"I could freshen up my black---" mused Susan.

"Of course you could!" triumphed Isabel. And her enthusiasm carried the day. The Olivers went to dine and spend the night with the Furlongs, and were afterward sorry.

In the first place, it was expensive. Susan indeed "freshened up" the black gown, but slippers and gloves, a belt and a silk petticoat were new for the occasion. The boys' wardrobes, too, were supplemented with various touches that raised them nearer the level of young Alan's clothes; Billy's dress suit was pressed, and at the last moment there seemed nothing to be done but buy a new suitcase--his old one was quite too shabby.

The children behaved well, but Susan was too nervous about their behavior to appreciate that until the visit was long over, and the exquisite ease and order of Isabel's home made her feel hopelessly clumsy, shabby and strange. Her mood communicated itself somewhat to Billy, but Billy forgot all lesser emotions in the heat of a discussion into which he entered with Isabel's father during dinner. The old man was interested, tolerant, amused. Susan thought Billy nothing short of rude, although the meal finished harmoniously enough, and the men made an engagement the next morning to see each other again, and thresh out the subject thoroughly.

Isabel kept Susan until afternoon, and strolled with her across the road to show her the pretty house that had been the Wallaces' home, in her mother's lifetime, empty now, and ready to lease.

Susan had forgotten what a charming house it really was, bowered in gardens, flooded with sunshine, old-fashioned, elegant, comfortable and s.p.a.cious. The upper windows gave on the tree-hidden roofs of San Rafael's nicest quarter, the hotel, the tennis-courts were but a few minutes' walk away.

"Oh, if only you dear people could live here, what bliss we'd have!"

sighed Isabel.

"Isabel--it's out of the question! But what's the rent?"

"Eighteen hundred---" submitted Isabel dubiously. "What do you pay?"

"We're buying, you know. We pay six per cent, on a small mortgage."

"Still, you could rent that house?" Isabel suggested, brightening.

"Well, that's so!" Susan let her fancy play with it. She saw Mart and Billy playing here, in this sheltered garden, peeping through the handsome iron fence at hors.e.m.e.n and motor-cars pa.s.sing by. She saw them growing up among such princely children as little Alan, saw herself the admired center of a group of women sensible enough to realize that young Mrs. Oliver was of no common clay.

Then she smiled and shook her head. She went home depressed and silent, vexed at herself because the question of tipping or not tipping Isabel's chauffeur spoiled the last half of the trip, and absent-minded over Billy's account of the day, and the boys' prayers.

Other undertakings, however, terminated more happily. Susan went with Billy to various meetings, somehow found herself in charge of a girls'

dramatic club, and meeting in a bare hall with a score or two of little laundry-workers, waitresses and factory girls on every Tuesday evening.

Sometimes it was hard to leave the home lamp-light, and come out into the cold on Tuesday evenings, but Susan was always glad she had made the effort when she reached the hall and when her own particular friends among the "Swastika Hyacinth Club" girls came to meet her.

She had so recently been a working girl herself that it was easy to settle down among them, easy to ask the questions that brought their confidence, easy to discuss ways and means from their standpoint. Susan became very popular; the girls laughed with her, copied her, confided in her. At the monthly dances they introduced her to their "friends,"

and their "friends" were always rendered red and incoherent with emotion upon learning that Mrs. Oliver was the wife of Mr. Oliver of the "Protest."

Sometimes Susan took the children to see Virginia, who had long ago left Mary Lou's home to accept a small position in the great inst.i.tution for the blind. Virginia, with her little cla.s.s to teach, and her responsibilities when the children were in the refectory and dormitory, was a changed creature, busy, important, absorbed. She showed the toddling Olivers the playroom and conservatory, and sent them home with their fat hands full of flowers.

"Bless their little hearts, they don't know how fortunate they are!"

said Virginia, saying good-bye to Mart and Billy. "But _I_ know!" And she sent a pitiful glance back toward her little charges.

After such a visit, Susan went home with a heart too full of grat.i.tude for words. "G.o.d has given us everything in the world!" she would say to Billy, looking across the hearth at him, in the silent happy evening.

Walking with the children, in the long spring afternoons, Susan liked to go in for a moment to see Lydia Lord in the library. Lydia would glance up from the book she was stamping, and at the sight of Susan and the children, her whole plain face would brighten. She always came out from behind her little gates and fences to talk in whispers to Susan, always had some little card or puzzle or fan or box for Mart and Billy.

"And Mary's well!"

"Well---! You never saw anything like it. Yesterday she was out in the garden from eight o'clock until ten at night! And she's never alone, everyone in the neighborhood loves her---!" Miss Lord would accompany them to the door when they went, wave to the boys through the gla.s.s panels, and go back to her desk still beaming.

Happiest of all the times away from home were those Susan spent with the Carrolls, or with Anna in the Hoffmanns' beautiful city home. Anna did not often come to Oakland, she was never for more than a few hours out of her husband's sight, but she loved to have Susan and the boys with her. The doctor wanted a glimpse of her between his operations and his lectures, would not eat his belated lunch unless his lovely wife sat opposite him, and planned a hundred delights for each of their little holidays. Anna lived only for him, her color changed at his voice, her only freedom, in the hours when Conrad positively must be separated from her, was spent in doing the things that pleased him, visiting his wards, practicing the music he loved, making herself beautiful in some gown that he had selected for her.

