. Still the suspicion, once raised, grew like a weed, as suspicion does grow in the ready soil of the human heart. For a month after the tragedy it seemed as if Sylvia Whitman's prophecy concerning the falling off of the hotel guests was destined to fail. The old hostelry was crowded. Newspaper men and women from all parts of the country flocked there, and also many not connected with the press, who were morbidly curious and revelled in the sickly excitement of thinking they might be living in the house of a poisoner. Lucinda Hart sent in her resignation from the church choir. Her experience, the first time she had sung after Eliza Farrel's death, did not exactly daunt her; she was not easily daunted. But she had raised her husky contralto, and lifted her elderly head in its flowered bonnet before that watchful audience of old friends and neighbors, and had gone home and written her stiffly worded note of resignation.
She attended church the following Sunday. She said to herself that her absence might lead people to think there was some ground for the awful charge which had been brought against her. She bought a smart new bonnet and sat among the audience, and heard Lucy Ayres, who had a beautiful contralto, sing in her place. Lucy sang well, and looked very pretty in her lace blouse and white hat, but she was so pale that people commented on it. Sylvia, who showed a fairly antagonistic partisanship for Lucinda, spoke to her as she came out of church, and walked with her until their roads divided. Sylvia left Henry to follow with Rose Fletcher, who was still staying in East Westland, and pressed close to Lucinda.
“How are you?” she said.
“Well enough; why shouldn't I be?” retorted Lucinda.
It was impossible to tell from her manner whether she was grateful for, or resented, friendly advances. She held her head very high. There was a stiff, jetted ornament on her new bonnet, and it stood up like a crest. She shot a suspicious glance at Sylvia. Lucinda in those days entertained that suspicion of suspicion which poisons the very soul.
“I don't know why you shouldn't be,” replied Sylvia. She herself cast an angry glance at the people around them, and that angry glance was like honey to Lucinda. “You were a fool to give up your place in the choir,” said Sylvia, still with that angry, wandering gaze. “I'd sung. I'd shown 'em; and I'd sung out of tune if I'd wanted to.”
“You don't know what it was like last Sunday,” said Lucinda then. She did not speak complainingly or piteously. There was proud strength in her voice, but it was emphatic.
“I guess I do know,” said Sylvia. “I saw everybody craning their necks, and all them strangers. You've got a lot of strangers at the hotel, haven't you, Lucinda?”
“Yes,” said Lucinda, and there was an echo in her monosyllable like an expletive.
Sylvia nodded sympathizingly. “Some of them write for the papers, I suppose?” said she.
“Some of them. I know it's my bread-and-butter to have them, but I never saw such a parcel of folks. Talk about eyes in the backs of heads, they're all eyes and all ears. Sometimes I think they ain't nothing except eyes and ears and tongue. But there's a lot besides who like to think maybe they're eating poison. I know I'm watched every time I stir up a mite of cake, but I stir away.”
“You must have your hands full.”
“Yes; I had to get Abby Smith to come in and help.”
“She ain't good for much.”
“No, she ain't. She's thinkin' all the time of how she looks, instead of what she's doing. She waits on table, though, and helps wash dishes. She generally forgets to pass the vegetables till the meat is all et up, and they're lucky if they get any butter; but I can't help it. They only pay five dollars a week, and get a lot of enjoyment out of watching me and Hannah, and they can't expect everything.”
The two women walked along the country road. There were many other people besides the church-going throng in their Sunday best, but they seemed isolated, although closely watched. Presently, however, a young man, well dressed in light gray, with a white waistcoat, approached them.
“Why, good-day, Miss Hart!” he said, raising his hat.
Lucinda nodded stiffly and walked on. She did not speak to him, but to Sylvia. “He is staying at the hotel. He writes for a New York paper,” she informed Sylvia, distinctly.
The young man laughed. “And Miss Hart is going to write for it, too,” he said, pleasantly and insinuatingly. “She is going to write an article upon how it feels to be suspected of a crime when one is innocent, and it will be the leading feature in next Sunday's paper. She is to have her picture appear with it, too, and photographs of her famous hotel and the room in which the murder was said to have been committed, aren't you, Miss Hart?”
“Yes,” replied Lucinda, with stolidity.
Sylvia stared with amazement. “Why, Lucinda!” she gasped.
“When I find out folks won't take no, I give 'em yes,” said Lucinda, grimly.
“I knew I could finally persuade Miss Hart,” said the young man, affably. He was really very much of a gentleman. He touched his hat, striking into a pleasant by-path across a field to a wood beyond.
“He's crazy over the country,” remarked Lucinda; and then she was accosted again, by another gentleman. This time he was older and stouter, and somewhat tired in his aspect, but every whit as genially persuasive.
“He writes for a New York paper,” said Lucinda to Sylvia, in exactly the same tone which she had used previously. “He wants me to write a piece for his paper on my first twenty-four hours under suspicion of crime.”
“And you are going to write it, aren't you, Miss Hart?” asked the gentleman.
“Yes,” replied Lucinda, with alacrity.
This time the gentleman looked a trifle suspicious. He pressed his inquiry. “Can you let us have the copy by Wednesday?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Lucinda. Her “yes” had the effect of a snap.
The gentleman talked a little more at length with regard to his article, and Lucinda never failed with her ready “yes.”
They were almost at the turn of the road, where Sylvia would leave Lucinda, when a woman appeared. She was young, but she looked old, and her expression was one of spiritual hunger.
“This lady writes for a Boston paper,” said Lucinda. “She came yesterday. She wants me to write a piece for her paper upon women's unfairness to women.”
“Based upon the late unfortunate occurrence at Miss Hart's hotel,” said the woman.
“Yes,” said Lucinda, “of course; everything is based on that. She wants me to write a piece upon how ready women are to accuse other women of doing things they didn't do.”
“And you are going to write it?” said the woman, eagerly.
“Yes,” said Lucinda.
“Oh, thank you! you are a perfect dear,” said the woman. “I am so much pleased, and so will Mr. Evans be when he hears the news. Now I must ask you to excuse me if I hurry past, for I ought to wire him at once. I can get back to Boston to-night.”
The woman had left them, with a swish of a frilled silk petticoat under a tailored skirt, when Sylvia looked at Lucinda. “You ain't goin' to?” said she.
“No.”
“But you said so.”
“You'd say anything to get rid of them. I've said no till I found out they wouldn't take it, so then I began to say yes. I guess I've said yes, in all, to about seventeen.”
“And you don't mean to write a thing?”
