She knew that she had answered well when he urged:

"Very well, then. If you will give such very little nibbles of your time, you must give me more of them. Will you come out again--to the theater--off in the motor--anywhere?"

Lena could hardly speak, but she smiled up her thanks.

"Oh, Mr. Percival!" she said.

As he walked away after seeing her home, he felt himself irritated with the other women, the women to whom ease and pleasure are a matter of course.

So they fell into the way of making little expeditions together, and d.i.c.k no longer joked with Ellery about this delectable morsel of pinkness, but kept his growing intimacy to himself. This dell by the way, into which he had strayed by accident, was becoming more fascinating than the crammed highway with its buzzing life.

July and August and September pa.s.sed and, in spite of her reserve, d.i.c.k felt that he was coming to know little Lena well. He had told her all about himself, his mother, his three-cornered intimacy with Norris and Madeline, his plans for his own future, and to all she listened, sometimes with a dreamy far-off look in the big eyes, sometimes with a swift smile of sympathy, in spite of the fact that he and his point of view were often puzzling to her. And he brought dainties and flowers to the dingy room.

Lena, on her side, thoroughly enjoyed some phases of her acquaintance with Mr. Percival. Apart from all other considerations, it was a real pleasure to prove herself the actress she knew she was. She pretended, when she was with him, that she was a wholly different kind of person.

It was fun to do it well and convincingly and deliberately. It was exhilarating.

But deeper, far deeper than her histrionic satisfaction lay the hope that d.i.c.k Percival might be the key to some other kind of life than that she led; and as the months went by, this hidden intimacy, delicious to him because of its very remoteness, began to irritate her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he playing with her? Privately she found Prince Charming, unless he meant something more than a half-hour now and again, something of a bore. Of what pleasure could it be to her that he was rich and happy and full of plans and in touch with all that was delightful, if he gave none of this to her?

One evening she seemed listless as she sat enduring an account of a garden party he had been to the day before. He had thought it might amuse her, but it evidently didn't.

"I'm always telling you of my affairs," he said half querulously. "Why don't you give me your experiences?"

"There's nothing to tell," she said dully. "You've had so many interesting things happen, and you expect ever so many more lovely things to come, but I've always been pinched, and I shall have to keep on pinching for ever, I guess."

"Nonsense!" d.i.c.k answered impulsively. "The future is sure to bring you better things."

She looked down a moment, and d.i.c.k had an impression that she was holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that seemed to hold him at arm's length.

"I'm quite alone with the people I have to live among," she said. "I'm not like them, and I don't care for them."

"Am I one of your kind?" d.i.c.k asked. He reviled himself the next moment for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though her color heightened a little as she answered:

"Oh, you! There's only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis in my desert. I'm very grateful for you, but--"

Lena had said such things before. d.i.c.k began to revolve plans for a larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be happy,--for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.

To d.i.c.k's friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with d.i.c.k more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his desertion, spent the quiet afternoons _a deux_ with Madeline.

It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over d.i.c.k.

At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling d.i.c.k of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a duplicate--in gilt--of the alderman's walk and swagger. He talked politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals red-handed and turning them out.

Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in d.i.c.k himself or in his att.i.tude toward her. It was like her to be above suspicions or small jealousies.

So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days.

Winter, after a feint, slunk into hiding again, and the only result of his excursion was a more splendid red on the maples, a more glowing russet on the oaks. Indian summer reigned in his stead, flinging broadcast her gorgeous colors and her melting mellowness. That men might not surfeit of her sweets, she tempered her daytime prodigality of heat by nights of frost. People were coming back to town, a few, very few, in velvet gowns, but mostly in rags and anxious about their autumn wardrobes; and yet these were days to make one long, as one does in spring, for the smell of the good brown earth and the sniff of untainted country air. The atmosphere was full of glowing warmth that penetrated to the heart and made every face on the street reflect some of its delight; for autumn with her thousand charms and witcheries was proving that she died, not from gray old age, but in the fullness of her prime.

Madeline Elton, therefore, wished herself back again with the fallen maple leaves and the pines that held their own; and Mrs. Lenox was fitting temptation to desire as the two hobn.o.bbed over cups of tea in easy friendliness. When d.i.c.k Percival appeared, Mrs. Lenox saw the way to make her bait irresistible.

"d.i.c.k," she cried, "just the man! Don't you pine for sunshine in your nostrils instead of city smoke? Doesn't the thought of winter coming, cold and long, make you appreciate these last heavenly gleams? Do you remember what a delicious week you and Mr. Norris and Madeline spent with me a year ago?"

"Yes, to everything," said d.i.c.k. "All of which means--what? No cream, please, Madeline."

