Mrs. Willard excused herself, ostensibly to speak to a maid; in reality to speak to a telephone. On her return she made a frontal attack:--

"Norrie, what made you break your engagement to Will Douglas?"

"Why? Don't you approve?"

"Did you break it for the same reason that drove you into it?"

"What reason do you think drove me into it?"

"Hal Surtaine."

"He didn't!" she denied furiously.

"And you didn't break it because of him?"

"No! I broke it because I don't want to get married," cried the girl in a rush of words. "Not to Will Douglas. Or to--to anybody. Why should I?

I don't want to--I won't," she continued, half laughing, half sobbing, "go and have to bother about running a house and have a lot of babies and lose my pretty figure--and get fat--and dowdy--and slow-poky--and old. Look at Molly Vane: twins already. She's a horrible example. Why do people always have to have children--"

She stopped, abruptly, herself stricken at the stricken look in the other's face. "Oh, Jinny, darling Jinny," she gasped; "I forgot! Your baby. Your little, dead baby! I'm a fool; a poor little silly fool, chattering of realities that I know nothing about."

"You will know some day, my dear," said the other woman, smiling valiantly. "Don't deny the greatest reality of all, when it comes. Are you sure you're not denying it now?"

The sunbeams crept and sparkled, like light upon ruffled waters, across Esme's obstinately shaken head.

"Perhaps you couldn't help hurting him. But be sure you aren't hurting yourself, too."

"That's the worst of it," said the girl, with one of her sudden accesses of sweet candor. "I needn't have hurt him at all. I was stupid." She paused in her revelation. "But he was stupider," she declared vindictively; "so it serves him right."

"How was he stupider?"

"He thought," said Esme with sorrowful solemnity, "that I was just as bad as I seemed. He ought to have known me better."

The older woman bent and laid a cheek against the sunny hair. "And weren't you just as bad as you seemed?"

"Worse! Anyway, I'm afraid so," said the confessional voice, rather m.u.f.fled in tone. "But I--I just got led into it. Oh, Jinny, I'm not awfully happy."

Mrs. Willard's head went up and she c.o.c.ked an attentive ear, like an expectant robin. "Some one outside," said she. "I'll be back in a moment. You sit there and think it over."

Esme curled back on the divan. A minute later she heard the curtains part at the end of the dim room, and glanced up with a smile, to face, not Jeannette Willard, but Hal Surtaine.

"You 'phoned for me, Lady Jinny," he began: and then, with a start, "Esme! I--I didn't expect to find you here."

"Nor I to see you," she said, with a calmness that belied her beating heart. "Sit down, please. I have something to tell you. It's what I really came to the office to say."

"Yes?"

"About Kathleen Pierce."

Hal frowned. "Do you think there can be any use--"

"Please," she begged, with uplifted eyes of entreaty. "She--she didn't tell me the truth about that interview with your reporter. It was true; but she made me think it wasn't. She confessed to me, and she feels very badly. So do I. I believed that you had deliberately made that up, about her saying that she didn't turn back because she wanted to catch a train. I believed, too, that the editorial was written after our--our talk. I'm sorry."

Hal stood above her, looking rather stern, and a little old and worn, she thought.

"If that is an apology, it is accepted," he said with surface politeness.

To him she was, in that moment, a light-minded woman apologizing for the petty misdeed, and paying no heed to the graver wrong that she had done him. Jeannette Willard could have set him right in a word; could have shown him what the girl felt, unavowedly to herself but with underlying conviction, that for so great an offense no apology could suffice; nothing short of complete surrender. But Mrs. Willard was not there to help out. She was waiting hopefully, outside.

"And that is all?" he said, after a pause, with just a shade of contempt in his voice.

"All," she said lightly, "unless you choose to tell me how the 'Clarion'

is getting on."

"As well as could be expected. We pay high for our principles. But thus far we've held to them. You should read the paper."

"I do."

"To expect your approval would be too much, I suppose."

"No. In many ways I like it. In fact, I think I'll renew my subscription."

It was innocently said, without thought of the old playful bargain between them, which had terminated with the mailing of the withered arbutus. But to Hal it seemed merely a brazen essay in coquetry; an attempt to reconst.i.tute the former relation, for her amus.e.m.e.nt.

"The subscription lists are closed, on the old terms," he said crisply.

"Oh, you couldn't have thought I meant that!" she whispered; but he was already halfway down the room, on the echo of his "Good-afternoon, Miss Elliot."

As before, he turned at the door. And he carried with him, to muse over in the depths of his outraged heart once more, the mystery of that still and desperate smile. Any woman could have solved it for him. Any, except, possibly, Esme Elliot.

"It didn't come out as I hoped, Festus," said the sorrowful little Mrs.

Willard to her husband that evening. "I don't know that Hal will ever believe in her again. How can he be so--so stupidly unforgiving!"

"Always the man's fault, of course," said her big husband comfortably.

"No. She's to blame. But it's the fault of men in general that Norrie is what she is; the men of this town, I mean. No man has ever been a man with Norrie Elliot."

"What have they been?"

"Mice. It's a tradition of the place. They lie down in rows for her to trample on. So of course she tramples on them."

"Well, I never trampled on mice myself," observed Festus Willard. "It sounds like uncertain footing. But I'll bet you five pounds of your favorite candy against one of your very best kisses, that if she undertakes to make a footpath of Hal Surtaine she'll get her feet hurt."

"Or her heart," said his wife. "And, oh, Festus dear, it's such a real, warm, dear heart, under all the spoiled-childness of her."

CHAPTER XXV