"Throw off your hat, Malise," suggested Molly. "Celeste, take her parasol from that chair. There is so much to hear about. I asked la femme de charge, when she was in this morning, if she'd ever heard of the Blairs. Everybody used to know everything about everybody when I was here before and the servants most of all, and, mon Dieu, she knew all about them. 'Miss Blair is married,' she told me. 'I know that,'

said I, for you'd mentioned that much in your letter, Malise. 'She ran off to get married,' said she. 'Oh, hush,' I told her."

She had retained her very colloquialisms, this Molly, too unconscious and too indolent to know she had them, probably, or to care.

"So she told me all about it, how tall, cold, proper Harriet had run off from Blair proprieties and Austen, to marry a Southerner and a Catholic! It's as if the virgin in marble had stepped down and done it!"

Molly was amused. It narrowed her eyes till they laughed through the lashes.

"I never heard anything so funny in my life, Malise, as--as Harriet eloping. What is it Jean Garnier would quote from his adored Shakespeare about Diana and her icicles? Make me stop! It hurts me--to laugh. Oh-o-h, mammy--G.o.d, mammy!"

The appeal died in a little choke, and the morsel of handkerchief pressed to her mouth showed a spot of crimson, but Celeste was already there, putting Alexina aside. "You can ring fo' lil' ice--yonder," she told the girl jealously. "Then, efen I were lil' missy, I'd go in there--that one is yo' room--an' I'd shet my do'h. When it's over with, p't.i.te won't want fo' you to have been in heah."

But pushed into the adjoining room and with the door shut between, Malise still could hear. She did not want to hear; she tried not to hear. She was awed and frightened.

"Am I going to die this time, Celeste? I'm afraid, mammy; my hands are cold. Don't rub them with the rings on, you fool; you hurt. No, no; don't go away, mammy! mammy! I couldn't sleep last night; that's why I'm--I'm tired. The night was so long and I was afraid. I see Jean when I try to sleep. I hear him cough. Give me something to make me sleep--oh, mammy, give it to me."

The girl in the next room stood gazing out the window over the roofs and chimney stacks at the yellow tide of the river sweeping down towards the pier bridge spanning it, but she was not seeing it. She was filled with pity and terror.

It grew quieter in the next room, then still, then the door between opened and closed. It was Celeste, outwardly unmoved and taciturn.

"P't.i.te's gone to sleep. Shall I help lil' missy unpack her things?"

CHAPTER SEVEN

Summer in a half-grown Southern city is full of charm; pretty girls in muslin dresses stroll the shopping streets and stop on the sidewalks to chat with each other and with callow youths; picnic parties board the street cars, and in the evenings sounds of music and dancing float out from open doors and windows along the residence streets.

Alexina, chaperoned by Harriet Blair, would have found herself in these things, yet never quite of them.

"Malise," Molly said quite earnestly, a day or so after her coming, "don't you think it's stuffy here?"

It was stuffy; hotel rooms in summer are apt to be; Alexina felt as apologetic as if Molly were the one who had given up a s.p.a.cious, comfortable home to come and live in rooms for her. "I'm sorry," she said. She had explained the necessity for it before.

"I thought you'd gotten the bank to take charge of your affairs,"

Molly reminded her; "so why do we have to stay?"

"I have, but it's a different thing, very, from having Uncle Austen, personally--"

She stopped; it might seem to be reminding Molly that she had caused the break with Austen Blair.

But Molly never took disagreeable things personally. She threw her arms back of her head. "Can't you propose something to do?" she entreated.

"We might go round to the stores," suggested Alexina doubtfully. She hated stores herself.

Molly brightened. "I need some summer things."

Alexina agreed, yet she wondered. Seven trunks can disgorge a good many clothes; "mere debris from the wreckage of things," Molly explained, though they didn't look it. Yet in a way Alexina understood. It wasn't the actual things Molly wanted; it was the diversion, and so at the suggestion Molly cheered up. "You look pretty in summer clothes, Malise," she stated with graciousness, as they started. On the way she went in and bought chocolates; not that she wanted them either--it was too hot for candy, she said--but one must be doing something.

Coming out the door they met Georgy, who promptly stopped. He was a beautiful youngster, with a buoyant and splendid heartiness, and now he was flushing ruddily with pleasure up to his yellow hair.

Alexina blushed, too; she hardly knew why, except that he did, and told his name to Molly, who regarded him with smiling eyes and gave him her hand, whereupon he blushed still more and then suggested that he go along with them.

A group of young matrons and their daughters stood at the door of the shop to which they were bound, chatting in easy, warm weather fashion.

Alexina knew them slightly but Georgy knew them well, and they were greeted with salutations and laughter.

Molly smiled, too, an interested smile that brightened as she was introduced, and she remembered having known the mother of this one when she, Molly, had lived in Louisville before, and the husband of another one, and all the while she was letting her eyes smile from one to the other of the group, who meanwhile were telling Georgy that they were planning a dance.

Dance? Molly's eyes grew inquiringly eager. Favors were they speaking of? She had a trunk full of Parisian knick-knacks, she told them.

"Come around to the hotel," she suggested, "all of you: why not now?"

And so it was that the stream of things gayest caught Molly and Molly's daughter into its swirl. The banks along the way were flowery, the sky was blue, and Alexina began to find the waters of dalliance sweet. Hitherto girlish groups had seemed to make themselves up and leave her out, and there always had been a disconcerting lack of things to talk about in dressing-rooms and strictly feminine a.s.semblies. Now she found herself in the planning and the whirl, happy as any.

There was exhilaration, too, in this sudden realization of what an income meant, which she had not had much opportunity of learning before, and these days she laughed out of very exuberance and sudden joy in living.

"It seems as if I didn't really know you, sometimes," said the literal Georgy, out calling with her one evening. "It makes you awful pretty, you know, to be jolly this way," which was meant to be more complimentary than it sounded.

They were stepping up on the porch of the house to which they were bound. Alexina laughed and caught a handful of rose petals from a blossoming vine clambering the post and cast them on Georgy.

There were other swains than Georgy these days, too, and not all of them were youths, either, not that it mattered in the least who they were; for in the beginning it is the homage, not the individual, that counts.

She hung over the offerings which came to her from them with a rapture which was more than any mere joy; it was relief. Suppose such things had been denied her? There are maidens, worthy maidens, who never know them, and so Alexina blushed divinely with relief. Roses to her!

And Molly, watching, would grow peevish--not over the flowers; Molly was too sure of her own charm for that. Alexina really did not know what it was about, and she did not believe Molly quite knew herself.

There was a lazy-eyed personage the young people called Mr. Allie.

Their mothers had called him Mr. Randall, but then he had been the contemporary of the mothers.

No daughter of these bygone belles was secure in her place to-day until the seal of Mr. Allie's half-serious, half-lazy approval was upon her, or so the mothers and the daughters felt. Mr. Allie was perennial, indolently handsome, an idler in the gay little world, yet somehow one believed he could have gone at life in earnest had there been need.

He, too, sent roses to Alexina, and flowers from him meant something subtly flattering, and he came strolling around at places and sat down by her, saying pretty things to make her blush, apparently to watch her doing it. Not that she minded as much as she worried, because she felt she ought to mind, and in her heart she knew she didn't really.

She had gone out with him half a dozen times perhaps, when, one evening at a dance, Mr. Allie, seeking, found her at the far end of a veranda where the side steps went down to the gravel. She and Georgy were sitting there together. Georgy was telling her of his aspirations and, in pa.s.sing, dwelling on the lack of any civic spirit in the town, the inference seeming to be that Georgy, modest as he was, some day himself meant to supply it.

Mr. Allie told Georgy that a waiting damsel was expecting him, then took Georgy's place. He did not speak for a while, and Alexina never was talkative.

"Would you rather go in and dance?" at last he asked.

"Why," said Alexina; "no." Which was not quite true for she loved to dance these days. She used to be afraid she was not going to have a successive partner and it marred the full enjoyment of the one she had, but now--

Still, any one would be flattered to have Mr. Allie asking, so she said no.

"Then we'll stay," he said; which was not brilliant, to be sure, but it was the way in which Mr. Allie said things which made them seem pregnant of many meanings.

After that neither of them spoke, yet Alexina's pulses began to beat.

The big side yard upon which the steps descended was flooded with moonlight, and a mockingbird was sending forth a trial note or two.