“I guess I ain't going to begin writing for the papers at my time of life.”
“But what will they do?”
“They won't get the pieces.”
“Can't they sue you, or anything?”
“Let them sue if they want to. After what I've been through lately I guess I sha'n't mind that.”
“And you are telling every one of them you'll write a piece?”
“Of course I am. It's the only thing they'll let me tell them. I want to get rid of them somehow.”
Sylvia looked at Lucinda anxiously. “Is it true that Albion Bennet has left?” she said.
“Yes; he was afraid of getting poisoned. Mrs. Jim Jones has taken him. I reckon I sha'n't have many steady boarders after this has quieted down.”
“But how are you going to get along, Lucinda?”
“I shall get along. Everybody gets along. What's heaped on you you have to get along with. I own the hotel, and I shall keep more hens and raise more garden truck, and let Hannah go if I can't pay her. I shall have some business, enough to keep me alive, I guess.”
“Is it true that Amos Quimby has jilted Hannah on account of—?”
“Guess so. He hasn't been near her since.”
“Ain't it a shame?”
“Hannah's got to live with what's heaped on her shoulders, too,” said Lucinda. “Folks had ought to be thankful when the loads come from other people's hands, instead of their own, and make the best of it. Hannah has got a good appetite. It ain't going to kill her. She can go away from East Westland by-and-by if she wants to, and get another beau. Folks didn't suspect her much, anyway. I've got the brunt of it.”
“Lucinda,” said Sylvia, earnestly. “Folks can't really believe you'd go and do such a thing.”
“It's like flies after molasses,” said Lucinda. “I never felt I was so sweet before in my life.”
“What can they think you'd go and poison a good, steady boarder like that for?”
“She paid a dollar a day,” said Lucinda.
“I know she did.”
“And I liked her,” said Lucinda. “I know lots of folks didn't, but I did. I know what folks said, and I'll own I found things in her room, but I don't care what folks do to their outsides as long as their insides are right. Miss Farrel was a real good woman, and she had a kind of hard time, too.”
“Why, I thought she had a real good place in the high-school; and teachers earn their money dreadful easy.”
“It wasn't that.”
“What was it?”
Lucinda hesitated. “Well,” she said, finally, “it can't do her any harm, now she's dead and gone, and I don't know as it was anything against her, anyway. She just set her eyes by your boarder.”
“Not Mr. Allen? You don't mean Mr. Allen, Lucinda?”
“What other boarder have you had? I've known about it for a long time. Hannah and me both have known, but we never opened our lips, and I don't want it to go any further now.”
“How did you find out?”
“By keeping my eyes and ears open. How does anybody find out anything?”
“I don't believe Mr. Allen ever once thought of her,” said Sylvia, and there was resentment in her voice.
“Of course he didn't. Maybe he'll take a shine to that girl you've got with you now.”
“Neither one of them has even thought of such a thing,” declared Sylvia, and her voice was almost violent.
“Well, I don't know,” Lucinda said, indifferently. “I have had too much to look out for of my own affairs since the girl came to know anything about that. I only thought of their being in the same house. I always had sort of an idea myself that maybe Lucy Ayres would be the one.”
“I hadn't,” said Sylvia. “Not but she—well, she looked real sick to-day. She didn't look fit to stand up there and sing. I should think her mother would be worried about her. And she don't sing half as well as you do.”
“Yes, she does,” replied Lucinda. “She sings enough sight better than I do.”
“Well, I don't know much about music,” admitted Sylvia. “I can't tell if anybody gets off the key.”
“I can,” said Lucinda, firmly. “She sings enough sight better than I can, but I sang plenty well enough for them, and if I hadn't been so mad at the way I've been treated I'd kept on. Now they can get on without me. Lucy Ayres does look miserable. There's consumption in her family, too. Well, it's good for her lungs to sing, if she don't overdo it. Good-bye, Sylvia.”
“Good-bye,” said Sylvia. She hesitated a moment, then she said: “Don't you mind, Lucinda. Henry and I think just the same of you as we've always thought, and there's a good many besides us. You haven't any call to feel bad.”
“I don't feel bad,” said Lucinda. “I've got spunk enough and grit enough to bear any load that I 'ain't heaped on my own shoulders, and the Lord knows I 'ain't heaped this. Don't you worry about me, Sylvia. Good-bye.”
Lucinda went her way. She held her nice black skirt high, but her plodding feet raised quite a cloud of dust. Her shoulders were thrown back, her head was very erect, the jetted ornament on her bonnet shone like a warrior's crest. She stepped evenly out of sight, as evenly as if she had been a soldier walking in line and saying to himself, “Left, right; left, right.”
When Sylvia reached home she found Rose Fletcher and Horace Allen sitting on the bench under the oak-trees of the grove north of the house. She marched out there and stood before them, holding her fringed parasol in such a way that it made a concave frame for her stern, elderly face and thin shoulders. “Rose,” said she, “you had better go into the house and lay down till dinner-time. You have been walking in the sun, and it is warm, and you look tired.”
She spoke at once affectionately and severely. It seemed almost inconceivable that this elderly country woman could speak in such wise to the city-bred girl in her fashionable attire, with her air of self-possession.
But the girl looked up at her as if she loved her, and answered, in just the way in which Sylvia liked her to answer, with a sort of pretty, childish petulance, defiant, yet yielding. “I am not in the least tired,” said she, “and it did not hurt me to walk in the sun, and I like to sit here under the trees.”
Rose was charming that morning. Her thick, fair hair was rolled back from her temples, which had at once something noble and childlike about them. Her face was as clear as a cameo. She was dressed in mourning for her aunt, but her black robe was thin and the fine curves of her shoulders and arms were revealed, and the black lace of her wide hat threw her fairness into relief like a setting of onyx.
“You had better go into the house,” said Sylvia, her eyes stern, her mouth smiling. A maternal instinct which dominated her had awakened suddenly in the older woman's heart. She adored the girl to such an extent that the adoration fairly pained her. Rose herself might easily have found this exacting affection, this constant watchfulness, irritating, but she found it sweet. She could scarcely remember her mother, but the memory had always been as one of lost love. Now she seemed to have found it again. She fairly coquetted with this older woman who loved her, and whom she loved, with that charming coquettishness sometimes seen in a daughter towards her mother. She presumed upon this affection which she felt to be so staple. She affronted Sylvia with a delicious sense of her own power over her and an underlying affection, which had in it the protective instinct of youth which dovetailed with the protective instinct of age.
It had been planned that she was to return to New York immediately after Miss Farrel's funeral. In fact, her ticket had been bought and her trunk packed, when a telegram arrived rather late at night. Rose had gone to bed when Sylvia brought it up to her room. “Don't be scared,” she said, holding the yellow envelope behind her. Rose stared at her, round-eyed, from her white nest. She turned pale.
“What is it?” she said, tremulously.
“There's no need for you to go and think anything has happened until you read it,” Sylvia said. “You must be calm.”
“Oh, what is it?”
“A telegram,” replied Sylvia, solemnly. “You must be calm.”
Rose laughed. “Oh, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are forever sending telegrams,” she said. “Very likely it is only to say somebody will meet me at the Grand Central.”
Sylvia looked at the girl in amazement, as she coolly opened and read the telegram. Rose's face changed expression. She regarded the yellow paper thoughtfully a moment before she spoke.
“If anything has happened, you must be calm,” said Sylvia, looking at her anxiously. “Of course you have lived with those people so many years you have learned to think a good deal of them; that is only natural; but, after all, they ain't your own.”
Rose laughed again, but in rather a perplexed fashion. “Nothing has happened,” she said—“at least, nothing that you are thinking of—but—”
“But what?”
“Why, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are going to sail for Genoa to-morrow, and that puts an end to my going to New York to them.”
A great brightness overspread Sylvia's face. “Well, you ain't left stranded,” she said. “You've got your home here.”
Rose looked gratefully at her. “You do make me feel as if I had, and I don't know what I should do if you did not, but”—she frowned perplexedly—“all the same, one would not have thought they would have gone off in this way without giving me a moment's notice,” she said, in rather an injured fashion, “after I have lived with them so long. I never thought they really cared much about me. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela look too hard at their own tracks to get much interest in anybody or anything outside; but starting off in this way! They might have thought that I would like to go—at least they might have told me.”
Suddenly her frown of perplexity cleared away. “I know what has happened,” she said, with a nod to Sylvia. “I know exactly what has happened.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Wilton's and Miss Pamela's aunt Susan has died, and they've got the money. They have been waiting for it ever since I have been with them. Their aunt was over ninety, and it did begin to seem as if she would never die.”
“Was she very rich?”
“Oh, very; millions; and she never gave a cent to Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela. She has died, and they have just made up their minds to go away. They have always said they should live abroad as soon as they were able.” Rose looked a little troubled for a moment, then she laughed. “They kept me as long as they needed me,” said she, with a pleasant cynicism, “and I don't know but I had lived with them long enough to suit myself. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela were always nice to me, but sometimes—well, sometimes I felt so outside them that I was awfully lonesome. And Mrs. Wilton always did just what you knew she would, and so did Miss Pamela, and it was a little like living with machines that were wound up to do the right thing by you, but didn't do it of their own accord. Now they have run down, just like machines. I know as well as I want to that Aunt Susan has died and left them her money. I shall get a letter to-morrow telling me about it. I think myself that Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela will get married now. They never gave up, you know. Mrs. Wilton's husband died ages ago, and she was as much of an old maid as Miss Pamela, and neither of them would give up. They will be countesses or duchesses or something within a year.”
Rose laughed, and Sylvia beamed upon her. “If you feel that you can stay here,” she said, timidly.
“IfI feel that I can,” said Rose. She stretched out her slender arms, from which the lace-trimmed sleeves of her night-gown fell away to the shoulder, and Sylvia let them close around her thin neck and felt the young cheek upon her own with a rapture like a lover's.
“Those folks she lived with in New York are going to Europe to-morrow,” she told Henry, when she was down-stairs again, “and they have treated that poor child mean. They have never told her a word about it until now. She says she thinks their rich aunt has died and left them her money, and they have just cleared out and left her.”
“Well, she can stay with us as long as she is contented,” said Henry.
“I rather guess she can,” said Sylvia.
Henry regarded her with the wondering expression which was often on his face nowadays. He had glimpses of the maternal depths of his wife's heart, which, while not understanding, he acquiesced in; but there was something else which baffled him.
But now for Sylvia came a time of contentment, apparently beyond anything which had ever come into her life. She fairly revelled in her possession of Rose, and the girl in her turn seemed to reciprocate. Although the life in East Westland was utterly at variance with the life she had known, she settled down in it, of course with sundry hitches of adjustment. For instance, she could not rid herself at first of the conviction that she must have, as she had always had, a maid.
“I don't know how to go to work,” she said to Sylvia one day. “Of course I must have a maid, but I wonder if I had better advertise or write some of my friends. Betty Morrison may know of some one, or Sally Maclean. Betty and Sally always seem to be able to find ways out of difficulties. Perhaps I had better write them. Maybe it would be safer than to advertise.”
Sylvia and Rose were sitting together in the south room that afternoon. Sylvia looked pathetically and wistfully at the girl. “What do you want a maid for?” she asked, timidly.
Rose stared. “What for? Why, what I always want a maid for: to attend to my wardrobe and assist me in dressing, to brush my hair, and—everything,” ended Rose, comprehensively.
Sylvia continued to regard her with that wistful, pathetic look.
“I can sew braid on your dresses, and darn your stockings, and button up your dresses, and brush your hair, too, just as well as anybody,” she said.
Rose ran over to her and went down on her knees beside her. “You dear,” she said, “as if you didn't have enough to do now!”
“This is a very convenient house to do work in,” said Sylvia, “and now I have my washing and ironing done, I've got time on my hands. I like to sew braid on and darn stockings, and always did, and it's nothing at all to fasten up your waists in the back; you know that.”
“You dear,” said Rose again. She nestled her fair head against Sylvia's slim knees. Sylvia thrilled. She touched the soft puff of blond hair timidly with her bony fingers. “But I have always had a maid,” Rose persisted, in a somewhat puzzled way. Rose could hardly conceive of continued existence without a maid. She had managed very well for a few days, but to contemplate life without one altogether seemed like contemplating the possibility of living without a comb and hair-brush. Sylvia's face took on a crafty expression.
“Well,” said she, “if you must have a maid, write your friends, and I will have another leaf put in the dining-table.”
Rose raised her head and stared at her. “Another leaf in the dining-table?” said she, vaguely.
“Yes. I don't think there's room for more than four without another leaf.”
“But—my maid would not eat at the table with us.”
“Would she be willing to eat in the kitchen—cold victuals—after we had finished?”
Rose looked exceedingly puzzled. “No, she would not; at least, no maid I ever had would have,” she admitted.
