The kitten, a black-and-white midget suggestive of a Coles-Phillips drawing, rubbed insistently against the girl's foot. She picked up the living toy and nestled its furry warmth beneath her chin, as she turned in quest of milk. She thrust forebodings from her mind with resolute will. It was too soon to think of these things; Anthony loved her, Anthony was content.

She had no conception of how fervently glad Anthony was to be rid of hara.s.sing thoughts and complications, or how gratefully the luxury of peace enfolded him and dwarfed the mere physical luxuries of idleness and lavish expenditure. Nor, being a woman, did she sufficiently value his pride in the possessions he had bought with his own labor. Tony Adriance never had noticed the table service in his father's house; he had been known to overturn a whole tray of translucent coffee-cups set in lace-fine silver work, without a second glance at the destruction.

But he knew every one of the cheap, heavy dishes he and Elsie had added to their equipment on Sat.u.r.day evening shopping orgies at a five-and-ten-cent store. Knew, and admired them! When Elsie would call from her "kitchen corner;" "Bring me the Niagara platter, honey," he could locate that ceramic atrocity at a glance. And when he let fall the Whistler bread-plate--it had a nocturnal, black-lined landscape effect in its centre--he was truly grieved. Indeed, it was he who selected their china, Elsie's taste being inclined toward a simplicity he refused as monotonous. He never had realized the pleasure of purchasing until he went shopping with his wife, chose with her, overruled her or indulged her in some fancy, then drew out his newly-received wage and paid, magnificent.

He could not have explained his emotions to Elsie. But his candid delight in those expeditions came to her memory, as she poured the kitten's milk into a saucer enamelled with blue forget-me-nots. She lifted her head and again glanced toward the distant city; but this time she smiled with certain triumph. He was her husband; better still, he was as eagerly her playmate as any lonely boy who first finds a chum.

She knew Lucille Masterson did not possess the art of comradeship among her talents; it was an art too unselfish.

"When he begins to tire of just playing this way," she half-unconsciously addressed the kitten, "we will find something else.

There will always be something for us to think of, together. It will come when it is needed. Perhaps----"

Arrested, her breath failed speech. It was as if her own words had thrown open a door before which she faltered, her eyes sun-dazzled, yet glimpsing a wide horizon.

Soothed by her silent neighborhood, the kitten finished lapping its milk and went to sleep against her skirt. But the girl stood still for a long time, steadying her heart, which seemed to her to be filling like a cup held under a clear fountain.

Later in the day a boy brought wreaths and sprays of holly to the door.

Elsie bought recklessly, so Adriance came home that night to a house Yule-gay with scarlet and green, spicy with the cinnamon fragrance of the apple-fritters, and holding a mistress who showed him a Christmas face of merry content.

"I could not wait two days," she explained to him. "We'll begin now and work up to it gradually."

But after all, Christmas morning came as a surprise, and achieved a final defeat of doubts and forebodings that drove them out of sight for many a day. For, kissing his wife awake at dawn, Anthony made his gift first, forestalling hers.

"You never had an engagement ring," he reminded her. "I'll have to make a tremendous record as a husband to live down my blunders as a fiance!

Here, let me put it on for you. What clever dimples you've got in your fingers! I noticed them our first night here, remember?"

She frankly cried in her great surprise and pa.s.sionate joy in his thought of her. It really was a spectacular ring, and glittered bravely in the early light; an oval of dark-red stones like a shield set above her wedding ring.

"They're only garnets," he stilled her protest of extravagance. "But they are the color of rubies; and the promise of them. Don't--please don't! Come, what have you got for me? Give it up."

The diversion succeeded. Laughing before her eyes were dry, she answered:

"He is in the wood-box. I had to keep him in the house where it was warm, and I was so afraid you would hear him and spoil the surprise. But he was as good as possible; he never said one word. Open the lid, dear."

"He?" echoed her husband. "Him?"

The wood-box yielded him; a small, jovial, bandy-legged puppy.

"He is _almost_ a Boston bull," Elsie explained conscientiously. "If he had been quite one, I couldn't have afforded to buy him. But he is a love. Anthony, he is the watch-dog, you know."

Finding both faces within reach, as he hung over Anthony's arm, the puppy licked them with fond impartiality.

CHAPTER X

MRS. MASTERSON TAKES TEA

It was the day after Christmas that Adriance was sent over to New York with his motor-truck, for the first time since he had become that ma.s.sive vehicle's pilot. His destination was in Brooklyn, so that he had the entire city to cross, and lights were commencing to twinkle here and there through the gray of the short winter afternoon when he turned homeward.

