"Thomas, you said she was Stanley Sinclair's wife."

"Well, she is, isn't she? Why, you don't mean--"

He interrupted himself, his look changing. "What kind of a man d'ye think I am, Persis Dale?" he challenged her angrily. "If you've known me all your life and think I'm the sort to be carrying on with other men's wives--well, I guess I'd better be going."

He got to his feet and then sank helplessly into a chair. He had never seen Persis cry before. He had not realized that she could cry. Yet without doubt those were tears upon her cheeks.

But if crying, Persis was smiling, too. His heart fluttered, and performed some extraordinary gymnastic feat, when she held out her hand.

"Thomas, I was in the wrong, I'll own it. I never favored jumping at conclusions and less than ever now. Maybe--maybe if I hadn't thought so much of you, I'd have been slower to think evil."

He did not trouble himself with the feminine lack of logic indicated in her closing words. He had clasped her hand in both of his and was holding it last, as if he never meant to let it go.

"Persis--Persis, you weren't fair to me in that, but I don't lay any claim to being all I'd ought to be. There's no end of things you'd have to forgive. I don't know as I've ever told you about the time Ed Collins and I--"

A movement on the part of Persis' disengaged hand checked his confession.

"Thomas," she protested while she smiled, "if you own up to any more things, I declare I believe I'll have to even up by telling you how old I am. And that's one thing a woman don't like to mention, except, of course, to her husband."

Two days later Diantha Sinclair was married at eight o'clock in the evening. The church was crowded. Wide-eyed girls took in every detail and dreamed of acting the star role on a similar happy occasion.

Complacent matrons, in their Sunday best, exchanged voluble comments.

The wedding party was a trifle late, and the guests were all early which gave opportunity for soul-satisfying gossip.

"Ain't those flowers lovely! I never saw anything to beat 'em except maybe, at Elder Larkins' funeral. They say Persis Dale went over to the Lakeview florist's in that car of hers and brought back flowers enough to fill a wash tub."

"Mis' West looks real nice in that new black silk. There's nothing like black for toning down a fat woman."

"There's Eddie Ryan in a dress-suit. Wonder if it's his'n or just borrowed. It hangs kind of baggy. Shouldn't wonder if his cousin up to Boston let him take his."

Annabel Sinclair's slight girlish figure was the center of interest until the entrance of the bridal party. She must have guessed how the tongues were wagging but her color did not fluctuate under the ordeal.

At last Annabel had come to the point of a.s.sisting nature. The carmine had been applied with artistic restraint, and she had never looked lovelier, but her happiness in her beauty had vanished. To retain the admiration which was the breath in her nostrils, she must henceforth resort to artifice, covering up and hiding what would sooner or later be revealed in spite of her. She was not thinking of Diantha as she sat looking straight before her but only of her own hard fate.

"Annabel Sinclair might be the bride herself," remarked one kindly matron on the other side of the church. "Beats all how she keeps her looks."

"Ain't that a handsome dress, though," sighed her companion. "She had it made in the city. But Persis Dale made Diantha's dress, and somebody who saw it, told me it was the handsomest thing she ever clapped her eyes on. Persis Dale sets everything by that girl."

If the occupants of the pews enjoyed the long wait, not so Thad West.

Pale and perspiring, he looked more like a patient about to be conveyed to an operating table, than a bridegroom on the threshold of his happiness.

"What do you s'pose is wrong, Scotty?" He clutched the arm of the friend selected to stand by him in this ordeal. "It's way past time."

"Oh, well, girls are always late," returned Scotty with soothing intent. Thad thought wrathfully that it was all very well for him to take that tone. He wasn't going to be married, hang it.

"Ring all right, Scotty?"

"Sure thing." But in spite of the prompt a.s.surance the best man's hand went to his waistcoat pocket and fumbled a long nervous minute while the perspiration trickled down Thad's spine. And then young Scott felt in the other pocket and breathed a sigh of relief. "Here 'tis."

"You want to keep better track of your dates than that," exclaimed Thad angrily. "You'll queer everything if you go feeling around in all your pockets when he's ready for the ring." His voice took on a tone of appeal. "Haven't you got an extra handkerchief, Scotty? If I keep on at this rate, my collar--"

"You just keep quiet and I'll mop you up a bit," returned the obliging Scotty, but his friendly ministrations were interrupted by a blood-curdling whisper from the bridegroom.

"_My G.o.d, here they come._"

There was no doubt about it. The little organ was wheezing out the wedding march as if it meant to be equal to the occasion if this proved its swan-song. The ushers were advancing up the aisle two by two.

With drooping heads and measured steps, the bridesmaids followed, and then came Diantha on her father's arm. The little flutter that went over the waiting a.s.sembly was chiefly an involuntary tribute to her girlish grace and beauty, though the dress, too, came in for its share.

"Might have been bought in Paris for all anybody could tell," was the a.s.surance pa.s.sed from lip to lip. Clematis was proud of that wedding dress.

Stanley Sinclair, very straight and handsome as he moved up the aisle, looked down on the bright head near his shoulder and remembered that other girl who twenty years before had come up the church aisle to meet him at the altar. He had learned long before to sneer at his own lost illusions, but singularly enough, never until this moment had it occurred to him to wonder what her dreams might have been that far-away June day. To his discomfiture the query brought a pang, and he had thought himself beyond such weakness. The petrified heart has a certain advantage over that of flesh, though possibly the ache which proves it human is a ground for felicitation.