"All of which means," answered the lady, "that Mr. Lenox and I are wise in our generation and do not fly to the city when the first birds go south; that I want Madeline to come and pay me a visit; that, as a kind of sugar-plum, a chromo, if you please, to induce her to buy my wares, I propose that you and Mr. Norris should join us on the Sunday of next week. What do you say?"

"May the Lord prosper you, and I'll do my part as an attraction," d.i.c.k replied heartily. "But I choose to be a sugar-plum rather than a chromo, especially if Madeline is going to eat me."

"I didn't need any additional inducement, Mrs. Lenox," said Madeline.

"Yourselves and all out-doors are surely sufficient. It will be good to get away from the grime. Now what bee have you in your bonnet, d.i.c.k?"

For a new look had come into his face as she spoke.

Percival had been glancing around the cheerful comfortable room whose very books and pictures suggested peace of mind. It seemed to him that he looked with Lena's longing eyes rather than with his own, familiar with these surroundings. He was thinking how little his small courtesies counted, and how much these women could do if they chose. Why shouldn't he be bold? Madeline and Mrs. Lenox were simple-hearted enough to take his plea at its true value, and not misunderstand his motives. They would be interested in Lena in exactly the same way he was. He smiled at Madeline's serenely inquiring face.

"Well, d.i.c.k?" she asked again.

"I was wondering whether I dared to suggest a little act of human kindliness to you two. You women are so much more ready to do such things than men are, but we are more apt to run up against the cases where it is needed. There's a pathetic little girl doing some hack work for the _Star_. Norris knows her. She's just one of those delicate creatures that ought to live in the sheltered corner of a garden, and she's out on a bleak prairie. She's about as much like the people she has to a.s.sociate with as an old-fashioned single rose is like a cabbage.

Even her mother, who is the only relative she has, is nothing but a fretful porcupine of a woman. I've been to see them a few times and the situation seems to me almost intolerable. If ever a girl needed a friend or two, it's she--not for charity, you understand, but just for real contact with people of her own kind. Now a man's not much use in such circ.u.mstances, is he? But naturally I think you are about the best kind of a friend in the world, so I came up this afternoon partly to see if you wouldn't give her a hand."

"It sounds as though it might be more of a pleasure than a painful duty."

"So it would. You'd take to her, I know," the young man went on eagerly.

Mrs. Lenox watched him in somewhat irritated amus.e.m.e.nt. "She hasn't your brains, of course, Madeline, but she has such charm, such simplicity and freshness, that you can't help liking her. And she grubs away at perfectly uncongenial work, and lives with this fusty old mother in a fusty little lodging-house. It makes me sick to think of such daily crucifixion. I've no business to say it, I know; but when you spoke about a week at the lake, I couldn't help thinking what such a thing would mean to her. She'd think herself in Paradise."

"I suppose, d.i.c.k, that this is your adroit and tactful way of suggesting that I should ask her," Mrs. Lenox said, laughing.

And Madeline, who, if d.i.c.k had proposed that Mrs. Lenox should turn her very charming summer home into an orphan asylum, would have considered that the proposition, as coming from him, was ent.i.tled to consideration, put in:

"I think it would be a lovely thing to do, Vera."

"And we should probably let ourselves in for a frightful bore."

"And you might entertain an angel unawares," said d.i.c.k.

Mrs. Lenox knit her brows and meditated. She didn't quite like d.i.c.k's championship of this unknown girl, nor did she trust to his judgment; but, like a wise woman, she wanted to know what was the thing that had attracted him, and was big enough in heart to be willing to do a good turn wherever she could.

"This is the oracle of the Pythia," she said at last. "We will not commit ourselves to anything at the behest of Richard Percival. On my way to the station, now, in fact, Madeline and I will go to see this rose among cabbages. We will introduce ourselves as your friends, d.i.c.k.

If we think you are a mere deluded male thing, there the matter ends. If we, too, are carried away by enthusiasm, we will invite her on the spur of the moment, and Mr. Lenox, who, like most married men, is a connoisseur in pretty girls, can talk to her. Will this suit you, d.i.c.k?"

"Excellently," said d.i.c.k, "I know the result."

"Then you'll come next Sat.u.r.day? Madeline is coming day after to-morrow and I'll write to Mr. Norris. Heaven send these days of sun continue.

Now if we are to pay this call, and I am to catch my train, we must be off."

Miss Quincy, having quarreled with her mother over her extravagance in buying a feather boa with the proceeds of her last small check, was seated by the window, industriously concocting a new hat. The Swedish "girl", whose unfortunate fate it was to minister to the wants of Mrs.

Olberg's lodgers, gave a kind of defiant pound on the door, opened it and thrust in a disheveled blond head, followed by a hand puckered from the dish-water.

"Haar's cards, Miss Quincy," she said, "Dar's twa ladies down staars."

She dropped the cards on the floor and disappeared. Lena, in great curiosity, picked them up and read aloud: