"But what do you make of it?" demanded Annie. "She talked of this Kate Sheridan--I remember her perfectly, she came to Paris when I was so ill, years ago. Poor Mama cried, and said that she wished to do something for Kate. Now you know, Alice," Annie went on reasonably, "n.o.body is tying Mama's hands! If she wants to educate this young girl--this Norma person--to please Kate, or all her children for that matter, she doesn't have to go into hysterics, and send for Judge Lee.

She said she didn't feel at all well, and she wanted to secure to Kate some money in her will I told her it was ridiculous--she never looked better in her life! I wish she could get over to see you, Alice; you always soothe her so. What on earth does Chris make of it?"

"Well, I'll tell you what we've done," Alice smiled. "Chris went to see her Sunday, and they had a long talk. He tells me that she was just as vague and unsatisfactory as ever, but calmer, and she finally admitted that all she really wanted to do was to befriend this niece of Kate Sheridan. Of course Chris and I think Mama has one of her funny notions about it, but if the child's mother had befriended Mama, for example, a thousand years ago, or if Mama had borrowed five dollars from Kate, and forgotten to return it, you know that would be enough to account for all this excitement."

"Yes, I know!" Annie admitted, with her favourite look of intolerant, yet indulgent, scorn.

"Well, it seems the girl is in Biretta's Bookshop, and Chris has often bought books of her. So to quiet Mama he promised that he would bring her out here to have tea with me some day soon. Mama was delighted, and I think she hopes that a friendship will come of it." Alice threw herself back into the pillows, and drew a great breath as if she were weary. "I only want to please Mama!" she finished.

"You're an angel," Annie said, absently. "I suppose I could get the truth out of Mama in five seconds," she mused. "It looks to me rather like blackmail!"

"No; she said not!" Alice contradicted, quickly.

"Well, it's all so silly," the elder sister said, impatiently. "And coming just now----" she added, significantly.

"Yes. I know!" Alice agreed, with a comprehending look. And in lowered tones they began to talk of Leslie's possible engagement.

CHAPTER V

Norma Sheridan saw the engagement announced in a morning paper two weeks later, and carried the picture of pretty Miss Melrose home, to entertain the dinner table. The news had been made known at a dinner given to forty young persons, in the home of the debutante's aunt, Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens. Miss Melrose, said the paper, was the daughter and heiress of the late Theodore Melrose, and made her home with her grandmother.

Mr. Liggett was the brother of Christopher Liggett, whose marriage to Miss Alice Melrose was a social event some years ago. A number of dinners and dances were already planned in honour of the young pair.

Norma looked at the pictured face with a little stir of feelings so confused that she could not define them, at her heart. But she pa.s.sed the paper to her aunt with no comment.

"You might send them two dozen kitchen towels, Mother," Wolf suggested, drily, and Rose laughed joyously. Her own engagement present from her mother had been this extremely practical one, and Rose loved to open her lower bureau drawer, and gloat over the incredible richness of possessing twenty-four smooth, red-striped, well-hemmed gla.s.s-towels, all her own. Norma had brought her two thick, dull gray Dedham bowls, with ducks waddling around them, and these were in the drawer, too, wrapped in tissue paper. And beside these were the length of lemon-coloured silk that Rose had had for a year, without making up, and six of her mother's fine sheets of Irish linen, and two gla.s.s candlesticks that Rose had won at a Five-hundred party. Altogether, Rose felt that she was making great strides toward home-making, especially as she and Harry must wait for months, perhaps a year. Norma had promised her two towels a month, until there were a whole dozen, and Wolf, prompted by the same generous little heart, told her not to give the gas-stove a thought, for she was to have the handsomest one that money could buy, with a stand-up oven and a water-heater, from her brother.

Rose walked upon air.

