"Oh, Sue, there you are! Listen, Mama wants you to go in and see her a minute before dinner," Emily said.

"I am dead!" Susan began flinging off her things, loosened the ma.s.ses of her hair, and shook it about her, tore off her tight slippers and flung them away.

"Should think you would be," Emily said sympathetically. She was evidently ready for confidences, but Susan evaded them. At least she owed no explanation to Emily!

"El wants to put you up for the club," called Emily above the rush of hot water into the bathtub.

"Why should she?" Susan called back smiling, but uneasy, but Emily evidently did not hear.

"Don't forget to look in on Mama," she said again, when Susan was dressed. Susan nodded.

"But, Lord, this is a terrible place to try to THINK in!" the girl thought, knocking dutifully on Mrs. Saunders' door.

The old lady, in a luxurious dressing-gown, was lying on the wide couch that Miss Baker had drawn up before the fire.

"There's the girl I thought had forgotten all about me!" said Mrs.

Saunders in tremulous, smiling reproach. Susan went over and, although uncomfortably conscious of the daughterliness of the act, knelt down beside her, and squeezed the little sh.e.l.l-like hand. Miss Baker smiled from the other side of the room where she was folding up the day-covers of the bed with windmill sweeps of her arms.

"Well, now, I didn't want to keep you from your dinner," murmured the old lady. "I just wanted to give you a little kiss, and tell you that I've been thinking about you!"

Susan gave the nurse, who was barely out of hearing, a troubled look.

If Miss Baker had not been there, she would have had the courage to tell Kenneth's mother the truth. As it was, Mrs. Saunders misinterpreted her glance.

"We won't say ONE WORD!" she whispered with childish pleasure in the secret. The little claw-like hands drew Susan down for a kiss; "Now, you and Doctor Cooper shall just have some little talks about my boy, and in a year he'll be just as well as ever!" whispered the foolish, fond little mother, "and we'll go into town next week and buy all sorts of pretty things, shall we? And we'll forget all about this bad sickness! Now, run along, lovey, it's late!"

Susan, profoundly apprehensive, went slowly out of the room. She turned to the stairway that led to the upper hall to hear Ella's voice from her own room:

"Sue! Going up to see Ken?"

"Yes," Susan said without turning back.

"That's a good child," Ella called gaily. "The kid's gone down to dinner, but don't hurry. I'm dining out."

"I'll be down directly," Susan said, going on. She crossed the dimly lighted, fragrant upper hall, and knocked on Kenneth's door.

It was instantly opened by the gracious and gray-haired Miss Trumbull, the night nurse. Kenneth, in a gorgeous embroidered Mandarin coat, was sitting up and enjoying his supper.

"Come in, woman," he said, smiling composedly. Susan felt warmed and heartened by his manner, and came to take her chair by the bed. Miss Trumbull disappeared, and the two had the big, quiet room to themselves.

"Well," said Kenneth, laying down a wish-bone, and giving her a shrewd smile. "You can't do it, and you're afraid to say so, is that it?"

A millstone seemed lifted from Susan's heart. She smiled, and the tears rushed into her eyes.

"I--honestly, I'd rather not," she said eagerly.

"That other fellow, eh?" he added, glancing at her before he attacked another bone with knife and fork.

Taken unawares, she could not answer. The color rushed into her face.

She dropped her eyes.

"Peter Coleman, isn't it?" Kenneth pursued.

"Peter Coleman!" Susan might never have heard the name before, so unaffected was her astonishment.

"Well, isn't it?"

Susan felt in her heart the first stirring of a genuine affection for Kenneth Saunders. He seemed so bright, so well to-night, he was so kind and brotherly.

"It's Stephen," said she, moved by a sudden impulse to confide. He eyed her in blank astonishment, and Susan saw in it a sort of respect. But he only answered by a long whistle.

"Gosh, that is tough," he said, after a few moments of silence. "That is the limit, you poor kid! Of course his wife is particularly well and husky?"

