"For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?"

Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in London--as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over there."

"_Oh, wild!_" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!"

"Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer breathlessly.

"That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head sideways and--" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her short, relieved that their collections were complete.

"Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the same hairdresser," Madeleine went on.

They were electrified. "Oh, _honestly_? Is it her own?" They trembled visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they would have said, "for eternities."

"Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color."

Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!"

They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known that, all this--"

"Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained.

"She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time."

Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now, instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father."

They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"

Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, "Well, not here down-town," she replied, her tone one of satisfied security.

A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their temperaments, "Oh, there he comes now!" "I think it's mean Lydia's gobbling him up from under our noses!" "I used to have a ride or two behind that gray while Lydia was away!" "My! Isn't he a good-looker!"

They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open, humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his ears, "Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away, Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her European trip!"

"Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I haven't heard any more than you have." He threw aside the lap-robe of supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl's eyes.

There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his meaning, to turn away.

The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. "Why, come on, Lydia," he cried with a good-humored pointedness, "I've been all over town looking for you." She backed away, looking over her shoulder, as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. "Oh, no, no thank you, Paul. Not _this_ afternoon!" she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of protest, "I'm on my way to Father's office. I want to walk home with him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home with him." She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure standing by the wagon.

This retreat was cut short by his next speech. "Oh, I've just come from your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said to tell you and your mother that he won't be home to dinner to-night at all. He's got some citations on hand he has to verify."

Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She was panting a little. She shook her head. "Well--anyhow--I want to see him!" she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a frightened child's. "I want to see my father." Paul laughed easily, "Well, you'd better choose some other time if you want to get anything out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks under those circ.u.mstances!" He held the picture up to her, relentlessly smiling.

Lydia's lips quivered, but she said nothing.

Paul went on soothingly, "I've only come to take you straight home, anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting turns again. She said to be sure to bring you."

At the mention of her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother needs me--" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were leaving.

She said little or nothing in answer to the young man's kind, cheerful talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another, conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks, constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely back from her knees as though for an instant escape.

The young man's pleasant chat stopped. "Look here, Lydia," he said in another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, "look here, don't you forget one thing!" His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy, his eyes full of emotion, "Don't you forget, little Lydia, that n.o.body's sorrier for you than I am! And I don't want anything that--" he cried out in sudden pa.s.sion--"Good Lord, I'd be cut to bits before I'd even _want_ anything that wasn't best for you!" He looked away and mastered himself again to quiet friendliness, "You know that, _don't you_, Lydia?

You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life anyone can?"

He leaned to her imploring in his turn.

She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said, as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, "Oh, yes, yes, Paul, I realize how awfully good you're being to me! I wish I could--but--yes, of course I see how good you are to me!"

He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself could make the action. "It makes me happy to have you know I want to be," he said simply, "now that's all. You needn't be afraid. I shan't bother you."

They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved hand an instant, "That's what I'm for--to be good to you."

The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward glance.

The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother's presence, where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried, "Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you _really_?"

"Why, yes, dear," said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa with an obvious effort; "did somebody say I didn't?"

"I hoped you didn't!" cried Lydia bitterly; "it was--horrid! I was out with all the girls in front of Hallam's--everybody was so--they all laughed so when--they looked at me so!"

Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, "Naturally I couldn't know where he would find you."

"But, Mother, you _did_ know that every afternoon for two weeks you've--it's been managed so that I've been out with Paul."

Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, "I didn't see that it was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after her only daughter because she was feeling worse."

Lydia's frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was engaging her. "_Are_ you feeling any worse?" she cried in a despairing incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery's pale glare of horror. "Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, running to her mother; "I'm sorry, Mother! I'm sorry!"

The tears began running down Mrs. Emery's cheeks, "I don't know my little Lydia any more," she said weakly, dropping her head back on the pillow.

"I don't know myself!" cried Lydia, sobbing violently, "I'm so unhappy!"

Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a noose over Lydia's neck, "There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn't mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you're unhappy these days, so is your poor mother."

"I'm making you so!" sobbed Lydia, "I know it! something like this happens every day! It's why you don't get well faster! I'm making you unhappy!"

"It doesn't make any difference about me!" Mrs. Emery heroically a.s.sured her, "I don't want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings, Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don't want you to feel the _slightest_ pressure from me--or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all I want--all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!"

CHAPTER XII

A SOP TO THE WOLVES

Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances, marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in which ordinary people lived.

As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for everybody--everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt that life in the same house with Lydia's G.o.dfather had given her more than her share of misery.