"It's idolatry, mon Guillaume," said Mrs. Oliver, briskly, when she was discussing the case of the Hoffmanns with her lord. "Now, I'm crazy enough about you, as you well know," continued Susan, "but, at the same time, I don't turn pale, start up, and whisper, 'Oh, it's Willie!' when you happen to come home half an hour earlier than usual. I don't stammer with excitement when I meet you downtown, and I don't cry when you--well, yes, I do! I feel pretty badly when you have to be away overnight!" confessed Susan, rather tamely.

"Wait until little Con comes!" Billy predicted comfortably. "Then they'll be less strong on the balcony scene!"

"They think they want one," said Susan wisely, "but I don't believe they really do!"

On the fifth anniversary of her wedding day Susan's daughter was born, and the whole household welcomed the tiny Josephine, whose sudden arrival took all their hearts by storm.

"Take your slangy, freckled, roller-skating, rifle-shooting boys and be off with you!" said Susan, over the hour-old baby, to Billy, who had come flying home in mid-morning. "Now I feel like David Copperfield's landlady, 'at last I have summat I can love!' Oh, the mistakes that you WON'T make, Jo!" she apostrophized the baby. "The smart, capable, self-sufficient way that you'll manage everything!"

"Do you really want me to take the boys away for a few days?" asked Billy, who was kneeling down for a better view of mother and child.

Susan's eyes widened with instant alarm.

"Why should you?" she asked, cool fingers tightening on his.

"I thought you had no further use for the s.e.x," answered Billy meekly.

"Oh---?" Susan dimpled. "Oh, she's too little to really absorb me yet,"

she said. "I'll continue a sort of superficial interest in the boys until she's eighteen or so!"

Sometimes echoes of the old life came to her, and Susan, pondering them for an hour or two, let them drift away from her again. Billy showed her the headlines one day that told of Peter Coleman's narrow escape from death, in his falling airship, and later she learned that he was well again and had given up aeronautics, and was going around the world to add to his matchless collection of semi-precious stones. Susan was sobered one day to hear of Emily Saunders' sudden death. She sat for a long time wondering over the empty and wasted life. Mrs. Kenneth Saunders, with a smartly clad little girl, was caught by press cameras at many fashionable European watering-places; Kenneth spent much of his time in inst.i.tutions and sanitariums, Susan heard. She heard that he worshipped his little girl.

And one evening a London paper, at which she was carelessly glancing in a library, while Billy hunted through files nearby for some lost reference, shocked her suddenly with the sight of Stephen Bocqueraz's name. Susan had a sensation of shame and terror; she shut the paper quickly.

She looked about her. Two or three young men, hard-working young men to judge from appearance, were sitting with her at the long, magazine-strewn table. Gas-lights flared high above them, soft footfalls came and went in the warm, big room. At the desk the librarian was whispering with two nervous-looking young women. At one of the file-racks, Billy stood slowly turning page after page of a heap of papers. Susan looked at him, trying to see the kind, keen face from an outsider's viewpoint, but she had to give up the attempt. Every little line was familiar now, every little expression. William looked up and caught her smile and his lips noiselessly formed, "I love you!"

"Me?" said Susan, also without a voice, and with her hand on her heart.

And when he said "Fool!" and returned grinning to his paper, she opened her London sheet and turned to the paragraph she had seen.

Not sensational. Mr. Stephen Bocqueraz, the well-known American writer, and Mrs. Bocqueraz, said the paragraph, had taken the house of Mrs.

Bromley Rose-Rogers for the season, and were being extensively entertained. Mr. and Mrs. Bocqueraz would thus be near their daughter, Miss Julia Bocqueraz, whose marriage to Mr. Guy Harold Wetmore, second son of Lord Westcastle, would take place on Tuesday next.

Susan told Billy about it late that night, more because not telling him gave the thing the importance inseparable from the fact withheld than because she felt any especial pang at the opening of the old wound.

They had sauntered out of the library, well before closing time, Billy delighted to have found his reference, Susan glad to get out into the cool summer night.

"Oysters?" asked William. Susan hesitated.

"This doesn't come out of my expenses," she stipulated. "I'm hard-up this week!"

"Oh, no--no! This is up to me," Billy said. So they went in to watch the oyster-man fry them two hot little panfuls, and sat over the coa.r.s.e little table-cloth for a long half-hour, contentedly eating and talking. Fortified, they walked home, Susan so eager to interrogate Big Mary about the children that she reached the orderly kitchen quite breathless.

Not a sound out of any of them was Big Mary's satisfactory report.

Still their mother ran upstairs. Children had been known to die while parents and guardians supposed them to be asleep.

However the young Olivers were slumbering safely, and were wide-awake in a flash, the boys clamoring for drinks, from the next room, Josephine wide-eyed and dewy, through the bars of her crib. Susan sat down with the baby, while Billy opened windows, wound the alarm clock, and quieted his sons.

A full half-hour pa.s.sed before everything was quiet. Susan found herself lying wakeful in the dark. Presently she said: