At that identical moment g.a.y.l.o.r.d, alias the screaming gentleman, had been summoned to Aunt Belle's bedside. For Beatrice believed in having two strings to her bow and she had written her aunt a second deluge of complaints and requests. Bemoaning the sprained ankle--and the probable regaining of three pounds which had been laboriously ma.s.saged away--Aunt Belle had called for g.a.y.l.o.r.d's sympathy and support.

While Mary, rather perturbed yet unshaken in her convictions, returned to the office and Constantine had decided his blood pressure could not stand any traipsing round after folderols, g.a.y.l.o.r.d was eagerly taking notes and saying pretty nothings to the doleful Mrs. Todd, who relied utterly on his artistic judgment and promptness of action.

Whereupon g.a.y.l.o.r.d proudly rolled out of the Constantine gates in a motor car bearing Constantine's monogram, and by late afternoon he had come to a most satisfactory understanding with decorators and antique dealers--an understanding which led to an increase in the prices Beatrice was to pay and the splitting of the profits between one g.a.y.l.o.r.d Vondeplosshe and the tradesmen.

"A supper!" Mark Constantine demanded crisply that same evening, merely groaning when his sister told him that g.a.y.l.o.r.d had undertaken all the errands and was such a dear boy. "And send it up to my room--ham, biscuits, pie, and iced coffee, and I'm not at home if the lord mayor calls."

He departed to the plainest room in the mansion and turned on an electric fan to keep him company. He sat watching the lawn men at their work, wondering what he was to do with this barn of a place.

Beatrice had told him forcibly that she was not going to live in it.

Wherein was the object of keeping it open for Belle Todd and himself when more and more he wished for semi-solitude? Noise and crowds and luxuries irritated him. He liked meals such as the one he had ordered, the plebeian joy of taking off tight shoes and putting on disreputable slippers, sitting in an easy-chair with his feet on another, while he read detective stories or adventurous romances with neither sense nor moral. He liked to relive in dream fashion the years of early endeavour--of his married life with Hannah. After he finished the reverie he would tell himself with a flash of honesty, "Gad, it might as well have happened to some other fellow--for all the good it does you." Nothing seemed real to Constantine except his check book and his wife's monument.

It was still to dawn upon him that his daughter partly despised him.

He had always said that no one loved him but his child, and that no one but his child mattered so far as he was concerned. Since Beatrice's marriage he had become restless, wretched, desperately lonesome; he found himself missing Steve quite as much as he missed Beatrice. Their letters were unsatisfactory since they were chiefly concerned with things--endless things that they coveted or had bought or wanted in readiness for their return. As he sat watching the lawn men gossip he knitted his black brows and wondered if he ought to sell the mansion and be done with it. Then it occurred to him that grandchildren playing on the velvety lawn would make it quite worth while. With a thrill of antic.i.p.ation he began to plan for his grandchildren and to wonder if they, too, would be eternally concerned with things.

As he recalled Mary's defiance he chuckled. "A ten-dollar-a-week raise was cheap for such a woman," he thought.

Meantime, Trudy informed the Faithful family at supper: "Gay has telephoned that he is coming to-night. Were you going to use the parlour, Mary?" A mere formality always observed for no reason at all.

"No, I'm going to water the garden. It's as dry as Sahara."

Luke groaned.

"Don't make Luke help you. He's stoop-shouldered enough from study without making him carry sprinkling cans," Mrs. Faithful objected.

"Nonsense! It's good for him, and he will be through in an hour."

"Too late for the first movie show," expostulated Luke.

"A world tragedy," his sister answered.

"I wanted to go to-night," her mother insisted. "It's a lovely story.

Mrs. Bowen was in to tell me about it--all about a Russian war bride.

They built a whole town and burnt it up at the end of the story. I guess it cost half a million--and there's fighting in it, too."

"All right, go and take Luke. But I don't think the movies are as good for him as working in a garden."

"You never want me to have pleasure. Home all day with only memories of the dead for company, and then you come in as cross as a witch, ready to stick your nose in a book or go dig in the mud! Excuse me, Trudy, but a body has to speak out sometimes. Your father to the life--reading and grubbing with plants. Oh, mother's proud of you, Mary, but if you would only get yourself up a little smarter and go out with young people you'd soon enough want Luke to go out, too! I don't pretend to know what your judgment toward your poor old mother would be!"

Mary's day had included a dispute with a firm's London representative, the Constantine incident, a session at the dentist's as a noon-recess attraction, housecleaning the office, and two mutually contradictory wires from Steve. She laid her knife and fork down with a defiant little clatter.

"I can't burn the candle at both ends. I work all day and I have to relax when I leave the office. If my form of a good time is to read or set out primroses it is nothing to cry thief for, is it? I want you to go out, mother, as you very well know. And you are welcome to fill the house with company. Only if I'm to do a man's work and earn his wage I must claim my spare time for myself."

"Now listen here, dear," interposed Trudy, who took Mary's part when it came to a real argument, "don't get peeved. Let me buy your next dress and show you how to dance. You'll be surprised what a difference it will make. You'll get so you just hate ever to think of work."