“Where is she going to eat, then? Would she wait till after we were through and eat in the dining-room?”
“I don't believe she would like that, either.”
“Where is she going to eat?” demanded Sylvia, inexorably.
Rose gazed at her.
“She could have a little table in here, or in the parlor,” said Sylvia.
Rose laughed. “Oh, that would never do!” said she. “Of course there was a servants' dining-room at Mrs. Wilton's, and there always is in a hotel, you know. I never thought of that.”
“She has got to eat somewhere. Where is she going to eat?” asked Sylvia, pressing the question.
Rose got up and kissed her. “Oh, well, I won't bother about it for a while, anyway,” said she. “Now I think of it, Betty is sure to be off to Newport by now, and Sally must be about to sail for Paris to buy her trousseau. She is going to marry Dicky van Snyde in the autumn (whatever she sees in him)! So I doubt if either of them could do anything about a maid for me. I won't bother at all now, but I am not going to let you wait upon me. I am going to help you.”
Sylvia took one of Rose's little hands and looked at it. “I guess you can't do much with hands like yours,” said she, admiringly, and with an odd tone of resentment, as if she were indignant at the mere suggestion of life's demanding service from this dainty little creature, for whom she was ready to immolate herself.
However, Rose had in her a vein of persistency. She insisted upon wiping the dishes and dusting. She did it all very badly, but Sylvia found the oddest amusement in chiding her for her mistakes and in setting them right herself. She would not have been nearly as well pleased had Rose been handy about the house. One evening Henry caught Sylvia wiping over all the dishes which Rose had wiped, and which were still damp, the while she was fairly doubled up with suppressed mirth.
“What in creation ails you, Sylvia?” asked Henry.
She extended towards him a plate on which the water stood in drops. “Just see this plate that dear child thinks she has wiped,” she chuckled.
“You women do beat the Dutch,” said Henry.
However, Rose did prove herself an adept in one respect. She had never sewed much, but she had an inventive genius in dress, and, when she once took up her needle, used it deftly.
When Sylvia confided to her her aspiration concerning the pink silk which she had found among Abrahama's possessions, Rose did not laugh at all, but she looked at her thoughtfully.
“Don't you think it would be suitable if I had it made with some black lace?” asked Sylvia, wistfully. “Henry thinks it is too young for me, but—”
“Not black,” Rose said, decisively. The two were up in the attic beside the old chest of finery. Rose took out an old barege of an ashes-of-roses color. She laid a fold of the barege over the pink silk, then she looked radiantly at Sylvia.
“It will make a perfectly lovely gown for you if you use the pink for a petticoat,” said she, “and have the gown made of this delicious old stuff.”
“The pink for a petticoat?” gasped Sylvia.
“It is the only way,” said Rose; “and you must have gray gloves, and a bonnet of gray with just one pale-pink rose in it. Don't you understand? Then you will harmonize with your dress. Your hair is gray, and there is pink in your cheeks. You will be lovely in it. There must be a very high collar and some soft creamy lace, because there is still some yellow left in your hair.”
Rose nodded delightedly at Sylvia, and the dressmaker came and made the gown according to Rose's directions. Sylvia wore it for the first time when she walked from church with Lucinda Hart and found Rose and Horace sitting in the grove. After Rose had replied to Sylvia's advice that she should go into the house, she looked at her with the pride of proprietorship. “Doesn't she look simply lovely?” she asked Horace.
“She certainly does,” replied the young man. He really gazed admiringly at the older woman, who made, under the glimmering shadows of the oaks, a charming nocturne of elderly womanhood. The faint pink on her cheeks seemed enhanced by the pink seen dimly through the ashen shimmer of her gown; the creamy lace harmonized with her yellow-gray hair. She was in her own way as charming as Rose in hers.
Sylvia actually blushed, and hung her head with a graceful sidewise motion. “I'm too old to be made a fool of,” said she, “and I've got a good looking-glass.” But she smiled the smile of a pretty woman conscious of her own prettiness. Then all three laughed, although Horace but a moment before had looked very grave, and now he was quite white. Sylvia noticed it. “Why, what ails you, Mr. Allen?” she said. “Don't you feel well?”
“Perfectly well.”
“You look pale.”
“It is the shadow of the oaks.”
Sylvia noticed a dainty little white box in Rose's lap. “What is that?” she asked.
“It is a box of candy that dear, sweet Lucy Ayres who sang to-day made her own self and gave to me,” replied Rose. “She came up to me on the way home from church and slipped it into my hand, and I hardly know her at all. I do think it is too dear of her for anything. She is such a lovely girl, and her voice is beautiful.” Rose looked defiantly at Horace. “Mr. Allen has been trying to make me promise not to eat this nice candy,” she said.
“I don't think candy is good for anybody, and girls eat altogether too much of it,” said Horace, with a strange fervor which the occasion hardly seemed to warrant.
“Wouldn't I know he was a school-teacher when I heard him speak like that, even if nobody had ever told me?” said Rose. “Of course I am going to eat this candy that dear Lucy made her own self and gave me. I should be very ungrateful not to, and I love candy, too.”
“I will send for some to Boston to-morrow,” cried Horace, eagerly.
Rose regarded him with amazement. “Why, Mr. Allen, you just said you did not approve of candy at all, and here you are proposing to send for some for me,” she said, “when I have this nice home-made candy, a great deal purer, because one knows exactly what is in it, and you say I must not eat this.”
Rose took up a sugared almond daintily and put it to her lips, but Horace was too quick for her. Before she knew what he was about he had dashed it from her hand, and in the tumult the whole box of candy was scattered. Horace trampled on it, it was impossible to say whether purposely or accidentally, in the struggle.
Both Rose and Sylvia regarded him with amazement, mixed with indignation.
“Why, Mr. Allen!” said Rose. Then she added, haughtily: “Mr. Allen, you take altogether too much upon yourself. You have spoiled my candy, and you forget that you have not the least right to dictate to me what I shall or shall not eat.”
Sylvia also turned upon Horace. “Home-made candy wouldn't hurt her,” she said. “Why, Mr. Allen, what do you mean?”
“Nothing. I am very sorry,” said Horace. Then he walked away without another word, and entered the house. The girl and the woman stood looking at each other.
“What did he do such a thing for?” asked Rose.
“Goodness knows,” said Sylvia.
Rose was quite pale. She began to look alarmed. “You don't suppose he's taken suddenly insane or anything?” said she.
“My land! no,” said Sylvia. “Men do act queer sometimes.”
“I should think so, if this is a sample of it,” said Rose, eying the trampled candy. “Why, he ground his heel into it! What right had he to tell me I should or should not eat it?” she said, indignantly, again.
“None at all. Men are queer. Even Mr. Whitman is queer sometimes.”
“If he is as queer as that, I don't see how you have lived with him so long. Did he ever make you drop a nice box of candy somebody had given you, and trample on it, and then walk off?”
“No, I don't know as he ever did; but men do queer things.”
“I don't like Mr. Allen at all,” said Rose, walking beside Sylvia towards the house. “Not at all. I don't like him as well as Mr. James Duncan.”
Sylvia looked at her with quick alarm. “The man who wrote you last week?”
“Yes, and wanted to know if there was a hotel here so he could come.”
“I thought—” began Sylvia.
“Yes, I had begun the letter, telling him the hotel wasn't any good, because I knew he would know what that meant—that there was no use in his asking me to marry him again, because I never would; but now I think I shall tell him the hotel is not so bad, after all,” said Rose.
“But you don't mean—”
“I don't know what I do mean,” said Rose, nervously. “Yes, I do know what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it, and men don't know that I know what I mean.” Rose was almost crying.
“Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner,” said Sylvia, anxiously.
“No,” replied Rose; “I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going to set the table.”
But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear, blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry.
“Uncle Henry?” said she, interrogatively, and waited.
Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had been so very different from his and his wife's. “Well?” he said.
“Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for doing a queer thing better than a woman can?”
“Perhaps.”
“I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing, better than a man could,” said Rose, reflectively. She hesitated a little.
Henry waited, his worn, pleasant face staring at her over a vividly colored page of the paper.
“Suppose,” said Rose, “another woman had given Aunt Sylvia a box of candy which she had made herself, real nice candy, and suppose the woman who had given it to her was lovely, and you had knocked a piece of candy from Aunt Sylvia's mouth just as she was going to taste it, and had startled her so you made her drop the whole box, and then set your heel hard on the pieces; what would you have done it for?”
The girl's face wore an expression of the keenest inquiry. Henry looked at her, wrinkling his forehead. “If another woman had given Sylvia a box of candy she had made, and I knocked a piece from her hand just as she was going to taste it, and made her drop the whole box, and had trampled all the rest of the candy underfoot, what should I have done it for?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
Henry looked at her. He heard a door shut up-stairs. “I shouldn't have done it,” he said.
“But suppose you had done it?”
“I shouldn't have.”
Rose shrugged her shoulders. “You are horrid, Uncle Henry,” she said.
“But I shouldn't have done it,” repeated Henry. He heard Horace's step on the stair. Rose got up and ran out of the room by another door from that which Horace entered. Horace sat down in the chair which Rose had just vacated. He looked pale and worried. The eyes of the two men met. Henry's eyes asked a question. Horace answered it.
“I am in such a devil of a mess as never man was yet, I believe,” he said.
Henry nodded gravely.
“The worst of it is I can't tell a living mortal,” Horace said, in a whisper. “I am afraid even to think it.”
At dinner Rose sat with her face averted from Horace. She never spoke once to him. As they rose from the table she made an announcement. “I am going to run over and see Lucy Ayres,” she said. “I am going to tell her an accident happened to my candy, and maybe she will give me some more.”
Henry saw Horace's face change. “Candy is not good for girls; it spoils their complexion. I have just been reading about it in the Sunday paper,” said Henry. Sylvia unexpectedly proved his ally. Rose had not eaten much dinner, although it had been an especially nice one, and she felt anxious about her.
“I don't think you ought to eat candy when you have so little appetite for good, wholesome meat and vegetables,” she said.
“I want to see Lucy, too,” said Rose. “I am going over there. It is a lovely afternoon. I have nothing I want to read and nothing to do. I am going over there.”
Henry's eyes questioned Horace's, which said, plainly, to the other man, “For God's sake, don't let her go; don't let her go!”
Rose had run up-stairs for her parasol. Horace turned away. He understood that Henry would help him. “Don't let her go over there this afternoon,” said Henry to Sylvia, who looked at him in the blankest amazement.
“Why not, I'd like to know?” asked Sylvia.
“Don't let her go,” repeated Henry.
Sylvia looked suspiciously from one man to the other. The only solution which a woman could put upon such a request immediately occurred to her. She said to herself, “Hm! Mr. Allen wants Rose to stay at home so he can see her himself, and Henry knows it.”
She stiffened her neck. Down deep in her heart was a feeling more seldom in women's hearts than in men's. She would not have owned that she did not wish to part with this new darling of her heart—who had awakened within it emotions of whose strength the childless woman had never dreamed. There was also another reason, which she would not admit even to herself. Had Rose been, indeed, her daughter, and she had possessed her from the cradle to womanhood, she would probably have been as other mothers, but now Rose was to her as the infant she had never borne. She felt the intense jealousy of ownership which the mother feels over the baby in her arms. She wished to snatch Rose from every clasp except her own.
She decided at once that it was easy to see through the plans of Horace and her husband, and she determined to thwart them. “I don't see why she shouldn't go,” she said. “It is a lovely afternoon. The walk will do her good. Lucy Ayres is a real nice girl, and of course Rose wants to see girls of her own age now and then.”
“It is Sunday,” said Henry. He felt and looked like a hypocrite as he spoke, but the distress in Horace's gaze was too much for him.
Sylvia sniffed. “Sunday,” said she. “Good land! what has come over you, Henry Whitman? It has been as much as I could do to get you to go to meeting the last ten years, and now all of a sudden you turn around and think it's wicked for a young girl to run in and see another young girl Sunday afternoon.” Sylvia sniffed again very distinctly, and then Rose entered the room.
Her clear, fair face looked from one to another from under her black hat. “What is the matter?” she asked.
Sylvia patted her on the shoulder. “Nothing is the matter,” said she. “Run along and have a good time, but you had better be home by five o'clock. There is a praise meeting to-night, and I guess we'll all want to go, and I am going to have supper early.”
After Rose had gone and Sylvia had left the room, the two men looked at each other. Horace was ashy pale. Henry's face showed alarm and astonishment. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Come out in the grove and have a smoke,” said Horace, with a look towards the door through which Sylvia had gone.
Henry nodded. He gathered up his pipe and tobacco from the table, and the two men sauntered out of the house into the grove. But even there not much was said. Both smoked in silence, sitting on the bench, before Horace opened his lips in response to Henry's inquiry.
“I don't know what it is, and I don't know that it is anything, and that is the worst of it,” he said, gloomily; “and I can't see my way to telling any mortal what little I do know that leads me to fear that it is something, although I would if I were sure and actually knew beyond doubt that there was—” He stopped abruptly and blew a ring of smoke from his cigar.
“Something is queer about my wife lately,” said Henry, in a low voice.
“What?”
“That's just it. I feel something as you do. It may be nothing at all. I tell you what, young man, when women talk, as women are intended by an overruling Providence to talk, men know where they are at, but when a woman doesn't talk men know where they ain't.”
“In my case there has been so much talk that I seem to be in a fog of it, and can't see a blessed thing sufficiently straight to know whether it is big enough to bother about or little enough to let alone; but I can't repeat the talk—no man could,” said Horace.
“In my case there ain't talk enough,” said Henry. “I ain't in a fog; I'm in pitch darkness.”
The two men sat for some time out in the grove. It was very pleasant there. The air was unusually still, and only the tops of the trees whitened occasionally in a light puff of wind like a sigh. Now and then a carriage or an automobile passed on the road beyond, but not many of them. It was not a main thoroughfare. The calls and quick carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were almost the only sounds heard. Now and then Sylvia's face glanced at them from a house window, but it was quickly withdrawn. She never liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet she could not have told why. She had a hazy impression, as she might have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.
“Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to speak a word,” she said to herself, as she returned to her seat beside a front window in the south room and took up her book. She was reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was, moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader. Henry had flung it aside in contempt. Sylvia thought it beautiful, possibly for the reason that her own hard sense was sometimes a strenuous burden, and in reading this she was forced to put it behind her. However, the book did not prevent her from returning every now and then to her own life and the happenings in it. Hence her stealthy journeys across the house and peeps at the men in the grove. If they were nettled by a sense of feminine mystery, she reciprocated. “What on earth did they want to stop Rose from going to see Lucy for?” seemed to stare at her in blacker type than the characters of the book.
Presently, when she saw Horace pass the window and disappear down the road, she laid the book on the table, with a slip of paper to keep the place, and hurried out to the grove. She found Henry leisurely coming towards the house. “Where has he gone?” she inquired, with a jerk of her shoulder towards the road.
“Mr. Allen?”
“Yes.”
“How should I know?”
“Don't you know?”
“Maybe I do,” said Henry, smiling at Sylvia with his smile of affection and remembrance that she was a woman.
“Why don't you tell?”
“Now, Sylvia,” said Henry, “you must remember that Mr. Allen is not a child. He is a grown man, and if he takes it into his head to go anywhere you can't say anything.”
Sylvia looked at Henry with a baffled expression. “I think he might spend his time a good deal more profitably Sunday afternoon than sitting under the trees and smoking, or going walking,” said she, rashly and inconsequentially. “If he would only sit down and read some good book.”
“You can't dictate to Mr. Allen what he shall or shall not do,” Henry repeated.
“Why didn't you want Rose to go to Lucy's?” asked Sylvia, making a charge in an entirely different quarter.
Henry scorned to lie. “I don't know,” he replied, which was the perfect truth as far as it went. It did not go quite far enough, for he did not add that he did not know why Horace Allen did not want her to go, and that was his own reason.
However, Sylvia could not possibly fathom that. She sniffed with her delicate nostrils, as if she actually smelled some questionable odor of character. “You men have mighty queer streaks, that's all I've got to say,” she returned.
When they were in the house again she resumed her book, reading every word carefully, and Henry took up the Sunday paper, which he had not finished. The thoughts of both, however, turned from time to time towards Horace. Sylvia did not know where he had gone. She did not suspect. Henry knew, but he did not know why. Horace had sprung suddenly to his feet and caught up his hat as the two men had been sitting under the trees. Henry had emitted a long puff of tobacco smoke and looked inquiringly at him through the filmy blue of it.
“I can't stand it another minute,” said Horace, almost with violence. “I've got to know what is going on. I am going to the Ayres's myself. I don't care what they think. I don't care what she thinks. I don't care what anybody thinks.” With that he was gone.
Henry took another puff at his pipe. It showed the difference between the masculine and the feminine point of view that Henry did not for one moment attach a sentimental reason to Horace's going. He realized Rose's attractions. The very probable supposition that she and Horace might fall in love with and marry each other had occurred to him, but this he knew at once had nothing to do with that. He turned the whole over and over in his mind, with no result. He lacked enough premises to arrive at conclusions. He had started for the house and his Sunday paper when he met Sylvia, and had resolved to put it all out of his mind. But he was not quite able. There is a masculine curiosity as well as a feminine, and one is about as persistent as the other.
Meantime Horace was walking down the road towards the Ayres house. It was a pretty, much-ornamented white cottage, with a carefully kept lawn and shade trees. At one side was an old-fashioned garden with an arbor. In this arbor, as Horace drew near, he saw the sweep of feminine draperies. It seemed to him that the arbor was full of women. In reality there were only three—Lucy, her mother, and Rose.
When Rose had rung the door-bell she had been surprised by what sounded like a mad rush to answer her ring. Mrs. Ayres opened the door. She looked white and perturbed, and behind her showed Lucy's face, flushed and angry.
“I knew it was Miss Fletcher; I told you so, mother,” said Lucy, and her low, sweet voice rang out like an angry bird's with a sudden break for the high notes.
Mrs. Ayres kept her self-possession of manner, although her face showed not only nervousness but something like terror. “Good-afternoon, Miss Fletcher,” she said. “Please walk in.”
“She said for me to call her Rose,” cried Lucy. “Please come in, Rose. I am glad to see you.”
In spite of the cordial words the girl's voice was strange. Rose stared from daughter to mother and back again. “If you were engaged,” she said, rather coldly, “if you would prefer that I come some other time—”
“No, indeed,” cried Lucy, “no other time. Yes, every other time. What am I saying? But I want you now, too. Come right up to my room, Rose. I know you will excuse my wrapper and my bed's being tumbled. I have been lying down. Come right up.”
Rose followed Lucy, and to her astonishment became aware that Lucy's mother was following her. Mrs. Ayres entered the room with the two girls. Lucy looked impatiently at her, and spoke as Rose wondered any daughter could speak. “Rose and I have some things to talk over, mother,” she said.
“Nothing, I guess, that your mother cannot hear,” returned Mrs. Ayres, with forced pleasantry. She sat down, and Lucy flung herself petulantly upon the bed, where she had evidently been lying, but seemingly not reposing, for it was much rumpled, and the pillows gave evidence of the restless tossing of a weary head. Lucy herself had a curiously rumpled aspect, though she was not exactly untidy. Her soft, white, lace-trimmed wrapper carelessly tied with blue ribbons was wrinkled, her little slippers were unbuttoned. Her mass of soft hair was half over her shoulders. There were red spots on the cheeks which had been so white in the morning, and her eyes shone. She kept tying and untying two blue ribbons at the neck of her wrapper as she lay on the bed and talked rapidly.
“I look like a fright, I know,” she said. “I was tired after church, and slipped off my dress and lay down. My hair is all in a muss.”
“It is such lovely hair that it looks pretty anyway,” said Rose.
Lucy drew a strand of her hair violently over her shoulder. It almost seemed as if she meant to tear it out by the roots.
“Lucy!” said her mother.
“Oh, mother, do let me alone!” cried the girl. Then she said, looking angrily at her tress of hair, then at Rose: “It is not nearly as pretty as yours. You know it isn't. All men are simply crazy over hair your color. I hate my hair. I just hate it.”
“Lucy!” said her mother again, in the same startled but admonitory tone.
Lucy made an impatient face at her. She threw back the tress of hair. “I hate it,” said she.
Rose began to feel awkward. She noticed Mrs. Ayres's anxious regard of her daughter, and she thought with disgust that Lucy Ayres was not so sweet a girl as she had seemed. However, she felt an odd kind of sympathy and pity for her. Lucy's pretty face and her white wrapper seemed alike awry with nervous suffering, which the other girl dimly understood, although it was the understanding of a normal character with regard to an abnormal one.
Rose resolved to change the subject. “I did enjoy your singing so much this morning,” she said.
“Thank you,” replied Lucy, but a look of alarm instead of pleasure appeared upon her face, which Rose was astonished to see in the mother's likewise.
“I feel so sorry for poor Miss Hart, because I cannot think for a moment that she was guilty of what they accused her of,” said Rose, “that I don't like to say anything about her singing. But I will say this much: I did enjoy yours.”
“Thank you,” said Lucy again. Her look of mortal terror deepened. From being aggressively nervous, she looked on the verge of a collapse.
Mrs. Ayres rose, went to Lucy's closet, and returned with a bottle of wine and a glass. “Here,” she said, as she poured out the red liquor. “You had better drink this, dear. You know Dr. Wallace said you must drink port wine, and you are all tired out with your singing this morning.”
Lucy seized the glass and drank the wine eagerly.
“It must be a nervous strain,” said Rose, “to stand up there, before such a crowded audience as there was this morning, and sing.”
“Yes, it is,” agreed Mrs. Ayres, in a harsh voice, “and especially when anybody isn't used to it. Lucy is not at all strong.”
“I hope it won't be too much for her,” said Rose; “but it is such a delight to listen to her after—”
“Oh, I am tired and sick of hearing Miss Hart's name!” cried Lucy, unpleasantly.
“Lucy!” said Mrs. Ayres.
“Well, I am,” said Lucy, defiantly. “It has been nothing but Miss Hart, Miss Hart, from morning until night lately. Nobody thinks she poisoned Miss Farrel, of course. It was perfect nonsense to accuse her of it, and when that is said, I think myself that is enough. I see no need of this eternal harping upon it. I have heard nothing except ‘poor Miss Hart’ until I am nearly wild. Come, Rose, I'll get dressed and we'll go out in the arbor. It is too pleasant to stay in-doors. This room is awfully close.”
“I think perhaps I had better not stay,” Rose replied, doubtfully. It seemed to her that she was having a very strange call, and she began to be indignant as well as astonished.
“Of course you are going to stay,” Lucy said, and her voice was sweet again. “We'll let Miss Hart alone and I'll get dressed, and we'll go in the arbor. It is lovely out there to-day.”
With that Lucy sprang from the bed and let her wrapper slip from her shoulders. She stood before her old-fashioned black-walnut bureau and began brushing her hair. Her white arms and shoulders gleamed through it as she brushed with what seemed a cruel violence.
Rose laughed in a forced way. “Why, dear, you brush your hair as if it had offended you,” she said.
“Don't brush so hard, Lucy,” said Mrs. Ayres.
“I just hate my old hair, anyway,” said Lucy, with a vicious stroke of the brush. She bent her head over, and swept the whole dark mass downward until it concealed her face and nearly touched her knees. Then she gave it a deft twist, righted herself, and pinned the coil in place.
“How beautifully you do up your hair,” said Rose.
Lucy cast an appreciative glance at herself in the glass. The wine had deepened the glow on her cheeks. Her eyes were more brilliant. She pulled her hair a little over one temple, and looked at herself with entire satisfaction. Lucy had beautiful neck and arms, unexpectedly plump for a girl so apparently slender. Her skin was full of rosy color, too. She gazed at the superb curve of her shoulders rising above the dainty lace of her corset-cover, and smiled undisguisedly.
“I wish my neck was as plump as yours,” said Rose.
“Yes, she has a nice, plump neck,” said Mrs. Ayres. While the words showed maternal pride, the tone never relaxed from its nervous anxiety.
Lucy's smile vanished suddenly. “Well, what if it is plump?” said she. “What is the use of it? A girl living here in East Westland can never wear a dress to show her neck. People would think she had gone out of her mind.”
Rose laughed. “I have some low-neck gowns,” said she, “but I can't wear them, either. Maybe that is fortunate for me, my neck is so thin.”
“You will wear them in other places,” said Lucy. “You won't stay here all your days. You will have plenty of chances to wear your low-neck gowns.” She spoke again in her unnaturally high voice. She turned towards her closet to get her dress.
“Lucy!” said Mrs. Ayres.
“Well, it is the truth,” said Lucy. “Don't preach, mother. If you were a girl, and somebody told you your neck was pretty, and you knew other girls had chances to wear low-neck dresses, you wouldn't be above feeling it a little.”
“My neck was as pretty as yours when I was a girl, and I never wore a low-neck dress in my life,” said Mrs. Ayres.
“Oh, well, you got married when you were eighteen,” said Lucy. There was something almost coarse in her remark. Rose felt herself flush. She was sophisticated, and had seen the world, although she had been closely if not lovingly guarded; but she shrank from some things as though she had never come from under a country mother's wing in her life.
Lucy got a pale-blue muslin gown from the closet and slipped it over her shoulders. Then she stood for her mother to fasten it in the back. Lucy was lovely in this cloud of blue, with edgings of lace on the ruffles and knots of black velvet. She fastened her black velvet girdle, and turned herself sidewise with a charming feminine motion, to get the effect of her slender waist between the curves of her small hips and bust. Again she looked pleased.
“You are dear in that blue gown,” said Rose.
Lucy smiled. Then she scowled as suddenly. She could see Rose over her shoulder in the glass. “It is awful countrified,” said she. “Look at the sleeves and look at yours. Where was yours made?”
“My dressmaker in New York made it,” faltered Rose. She felt guilty because her gown was undeniably in better style.
“There's no use trying to have anything in East Westland,” said Lucy.
While she was fastening a little gold brooch at her throat, Rose again tried to change the subject. “That candy of yours looked perfectly delicious,” said she. “You must teach me how you make it.”
Mrs. Ayres went dead white in a moment. She looked at Lucy with a look of horror which the girl did not meet. She went on fastening her brooch. “Did you like it?” she asked, carelessly.
“An accident happened to it, I am sorry to say,” explained Rose. “Mr. Allen and I were out in the grove, and somehow he jostled me, and the candy got scattered on the ground, and he stepped on it.”
“Were you and he alone out there?” asked Lucy, in a very quiet voice.
Rose looked at her amazedly. “Why, no, not when that happened!” she replied. “Aunt Sylvia was there, too.” She spoke a little resentfully. “What if Mr. Allen and I had been alone; what is that to her?” she thought.
“There is some more candy,” said Lucy, calmly. “I will get it, and then we will go out in the arbor. I will teach you to make the candy any day. It is very simple. Come, Rose dear. Mother, we are going out in the arbor.”
Mrs. Ayres rose immediately. She preceded the two girls down-stairs, and came through the sitting-room door with a dish of candy in her hand just as they reached it. “Here is the candy, dear,” she said to Lucy, and there was something commanding in her voice.
Lucy took the dish, a pretty little decorated affair, with what seemed to Rose an air of suspicion and a grudging “thank you, mother.”
“Come, Rose,” she said. She led the way and Rose followed. Mrs. Ayres returned to the sitting-room. The girls went through the old-fashioned garden with its flower-beds outlined with box, in which the earlier flowers were at their prime, to the arbor. It was a pretty old structure, covered with the shaggy arms of an old grape-vine whose gold-green leaves were just uncurling. Lucy placed the bowl of candy on the end of the bench which ran round the interior, and, to Rose's surprise, seated herself at a distance from it, and motioned Rose to sit beside her, without offering her any candy. Lucy leaned against Rose and looked up at her. She looked young and piteous and confiding. Rose felt again that she was sweet and that she loved her. She put her arm around Lucy.
“You are a dear,” said she.
Lucy nestled closer. “I know you must have thought me perfectly horrid to speak as I did to mother,” said she, “but you don't understand.”
Lucy hesitated. Rose waited.
“You see, the trouble is,” Lucy went on, “I love mother dearly, of course. She is the best mother that ever a girl had, but she is always so anxious about me, and she follows me about so, and I get nervous, and I know I don't always speak as I should. I am often ashamed of myself. You see—”
Lucy hesitated again for a longer period. Rose waited.
“Mother has times of being very nervous,” Lucy said, in a whisper. “I sometimes think, when she follows me about so, that she is not for the time being quite herself.”
Rose started and looked at the other girl in horror. “Why don't you have a doctor?” said she.
“Oh, I don't mean that she—I don't mean that there is anything serious, only she has always been over-anxious about me, and at times I fancy she is nervous, and then the anxiety grows beyond limit. She always gets over it. I don't mean that—”
“Oh, I didn't know,” said Rose.
“I never mean to be impatient,” Lucy went on, “but to-day I was very tired, and I wanted to see you especially. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
Lucy looked away from Rose. She seemed to shrink within herself. The color faded from her face. “I heard something,” she said, faintly, “but I said I wouldn't believe it until I had asked you.”
“What is it?”
“I heard that you were engaged to marry Mr. Allen.”
Rose flushed and moved away a little from Lucy. “You can contradict the rumor whenever you hear it again,” said she.
“Then it isn't true?”
“No, it isn't.”
Lucy nestled against Rose, in spite of a sudden coldness which had come over the other girl. “You are so dear,” said she.
Rose looked straight ahead, and sat stiffly.
“I am thoroughly angry at such rumors, merely because a girl happens to be living in the same house with a marriageable man,” said she.
“Yes, that is so,” said Lucy. She remained quiet for a few moments, leaning against Rose, her blue-clad shoulder pressing lovingly the black-clad one. Then she moved away a little, and reared her pretty back with a curious, snakelike motion. Rose watched her. Lucy's eyes fastened themselves upon her, and something strange happened. Either Lucy Ayres was a born actress, or she had become actually so imbued, through abnormal emotion and love, with the very spirit of the man that she was capable of projecting his own emotions and feelings into her own soul and thence upon her face. At all events, she looked at Rose, and slowly Rose became bewildered. It seemed to her that Horace Allen was looking at her through the eyes of this girl, with a look which she had often seen since their very first meeting. She felt herself glowing from head to foot. She was conscious of a deep crimson stealing all over her face and neck. Her eyes fell before the other girl's. Then suddenly it was all over. Lucy rose with a little laugh. “You sweet, funny creature,” she said. “I can make you blush, looking at you, as if I were a man. Well, maybe I love you as well as one.” Lucy took the bowl of candy from the bench and extended it to Rose. “Do have some candy,” said she.
“Thank you,” said Rose. She looked bewildered, and felt so. She took a sugared almond and began nibbling at it. “Aren't you going to eat any candy yourself?” said she.
“I have eaten so much already that it has made my head ache,” replied Lucy. “Is it good?”
“Simply delicious. You must teach me how you make such candy.”
“Lucy will be glad to teach you any day,” said Mrs. Ayres's voice. She had come swiftly upon them, and entered the arbor with a religious newspaper in her hand. Lucy no longer seemed annoyed by her mother's following her. She only set the candy behind her with a quick movement which puzzled Rose.
“Aren't you going to offer your mother some?” she asked, laughing.
“Mother can't eat candy. Dr. Wallace has forbidden it,” Lucy said, quickly.
“Yes, that is quite true,” assented Mrs. Ayres. She began reading her paper. Lucy offered the bowl again to Rose, who took a bonbon. She was just swallowing it when Horace Allen appeared. He made a motion which did not escape Mrs. Ayres. She rose and confronted him with perfect calmness and dignity. “Good-afternoon, Mr. Allen,” she said.