On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her diploma brought home to her by a cla.s.smate, Albert Penny died, with no more furor than he had lived.

Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that it was the sh.e.l.l of her seemed to compete with the pa.s.sing time.

Certainly it was this sh.e.l.l of her followed Albert in that strangest of little processions, to his cremation.

There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine conditions forbade, and it was just as well so.

Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs.

Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a silence which he seemed to see.

A very quiet and very frightened Zoe had been packed off to Ida Blair's, through it all Lilly's stupor persisting.

Mrs. Becker's state became cause for concern. Once back at the hotel, with Albert's room locked off, and once more thrown open to the impersonal feet of transiency, she would only moan and wind her hands and go off into the light states of unconsciousness.

"I haven't my son any more! Why did we come? It might not have happened at home. Our daughter wronged him, but, thank G.o.d, we tried to make it up to him. My boy. He was so steady--so careful. I can't realize he's gone--without me. The way he used to come home. Never a habit--evening after evening his newspaper and bed. Thank G.o.d, I don't think he ever missed her going as he might have. It hurt at first. He wanted to resign his Bible cla.s.s, and that day we broke up the house--he kept twitching with his eyes. You remember, Ben. And that bed caster. Funny to have twitched over that. It seems he brought it home the night she left--it came over him all of a sudden, it wouldn't ever have to be fitted in.

That's it! O G.o.d! all these years without knowing his own child. He was so steady--a good boy if G.o.d ever grew one. Ben, Ben, how can we go home without him? How can we go home without our boy?"

"Carrie, it is G.o.d's will."

"It is n.o.body's will. G.o.d couldn't will it that way. Just as he had got a little happiness in his way. To think he was willing to take her back.

I don't care for myself, we're on in years, Ben--we're done--and now we've lost our--all--nothing to live for--"

"Mamma, mamma, don't talk that way. Let me try to make up to you for--"

"I can't face going home. He was my life, that boy. He made up for what we suffered through our own. He was a son to us. I can't face going home without him. Albert--where are you? Albert!"

"Mamma, mamma, won't you let me try to make up, dear, for what I have failed you?"

"Albert--can't you hear me--Albert--"

"Carrie, we've got our daughter back. Isn't that something to be--"

"I want my son, I tell you."

"Mamma darling, you're killing me. Let me make it up to you--even a little--the--"

"No, no; you're not a daughter to me. I want my son. Our way was his way."

"Mamma, please--take me home in his place. I'll make it up to you. Let me go back, dear, in Albert's place. I want to pay up--to you. I'm finished--here, dear. I'm ready--ready--"

Suddenly Mrs. Becker seemed to experience one of her cyclonic shifts.

Tears came raining down her face, her sobbing cleft with great racking gulps. Then she dropped to her knees beside her daughter, and, before Lilly could prevent, reached up to drag down her face against her own tear-drenched one.

"Don't leave us, Lilly. Don't ever. Come home with us. We're getting old, Lilly. Don't ever leave us, me and papa. Promise me, Lilly. Promise."

"Of course I promise, mamma darling. Of course I promise."

CHAPTER XI

For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in a clinging fog that feathered the throat.

The morning that Lilly returned to the office electric lights were burning and electric fans were whirring into it.

The una.s.sailed normality of the machine whose functioning depended upon its parts! How easily even the most component of those parts could be replaced! The rows of stenographers, in her but two weeks' absence, new faces among them, outlined against windows of s.p.a.ce and East River. The hinged little mahogany gates swinging to their goings and comings. Her own office with its glazed pane of door gla.s.s and outlook over city roofs and tug-specked band of river.

It was as if the tide of life were once more licking at her feet. She hung up her hat, patting at her hair in the little square of mirror above the stationary washstand, looking back at herself out of eyes a bit dreggy with tiredness, but her skin so deep in its whiteness that it was almost as if its creamy quality had congealed of mere richness.

She rubbed her cheeks to pinken and quicken them, and rang for an office boy, turning her back on the pile of letters and her reports on the desk and her eagerness to be at them.

"Ask Mr. Bruce Visigoth if he can see me."

The message came back on the instant. He could.

She turned the k.n.o.b to his office door so slowly that she saved the slightest squeak, and stood there with her silhouette against the ground gla.s.s for a long moment. When she did enter, from the center of the room where he had been watching her silhouette against the pane, Bruce advanced to meet her.

He took her hand and on the instant she felt her eyes fill, burningly.

He was in summer and office negligee, an unlined blue-serge coat, a white-silk shirt which lay lightly to his body flexuosity, and above the soft collar he had taken on enough outdoor tan to make his smile whiter.

She could have bitten her lips for their trembling, and tried to smile with her tortured eyes.

"Lilly," he said, topping her hand with his, "why didn't you let me know sooner? Your letter an hour ago came out of a clear sky. You see, I didn't even know he--he was here."

"It was all so--so quick!"

"Jove! I don't seem to take it in yet."

"Nor I," she said, quiescently and letting him lead her to a chair.

"He--You see, he was only ill three days."

"There doesn't seem much for me to say, does there, Lilly?"

"No," she said, "that's it, there's nothing to say."

"I can't bear to think of your having been exposed to it."

"That was the least. He died--afraid. That is so terrible to me, somehow. I wouldn't mind all of the horrible rest if only he hadn't died--afraid. I wonder if you know what I mean. He lived so--so meekly to have died--that way. Afraid."

"Yes," he said, "I think I do know." He wanted to keep his gaze away from her and to keep it cool, but somehow each time their eyes met a flame leaped up out of embers, a fiery new consciousness that kept dancing.

"He and--and my parents--you see, they--Well, I told you everything in the letter."

"Are your parents returning home?"

"Yes. That's what I've come to say. You see--they--we--we've decided to remain here two months. Until September--up in my little apartment, all of us. In September Zoe is to have her audition with Auchinloss. So much depends on that. We've such hopes, her teacher and I. She's pure lyric soprano. We think grand-opera brand. And now with the war on, more and more the American girl is getting her chance. That's why my parents have finally consented to wait here with me until then. After that, Zoe is to stay with Ida Blair and we three--my parents and I--are going home--together. That is what I have come to tell you. I'll be giving up my work with you in--September. I'm going home--with them."

He regarded her, his flush going down perceptibly.