The experience had not been without a novel interest. Holiday traffic crowded the streets; traffic officers, tired and chilled by a biting east wind, were not patient. Adriance chose Fifth Avenue for his route up-town with the naturalness of long custom, without reflecting upon the greater freedom of travel he would have found on one of the dingy streets usually followed by such vehicles as his. However, the difficulties exhilarated him. Andy of the truck could not but wonder how the policeman who roughly ordered him away from the entrance of the Park might have phrased that request if he had known that the intruder was Tony Adriance, "paper, you know!" Perhaps, because of this wonder, his cheerful grin drew a sour smile from the officer.

"Don't you know you've not got a limousine there? You from the woods?"

came the not ill-natured sarcasm.

"Worse than that: from Jersey," Adriance shot back. "All right; I'm sorry."

"Plain streets for yours; round the circle," was the direction, which also implied a release.

"Thanks," Adriance called acknowledgment, as he obeyed.

The bulky figure beside the chauffeur stirred.

"You got a nerve," commented the man, his slow, heavy voice tinged with admiration. "I seen guys pulled fer less, Andy."

Adriance laughed. He and his big a.s.sistant were very good friends, after weeks of sharing the truck's seat. The chauffeur appeared a stripling by comparison with the man lounging beside him, huge arms folded across thick chest. "Mike," as he was known to his fellow-workers, was a Russian peasant. His upbringing in a Hoboken slum had fixed his patriotism and language, but had left his physique that of his inheritance. His reddish-yellow head was set on a ma.s.sive neck whose base his open shirt showed to be covered with a red growth of hair extending down over his chest. His large features and mild, slow-moving eyes, his heavy, placid manner of speech were absurdly alien to the colloquial language that he spoke. Adriance knew his helper had been an employee of the factory for ten years, but he did not know that Mike was always a.s.signed to a new chauffeur until the stranger proved himself trustworthy. Mike was dull, but he was stolidly honest. Valuable boxes or packages were not reported "lost" from trucks under his care.

Adriance had no idea of the truth that "Russian Mike" actually had determined the permanence of his position in his father's great mill.

"If I cannot go through the Park, I'll go back to the avenue," Adriance declared, when the turning had been negotiated. "I want gayety, Michael; boulevard gayety! Four o'clock on Fifth Avenue--shall a poor workingman be deprived of the sight? It is true that we are too far uptown, but the principle is the same. You agree with me?"

"It ain't nothin' to me," averred the magnificent guardian, shifting to a new position with an indolent movement that swelled the muscles under his flannel shirt until the fabric strained. His glance at his companion was mildly indulgent.

"Of course not. But it will be, next time; that is, if you do not die of pneumonia after taking this drive with your coat wide open. Appreciation will grow on you. What do you think of that girl in gray, in the limousine? Pretty? I used to go to school with her, Michael; dancing school."

The Slavic brown eyes became humorous.

"Fact," Adriance met the incredulity. "And now she doesn't recognize me; and neither of us cares."

The uplifted hand of another traffic officer halted the long lines of vehicles. Three deep from the curb on either side, so that the street was solidly filled, automobiles, carriages, green and yellow busses and ornate delivery-cars stopped in a close, orderly ma.s.s. Adriance's truck was next to the sidewalk, in obedience to the rule for slow-moving vehicles. As his laughing voice answered Mike, his tone raised to carry across the roar of sound about them, a woman who had emerged from one of the shops stopped abruptly. Her glance quested along the rows, to rest upon Adriance with eager attention. A moment later, the man started at the sound of his own name, spoken beside him.

"How do you do, Tony. And aren't you--rather out of place?"

Momentarily dumb, he looked down into the large, cool eyes of Lucille Masterson. She did not smile, but faced his regard with a composure that made his embarra.s.sment a fault. Against the white fur of her stole was fastened a knot of pink-and-white sweet peas; beside them her face showed as softly tinted, and artificially posed, as the flowers. Beside the wheel of the huge truck, she appeared smaller and more fragile than Adriance remembered her. Without the slightest cause he felt himself a culprit surprised by her. He had all the sensations of a deserter confronted with the heartlessly abandoned.

"Aren't you going to speak to me?" she queried, when he remained voiceless. "I have missed you, Tony."

He hastily aroused himself.

"Of course! I mean--you are very kind. I--we have been out of town."

Feeling the utter idiocy into which he was stumbling, he checked himself. The current of traffic was flowing on once more, leaving his machine stranded against the curb; made fast, as it were, by the white-gloved hand Mrs. Masterson had laid upon the wheel.

Without heeding his incoherence, she looked at a tiny watch on her wrist, half-hidden by her wide, furred sleeve. With her movement a drift of fragrance was set afloat on the thick, city air.

"I want you to take me to tea," she announced, with her accustomed imperativeness. "I have things to say to you. Let your man take your car home."

In spite of his exasperation, Adriance laughed. He was aware of the staring admiration which held the big man beside him intent upon the beautiful woman; he had heard the greedy intake of breath with which the other absorbed the perfume shaken from her daintiness, and could guess the effect of _Essence Enivrante_ upon untutored nostrils. But for all that, he could not imagine Russian Mike obeying the order proposed.