"Particularly!" echoed Susan with a shaky laugh. For the first time in their lives she and Kenneth talked together with entire naturalness and with pleasure. Susan's heart felt lighter than it had for many a day.

"Stephen can't shake his wife, I suppose?" he asked presently.

"Not--not according to the New York law, I believe," Susan said.

"Well--that's a case where virtue is its own reward,--NOT," said Kenneth. "And he--he cares, does he?" he asked, with shy interest.

A rush of burning color, and the light in Susan's eyes, were her only answer.

"Shucks, what a rotten shame!" Kenneth said regretfully. "So he goes away to j.a.pan, does he? Lord, what a shame---"

Susan really thought he was thinking more of her heart-affair than his own, when she finally left him. Kenneth was heartily interested in the ill-starred romance. He bade her good-night with real affection and sympathy.

Susan stood bewildered for a moment, outside the door, listening to the subdued murmurs that came up from the house, blinking, after the bright glow of Kenneth's lamps, in the darkness of the hall. Presently she crossed to a wide window that faced across the village, toward the hills. It was closed; the heavy gla.s.s gave back only a dim reflection of herself, bare-armed, bare-throated, with spangles winking dully on her scarf.

She opened the window and the sweet cold night air came in with a rush, and touched her hot cheeks and aching head with an infinite coolness.

Susan knelt down and drank deep of it, raised her eyes to the silent circle of the hills, the starry arch of the sky.

There was no moon, but Tamalpais' great shoulder was dimly outlined against darker blackness, and moving, twinkling dots showed where ferryboats were crossing and recrossing the distant bay. San Francisco's lights glittered like a chain of gems, but San Rafael, except for a half-concealed household light, here and there under the trees, was in darkness. Faint echoes of dance-music came from the hotel, the insistent, throbbing ba.s.s of a waltz; Susan shuddered at the thought of it; the crowd and the heat, the laughing and flirting, the eating and drinking. Her eyes searched the blackness between the stars;--oh, to plunge into those infinite deeps, to breathe the untainted air of those limitless great s.p.a.ces!

Garden odors, wet and sweet, came up to her; she got the exquisite breath of drenched violets, of pinetrees. Susan thought of her mother's little garden, years ago, of the sunken stone ale-bottles that framed the beds, of alyssum and marigolds and wall-flowers and hollyhocks growing all together. She remembered her little self, teasing for heart-shaped cookies, or gravely attentive to the bargain driven between her mother and the old Chinese vegetable-vendor, with his loaded, swinging baskets. It went dimly through Susan's mind that she had grown too far away from the good warm earth. It was years since she had had the smell of it and the touch of it, or had lain down in its long gra.s.ses. At her aunt's house, in the office, and here, it seemed so far away! Susan had a hazy vision of some sensible linen gardening dresses--of herself out in the spring sunshine, digging, watering, getting happier and dirtier and hotter every minute----

Somebody was playing Walther's song from "Die Meistersinger" far downstairs, and the plaintive pa.s.sionate notes drew Susan as if they had been the cry of her name. She went down to find Emily and Peter Coleman laughing and flirting over a box of chocolates, at the inglenook seat in the hall, and Stephen Bocqueraz alone in the drawing-room, at the piano. He stopped playing as she came in, and they walked to the fire and took opposite chairs beside the still brightly burning logs.

"Anything new?" he asked.

"Oh, lots!" Susan said wearily. "I've seen Kenneth. But they don't know that I can't--can't do it. And they're rather taking it for granted that I am going to!"

"Going to marry him!" he asked aghast. "Surely you haven't equivocated about it, Susan?" he asked sharply.

"Not with him!" she answered in quick self-defense, with a thrill for the authoritative tone. "I went up there, tired as I am, and told him the absolute truth," said Susan. "But they may not know it!"

"I confess I don't see why," Bocqueraz said, in disapproval. "It would seem to me simple enough to---"

"Oh, perhaps it does seem simple, to you!" Susan defended herself wearily, "but it isn't so easy! Ella is dreadful when she's angry,--I don't know quite what I will do, if this ends my being here---"