"Splendid! Who will pay the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker?"

Mary thought of the wedding presents carelessly stacked about Beatrice's apartment. One pile of them, as she measured expenses, would have paid the aforementioned gentlemen for a year or more.

"Now you've got her going," Luke objected. "Say, Trudy, you don't kill yourself tearing off any work at the shop!"

"Luke," began his mother, "be a gentleman. Dear me, I wish I hadn't said a word. To think of my children in business! Why, Luke ought to be attending a private school and going to little cotillion parties like my brothers did; and Mary in her own home." She pressed her napkin to her eyes.

"I admit Mary carries me along on the pay roll--I'm Mary's foolishness,"

Trudy said, easily. "Mary's a good scout even if she does keep us stepping. She has to fall down once in a while, and she fell hard when she hired me and took me in as a boarder."

Mary flushed. "I try to make you do your share," she began, "and----"

"I ought to pay more board," Trudy giggled at her own audacity. "But I won't. You're too decent to make me. You know I'm such a funny fool I'd go jump in the river if I got blue or things went wrong, and you like me well enough to not want that. Don't worry about our Mary, Mrs.

Faithful. Just let her manage Luke and he won't wander from her ap.r.o.n strings like he will if you and I keep him in tow."

Luke made a low bow, sc.r.a.ping his chair back from the table. "I'll go ahead and get reserved seats and mother can come when she's ready," he proposed.

Mrs. Faithful beamed with triumph. "That's my son! Get them far enough back, the pictures blur if I'm too close."

"I'll do the dishes," Mary said, briefly. "Go and get ready."

"I'd wipe them only Gay is coming so early," Trudy explained, glibly.

"I'd rather be alone." Mary was piling up the pots and pans.

"Now, deary, if you don't feel right about mother's going," her mother resumed a little later as she poked her head into the kitchen, "just say so. But I certainly want to see that town burnt up; and besides, it's teaching Luke history. Dear me, your hair is dull. Why don't you try that stuff Trudy uses?"

"Because I'm not Trudy. Good-bye."

"You're all nerves again. I'd certainly let someone else do the work."

"I need a vacation."

"That means you want to get away from us. Well, I try to keep the home together. Leave that coffeepot just as it is, I'll want a drop when I get back." Waddling out the door Mrs. Faithful left Mary to a.s.sault the dishes and long for Steve's return.

"I wonder why the great plan did not make it possible for all folks to like their relatives?" she asked herself as she finally hung the tea towels on the line; "or their star boarder?"

Then she became engrossed in the way the newly set out plants had taken root. Bending over the flower beds she was hardly conscious that darkness had fallen over the earth--a heavenly, summer-cool darkness with veiled stars prophetic of a blessed shower. She repaired to the porch swing to dream her dreams of fluffs and frills, arrange a dream house and live therein. It should be quite unlike the Gorgeous Girl's apartment--but a roomy, sprawling affair with old furniture that was used and loved and shabby, well-read books, carefully chosen pictures, dull rugs, and oddly shaped lamps, a s.h.a.ggy old dog to lie before the open fireplace and be patted occasionally, fat blue jugs of Ragged Robin roses at frequent intervals. Perhaps there would be a baby's toy left somewhere along the stairway leading to the nursery. When one has the cool of a summer's night, a porch screened with roses and a comfortable swing, what does it matter if there are unlikable persons and china-shop apartment houses?

Had Mary known what was taking place in the front parlour it would not have jarred her from her dreams. For g.a.y.l.o.r.d, resplendent in ice-cream flannels, and Trudy, wearing an unpaid-for black-satin dress with red collar and cuffs, were both busier than the proverbial beaver planning their wedding. It was to be an informal and unexpected little affair, being the direct result of the Gorgeous Girl's demands as to settling her household.

"You've no idea how jolly easy it was, Babseley. There was a dressing case I know Bea will keep--it brought me a cool hundred commission--it had just come in. I plunged and bought two altar scarfs she can use for her reading stand--she likes such things, besides all the bona-fide orders. I've been working for fair--and I've made over a thousand dollars."

Trudy kissed Bubseley between his pale little eyes. "You Lamb! Sure you won't have to give it back or that they will tell?"

"Of course not! They'd give their own selves away. That's the way such things are always done, y'know. I've an idea that I'll go in seriously for the business by and by. I don't feel any compunction; I'm ent.i.tled to every cent of it; in fact, I call it cheap for Bea at a thousand."

"But will they really pay you?" Trudy was skeptical. It seemed such a prodigious amount for buying a few trifles.

"The Constantine credit is like the Bank of England. I'll have my money and we'll make our getaway before Bea arrives in town."

"Why?" Trudy did not approve of this. The contrast between her marriage and the Gorgeous Girl's wedding rankled.

Gay hesitated. "I want to go to New York and see concert managers and father's friends," he evaded. "Then we'll visit my sister in Connecticut as long as she'll have us. And when we come back--well, you'll--you'll know the smart ways better."