But Norma was in a mood that she herself seemed unable to understand or to combat. She felt a constant inclination toward tears. She didn't hate the Melroses--no, they had been most friendly and kind. But--but it was a funny world in which one girl had everything, like Leslie, and another girl had no brighter prospect than to drudge away in a bookstore all her life, or to go out on Sundays with her cousin. Norma dreamed for hours of Leslie's life, the ease and warmth and beauty of it, and when Leslie was actually heralded as engaged the younger girl felt a pang of the first actual jealousy she had ever known. She imagined the beautiful drawing-room in which Acton Liggett--perhaps as fascinating a person as his brother!--would clasp pearls about Leslie's fair little throat; she imagined the shining dinner tables at which Leslie's modestly dropped blonde head would be stormed with compliments and congratulations.

And suddenly mola.s.ses peppermints and dish-washing became odious to her, and she almost disliked Rose for her pitiable ecstasies over china bowls and gla.s.s-towels. All the pleasant excitement of her call upon Mrs. Melrose, with Aunt Kate, died away. It had seemed the beginning of some vaguely dreamed-of progress toward a life of beauty and achievement, but it was two weeks ago now, and its glamour was fading.

True, Christopher Liggett had come into Biretta's bookstore, with Leslie, and he and Norma had talked together for a few minutes, and Leslie had extended her Aunt Alice's kind invitation for tea. But no day had been set for the tea, Norma reflected gloomily. Now, she supposed, the stir of Leslie's engagement would put all that out of Christopher's head.

Wolf was not particularly sympathetic with her, she mused, disconsolately. Wolf had been acting in an unprecedented manner of late.

Rose's engagement seemed to have completely turned his head. He laughed at Norma, hardly heard her words when she spoke to him, and never moved his eyes from her when they were together. Norma could not look up from her book, or her plate, or from the study of a Broadway shop window, without encountering that same steady, unembarra.s.sed, half-puzzled stare.

"What's the matter with you, Wolf?" she would ask, impatiently. But Wolf never told her.

As a matter of fact, he did not know. He was a silent, thoughtful fellow, old for his years in many ways, and in some still a boy. Norma and Rose had known only the more prosperous years of Kate's life, but Wolf remembered many a vigil with his mother, remembered her lonely struggles to make a living for him and for the girls. He himself was the type that inevitably prospers--industrious, good, intelligent, and painstaking, but as a young boy in the working world he had early seen the terrors in the lives of men about him: drink, dirt, unemployment and disease, debt and dishonour. Wolf was not quick of thought; he had little imagination, rather marvelling at other men's cleverness than displaying any of his own, and he had reached perhaps his twenty-second or twenty-third summer before he realized that these terrors did not menace him, that whatever changes he made in his work would be improvements, steps upward. For actual months after the move to New York Wolf had pondered it, in quiet grat.i.tude and pleasure. Rent and bills could be paid, there might be theatre treats for the girls, and chicken for Sunday supper, and yet the savings account in the Broadway bank might grow steadily, too. Far from being a slave to his employer, Wolf began to realize that this rather simple person was afraid of him, afraid that young Sheridan and some of the other smart, ingenious, practically educated men in his employ might recognize too soon their own independence.

And when the second summer in New York came, and Wolf could negotiate the modest financial deal that gave him and the girls a second-hand motor-car to cruise about in on Sundays and holidays, when they could picnic up in beautiful Connecticut, or unpack the little fringed red napkins far down on the Long Island sh.o.r.e, life had begun to seem very pleasant to him. Debt and dirt and all the squalid horrors of what he had seen, and what he had read, had faded from his mind, and for awhile he had felt that his cup could hold no more.

But now, just lately, there was something else, and although the full significance of it had not yet actually dawned upon him, Wolf began to realize that a change was near. It was the most miraculous thing that had ever come to him, although it concerned only little Norma--only the little cousin who had been an actual member of his family for all these years.

He had heard his mother say a thousand times that she was pretty; he had laughed himself a thousand times at her quick wit. But he had never dreamed that it would make his heart come up into his throat and suffocate him whenever he thought of her, or that her lightest and simplest words, her most casual and unconscious glance, would burn in his heart for hours.