Ten minutes later Thad was wondering what he had been afraid of. Why, it was nothing. He could hardly believe that a matter so momentous could be disposed of in so few minutes. And yet it was true, and Diantha's little hand was in his, to have and to hold till death did them part.

Diantha's composure throughout the ceremony had suggested that being married was an every-day matter to a person of her wide experience.

Her poise and self-possession were the occasion of wondering comment among the many who were hardly able to realize even now that she had really grown up. It was not till the reception, when Persis with Thomas following bashfully in her wake came up lo proffer her good wishes, that Diantha relapsed into youthfulness. She flung her arms about her old friend's neck and kissed her tumultuously.

"Darling Miss Persis, how perfectly lovely you look! Did you get that beautiful dress just for my wedding?"

The composition of Persis' reply apparently took a little time. She did not speak for a minute.

"Yes, I made it for your wedding," she returned at length. "But I used it for my own, too. Thomas and I slipped over to the minister's after supper and got married. So we'll both wish each other joy, my dearie."

It was a shock of course, but Clematis was getting used to that where Persis was concerned. And Mrs. Hornblower voiced the feeling of more than herself when she commented on the affair at the next meeting of the Woman's Club. Persis was not present. She and Thomas had gone on a wedding trip to the seash.o.r.e, and taken all the children.

"It's a kind of back-handed way of getting a family," said Mrs.

Hornblower. "Picking up one child here and another there, and then winding up with a husband. But I must say it'll take a load off my mind to see a man at the head of Persis Dale's pew."

CHAPTER XXIV

FAIR PLAY

The late October sunshine poured its prodigal gold into the little room of which Annabel Sinclair was the sole occupant, and as its single door and window were both closed, the resulting temperature was suggestive of mid-July. The room itself was plain and bare. The cottage Thad West had purchased the year following his marriage was needlessly s.p.a.cious for the immediate requirements of the two young people and for that reason, several of the rooms had been left unfurnished or nearly so, until time should justify Thad's foresight. As a rule Annabel had a feline instinct for comfort, selecting the easiest chair and the pleasantest outlook almost unconsciously. To-day her discomfort and the convent-like austerity of her surroundings failed to impress her.

She was hardly aware of them.

She was not in her daughter's home of her own volition that October morning. She had yielded as the most self-willed must on occasion to the a.s.sumption of her little world that this was the place where she would wish to be. But the first glimpse of Diantha had convinced her that her shrinking recoil had been well-grounded. Diantha, deadly pale and yet with little flickering, unsteady smiles, Diantha, quiet and self-possessed, with nothing but those white cheeks to show how flesh and spirit shrank from the approaching ordeal, was terrifyingly a stranger. But that she was a woman there could be no doubt. And this woman, soon to be a mother, was her child.

The little, bare, remote room seemed a refuge. Annabel closed the door and would have locked it, but the key was missing. She sank into the single chair, her face storm-swept, transformed by her emotion almost beyond recognition. The natural a.s.sumption would have been that she was enduring vicariously the suffering of her daughter, bearing for the second time the pangs that had given Diantha life. As a matter of fact, Diantha's pain and peril were remote from her mood. Her mind had room for one thought: "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy!"

As she stared before her, hand gripping hand, her bloodless lips moving inarticulately, she saw the monstrous folly of her self-deception. She had played at youth, listened to the love-making of undeveloped boys whose mother she might have been, and made herself believe that she could cheat Time. And Time, too, had had his fun. For the moment it almost seemed to her that her girlish prettiness had been his merciless concession to add to the spirit of the game, as a cat lets a mouse run with a sense of recovered freedom, only to pounce again.

And now she was to be a grandmother. She made a futile effort to face the thought, to adjust her idea of herself to so astounding a development. But it was like the effort to imagine herself belonging to another race, Ethiopian or Oriental. It was unthinkable. She had a clearly defined conception of grandmothers, persons with a generous waist-line and white hair. Undoubtedly they were useful people in their way, and worthy of regard. But she found it impossible to realize that she herself might belong to their number.

As if recalling some experience far distant, she fell to reviewing the events of the previous evening. Her caller had been a young fellow with a carefully nurtured and on the whole a promising mustache and with a lurid taste in socks. She had enjoyed the call. The boy's crude efforts at veiled sentiment, his languishing glances had been incense to her vanity. But to-morrow! "How is your little grandchild, Mrs. Sinclair?" he would say. Or no! He would not say it. He would not come again. He must realize, as she was doing, the absurdity of their acquaintance. He would laugh at the old woman who had painted her cheeks that she might look a girl and had let him kiss her hand as though granting a priceless favor. Annabel moaned faintly as she writhed. Every one would laugh. Every one must have been laughing for years over her silly pretenses.

She did not know how long a time had elapsed before heavy footsteps creaked down the hall. She shuddered and her body stiffened. The knock was twice repeated before she could utter an audible, "Come in."

Mrs. West pushed the door ajar and started violently as her eyes fell on Annabel. As not infrequently happens with women who preserve an unnaturally youthful appearance, under the stress of deep emotion, Annabel had aged years in an hour. It was a moment before Mrs. West could recover herself.