Here are the three of us--Evelyn, Sophie and I--all at the age of Eve; and all enduring such a period of gloom that I feel sure if the original Eve had been half as badly bored she would never have waited for a pretty snake to come along and amuse her--she would have started up a flirtation with a _grub-worm_!

Richard is still away and I have not even had a line from him. Neither has any one else on the place, of course, but his name appeared in the society columns of the _Times_ the day after Thanksgiving. He had attended the football game that afternoon with Major Blake's party, the paper stated--and alas! I was in no position to dispute the statement.

Now if there is _one_ thing a girl hates worse than having her rat show in the presence of her beloved it is to have that beloved's name appear in a society column when her own is not in the same line!

"Why the Blakes?" I kept wondering uneasily, as I read over the hateful paragraph again and again; and I tried to fight down the fierce feeling of jealousy which took possession of me. "Why couldn't he have gone to the foot-ball game with some one else--or why couldn't he have come home?"

I found upon this occasion that jealousy is a pa.s.sion which makes me physically ill, and I thought quickly of how tormented Richard must be by his jealous disposition. I wondered if he had ever felt the quick desire to strangle Alfred Morgan that I now caught myself feeling to annihilate the entire Blake faction. They had no right to make Richard leave home upon such an occasion as this; or they should have finished their hateful business and sent him on back home for Thanksgiving.

They certainly had no right to take him off with them to a foot-ball game for all the world to see--and have his name with theirs in the paper next morning.

"Major Blake had with him in his car, besides Mrs. Blake, Miss Berenice Blake, who returned last week from Denver, and Mr. Richard Chalmers."

I knew the horrid words by heart, yet I read them over and over. And even this was not the worst. On the front page of the _Times_ was a cartoon representing Major Blake seated beside a little creek, angling persistently for a fish in midstream--a fish with Richard's handsome head and "Chalmers" printed in big letters across the side. The bait was a bag of gold and a handful of glory; and beneath it was written "Little fishie in the brook, can daddy catch him with a hook?"

Such a cartoon in Rufe's paper struck me as being pregnant with meaning. What did it portend? Why did Richard leave home at this time to spend Thanksgiving with old man Blake if it did not mean that he was entangled with him? How deeply entangled--and for what? Major Blake had some time ago given the anti-liquor forces to understand that they had not money enough for their campaign to make a union with them interesting to him. But the Appleton followers had been equally unsuccessful in trying to gain his support. _Could_ it be that he and Richard intended forming a separate faction where his own personal popularity should cut a tremendous figure in gaining for him what he wanted, and he could have the backing of Richard's friends among the temperance forces? But where would Richard come in then? Why should old man Blake give all the biggest portion of the plum to Richard, when he had never been governor himself?

I thought over the matter and _thought_--until I grew dizzy with the problem, yet I never found anything that could serve even as a half-way solution. But enough of my own grievances.

As I have said, Sophie and Evelyn are both miserable, too, though in entirely different ways. Evelyn is half ill, with a constantly threatening pain in her right side--a trouble which she has had for several years--and Sophie, poor girl, has stayed in her room most of the time because she is so disappointed in the way Mr. Maxwell has acted since he learned that she is a working-woman. Horrid cad! He has watched Sophie every minute she has been in his presence since that night, looking as if he were a detective and suspected her of carrying concealed weapons about her. Yet all the time there is a look of dumb misery in his eyes--sorrow and _incredulity_.

He has several times tried to get me off alone where he could talk to me of the occurrence Thanksgiving night, but I have been careful to avoid him, for I am as much disappointed in him as Sophie is. Each of them has tried to leave, but Mrs. Chalmers has insisted upon their not doing so. She is so upset over Evelyn that she needs Sophie's skilled advice in nursing, although no open acknowledgment of the matter has been made. And she has insisted that Mr. Maxwell remain at least until Richard returns.

Meanwhile she has tried to get a message through to Richard in the city, but she has been so far unable to find him. Altogether it is rather a miserable household.

Another day; and it started so well and ended so queerly that I am not going to try to sleep for hours yet--until I have written the whole thing out so I can read it over and see whether or not it really happened, for I find it so hard to believe.

To begin at the beginning, Richard called up from the city this morning and explained to his mother that he had been on a business trip down in the country--far away from a telephone station, he said, and so he had not been able to communicate with her. He asked her to call me to the telephone and we had as satisfying a little talk as people in our position ever have over wires. He would be down home on the first train in the morning, he told me, and he insisted that I tell him something he might have the pleasure of bringing me.

"Oh, I'll excuse the olive branch," I replied in answer to this question, "for I'll be so glad to see you."

Glad to see him? Ah yes, so glad! And in the joy of the thought I forgot all about being jealous of the Blakes. With this restoration of happiness the day naturally pa.s.sed more quickly to me, and I found myself wondering why Evelyn didn't get over that hurting in her side, and why Mrs. Chalmers still looked so anxious and why Sophie and Mr.

Maxwell continued to eye each other so reproachfully when the one thought the other was not looking. Richard was coming home in the morning! Surely all would be well then!

Dinner was a dismal affair, for Evelyn was not any better--was not so well, Mrs. Chalmers said, with a look of great anxiety, although the doctor had not said positively what the trouble was. As soon as we had left the table Sophie followed Mrs. Chalmers to Evelyn's room, thus leaving Mr. Maxwell to a tete-a-tete evening with me.

There was a brilliant fire in the library and we both were attracted toward its cheer as we crossed the hall. He lit a cigarette and sat staring moodily at the little clouds of smoke which he puffed into the air. Clearly he was not going to thrust conversation upon me. To make sure that he should have no encouragement to do so I began looking around vaguely for something to read. There was a pile of fresh papers which had come by the night's train lying folded on the table, but I have had little appet.i.te for newspapers since the day of the fishy cartoon. I should not read any more of the horrid tales about him, but he should tell me all that there was to tell and I would believe him. But not a question did I expect to ask. His confidence should be entirely voluntary or not given at all.

No newspapers for me then this night; and I glanced around the room for something else. Something forbidding-looking and very deep I decided on as being best to keep Mr. Maxwell's conversational powers in abeyance. I went to one of the book-shelves which lined the walls.

Running my hand along a line of Huxley's works I came to _Science and the Christian Tradition_ and promptly decided that this was the very volume I needed to impress Mr. Maxwell that I was reading something very profound and needed all my wits about me.

Returning to my chair by the fire I sat down and opened my book, but I was in nowise disappointed by finding that the leaves had never been cut. There was a heavy pearl-and-silver paper-cutter lying on the table near by, but I did not take the trouble to reach for it. What did I care for a lot of prehistoric teeth and toe-nails dug up and brought forward to prove that before "Adam delved and Eve span" the baboon was a gentleman?

Mr. Maxwell continued to stare into the fire, and I do not believe he ever glanced at the impressive three-quarters morocco binding I was holding up so persistently for him to see. After half-an-hour had been thus profitlessly spent I grew tired and decided that I would go to my room and go to bed. Morning would come the more quickly this way.

As I started to cross the room to replace the book in its niche I heard Mrs. Chalmers going up the steps again--it seemed to me fully fifty times that evening she had made pilgrimages up and down those stairs on her way to and from the invalid's room.

"Evelyn must be worse," I said aloud before I remembered that I was trying _not_ to start conversation.

"Possibly so," he answered politely.

"I believe I'll go now and see if I can do anything to help Mrs.

Chalmers; she must be worn out."

I put the Huxley back where he belonged and had turned again to wish Mr. Maxwell good night, when I found that he had at last unfastened his eyes from the bright fire and was looking toward me appealingly.

"Miss Fielding," he began with an unwonted timidity.

I had already opened the door to leave the room, but I came back a few steps, leaving the door wide open; and as I did so I heard, for the fifty-first time, the sound of Mrs. Chalmers' footfalls upon the stairs. She was coming down this time.

"Yes?" I said coldly in the direction of Mr. Maxwell.

"Miss Fielding, I am going away in the morning," he said rather awkwardly, as he pushed up a chair for me again, but I did not sit down. I leaned over a little and rested my elbows against its high leather back. He stood upon the hearth-rug, and even the shaded lights of the room brought out the troubled lines on his face. "I am going away on the same train that brings Chalmers home," he repeated.

"Yes."

"And I was anxious to talk with you a little before I go," he went on with considerable hesitation. My att.i.tude was far from being encouraging. "You seem to be on friendly terms with her still--with Sophie, I mean."

"I _am_ on friendly terms," I said rather pointedly. "I am fortunately not the kind of person who indulges in _seeming_ friendship."

"Oh, I say, Miss Fielding, don't rub it in on a fellow! Don't you see that I have been half crazy ever since I found it out? Surely you don't think that the matter hasn't made me feel worse cut up than anything that ever happened to me before! A man doesn't get over a shock like _that_!"

"Shock?"

"Certainly shock," he repeated earnestly. "If she had told me she is a horse-thief I couldn't have felt worse. Of course a man could keep up a sort of pitying friendliness after such an acknowledgment as that, but--I had intended asking her that night to marry me."

He looked at me as if he might be beseeching me to speak a word of comfort to him, but I stood there and said nothing.

"Miss Fielding, surely you understand that I couldn't marry a woman who, by her own acknowledgment, is a--a dope-fiend."

"Dope-fiend!" I gave a little shriek.

He looked at me a moment as if he thought I had lost my mind, then we were both startled by the abrupt entrance of Mrs. Chalmers at the door which I had a few minutes before left open. She had evidently heard my horrified exclamation and come in to investigate. She looked from one to the other of us inquiringly, and there was no use trying to hide the situation from her.

"Miss Fielding and I were talking about Sophie, Mrs. Chalmers," Mr.

Maxwell explained after a moment of painful silence. "She acknowledged to us, Miss Fielding and me, the other night the--the truth about this unhappy condition."

"The truth?" Mrs. Chalmers' tone was questioning, although I knew that she must have heard my startled cry as I repeated the hideous word he had used a moment before.

"It was the night that we stayed away from the ball--we three--and we found the evidence in her bag. She acknowledged that it was true. I had expected to ask her to marry me that night--but she is a drug-fiend."

Mrs. Chalmers started, but she did not speak. She made no effort to correct him.

"So of course I am leaving in the morning. I should have gone long ago, but--"

He looked at Richard's mother, who stood in the center of the room, directly beneath the chandelier. The light shone down on her soft white hair and changed it into a veritable crown of glory. She moved her crown slightly as she nodded an a.s.sent to his suggestion of leaving in the morning, but she did not lift a finger to detain him, nor to set him right in regard to Sophie. Could it be that her desire to get Evelyn married off to him was going to carry her to such lengths as this? It seemed so; and I caught myself wondering quickly if in so doing she might be carrying out a command of Richard's.

Likely he was very positive in bidding her keep Sophie's secret, or in impressing it upon her that Evelyn ought to be suitably married. In either case she would be mortally afraid to speak--she would _not_ speak. Then quickly upon the heels of this came the knowledge that if she did not speak it was my place to do so, for I knew the truth as well as she did--but it might make Richard angry! It would be sure to if he had given commands that the secret should be kept! I might even lose him--