During his busy days Wolf found himself musing about this undefined and nebulous happiness that began to tremble, like a growing brightness behind clouds, through all his days and nights. Had there ever been a time, he wondered, when he had taken her for granted, helped her into her blessed little coat as coolly as he had Rose? Had it been this same Norma who scolded him about throwing his collars on the floor, and who had sent his coat to the cleaner with a ten-dollar bill in the pocket?

Wolf remembered summer days, and little Norma chattering beside him on the front seat, as the shabby motor-car fled through the hot, dry city toward shade and coolness. He remembered early Christmas Ma.s.s, and Norma and Rose kneeling between him and his mother, in the warm, fir-scented church. He remembered breakfast afterward, in a general sense of hunger and relaxation and well-being, and the girls exulting over their presents. And every time that straight-shouldered, childish figure came into his dream, that mop of cloudy dark hair and flashing laugh, the new delicious sense of some unknown felicity touched him, and he would glance about the busy factory self-consciously, as if his thoughts were written on his face for all the world to read.

Wolf had never had a sweetheart. It came to him with the blinding flash of all epoch-making discoveries that Norma was his girl--that he wanted Norma for his own, and that there was no barrier between them. And in the ecstasy of this new vision, which changed the whole face of his world, he was content to wait with no special impatience for the hour in which he should claim her. Of course Norma must like him--must love him, as he did her, unworthy as he felt himself of her, and wonderful as this new Norma seemed to be. Wolf, in his simple way, felt that this had been his destiny from the beginning.

That a glimpse of life as foreign and unnatural as the Melrose life might seriously disenchant Norma never occurred to him. Norma had always been fanciful, it was a part of her charm. Wolf, who worked in the great Forman shops, had felt it no particular distinction when by chance one day he had been called from his luncheon to look at the engine of young Stanley Forman's car. He had left his seat upon a pile of lumber, bolted the last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not to drive a racer.

So Norma's half-formed jealousies, desires, and dreams were a sealed book to him. But this very unreasonableness lent her an odd exotic charm in his eyes. She was to Wolf like a baby who wants the moon. The moon might be an awkward and useless possession, and the baby much better without it, still there is something winning and touching about the little imperious mouth and the little upstretched arms.

One night, when he had reached home earlier than either of the girls, Wolf was in the warm bright kitchen, alone with his mother. He was seated at the end of the scrubbed and bleached little table; Kate at the other end was neatly and dexterously packing a yellow bowl with bread pudding.

"Do you remember, years and years ago, Mother," Wolf said, chewing a raisin, thoughtfully, "that you told me that Norma isn't my real cousin?"

Kate's ruddy colour paled a little, and she looked anxious. Not Perseus, coming at last in sight of his Gorgon, had a heart more sick with fear than hers was at that instant.

"What put that into your head, dear?"

"Well, I don't know. But it's true, isn't it?"

Kate scattered chopped nuts from the bowl of her spoon.

"Yes, it's true," she said. "There's not a drop of the same blood in your veins, although I love her as I do you and Rose."

She was silent, and Wolf, idly turning the egg-beater in an empty dish, smiled to himself.

"But what made you think of that, Wolf?" his mother asked.

"I don't know!" Wolf did not look at her, but his big handsome face was suffused with happy colour. "Harry and Rose, maybe," he admitted.

Kate sat down suddenly, her eyes upon him.

"Not the Baby?" she half whispered.

Her son leaned back in his chair, and folded his big arms across his chest. When he looked at her the smile had faded from his face, and his eyes were a trifle narrowed, and his mouth set.

"I guess so!" he said, simply. "I guess it's always been--Norma. But I didn't always know it. I used to think of her as just another sister--like Rose. But I know now that she'll never seem that again--never did, really."

He was silent, and Kate sat staring at him in silence.

"Has she any relatives, Mother?"

"Has--what?"

"Has she people--who are they?"

Kate looked at the floor.

"She has no one but me, Son."