Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an open laugh.

He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: "A boiler factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?" he put it to his old friend.

"Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!" the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. "I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you thinking they're _funny_!"

"They _are_ funny!" insisted the Judge tranquilly. "I stood by the door and listened to the sc.r.a.ps of talk I could catch, till I thought I should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage."

"Look-y here, Nat," the doctor stared up at him angrily, "they're not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at!

They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me tell you!"

"I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!" The Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor.

"Don't commence jumping on the American woman now! I won't stand it!

She's the n.o.blest of her s.e.x!"

"Do you know why I am bald?" said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his shining dome.

"If I did, I wouldn't admit it," the Judge put up a cautious guard, "because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against me."

"I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You don't give enough thought to her--real thought--from one year's end to another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!"

"Oh, you can't get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair a deal in that respect as I give myself," protested Lydia's father reasonably, smiling and eating.

"There's something in _that_, now!" cried his interlocutor, with an odd Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; "but she _has_ an immortal soul, and I'm by no means sure that yours is still inside you."

The Judge stood up, brushed the crumbs of his stolen feast from his well-fitting broadcloth, and smiled down indulgently at the unquiet little doctor. "She's all right, Melton, the American woman, and you're an unconscionably tiresome old fanatic. That's what _you_ are! Come along and have a gla.s.s of punch with me. Lydia's cook has a genius for punch--and for sandwiches!" he added reflectively, setting down the empty platter.

Dr. Melton apparently was off on another tangent of excitability. "Did you ever see her?" he demanded with a fiercely significant accent.

The Judge made a humorous wry mouth. "Yes, I have; but what concern is a cook's moral character to her employer any more than an engineer's to the railroad--"

"Well, it mightn't hurt the railroad any if it took more cognizance of its engineers' morals--" began the doctor dryly.

The Judge cut him short with a great laugh. "Oh, Melton! Melton! You bilious soph.o.m.ore! Take a vacation from finding everything so d.a.m.n tragic. Take a drink on me. You're all right! Everybody's all right!"

The doctor nodded. "And the reception is the success of the season," he said.

CHAPTER XX

AN EVENING'S ENTERTAINMENT

The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later, would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. "Just think of the dinners Ellen's been giving us for the last two months! I don't believe there's another such cook in Ohio--within our purse, of course."

Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was sewing, she said: "I don't think I can stand more than this one dinner party, Paul. I'm sorry, but I don't feel at all well, and this dreadful nausea troubles me a good deal."

"Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life," Paul rea.s.sured her tenderly, and felt a moment's pique that her face did not entirely clear at this all-important announcement. "Come, let's go over to the Derby's for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?"

This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul's usual early departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be more intimate with her husband's sister.

She had not inherited her mother's housekeeping eye, and was never extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the other side was already covered with a coa.r.s.e handwriting, unfamiliar to her.

As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And another.

She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person paralyzed.

With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs announced that lunch was served.

Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table, set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl answered it--one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that position.

"Tell Ellen to come here," said her mistress.

At the appearance of the cook, Lydia's white face went a little whiter.

"Did you use my writing desk last evening?" she asked.

Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which her eyes probed her mistress' expression. "Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,"

she said in the admirable "servant's manner" she possessed to perfection. "I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission, but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister should return, and as--"

"You left part of your letter to Patsy O'Hern," said Lydia, and sat down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.

The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence.

Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally lowered her eyes.

"I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don't think I'm worth the place, and if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I'll go this minute," she said coolly.

Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other's flushed face. "You must go far away from Bellevue," she said. "You must not take a place anywhere near here."

Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of her face. After a sullen silence, "Yes," she said.

"That is all," said Lydia.

Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen's disappearance with a dry brevity. "That we should have continued to give that--that awful--to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of--" she ended brokenly. "Suppose he had been my brother!"

Paul was aghast. "But, my _dear_! To-morrow is the night of the dinner!

Couldn't you have put off a few days this sudden fit of--"

Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out fiercely: "No, no, Paul! Not that! I can't bear to have you say that! I hoped--I hoped you wouldn't think of--"

Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated apprehensions about the next day's event, and picking Lydia up bodily he carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing her with caresses, like a frightened child.

"Oh, you are good to me!" she murmured finally, quieted. "I must try not to get so excited. But, Paul--I _can't_ tell you--about--about that letter--and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to hand for Patsy, though she never--"

"There, there, dearest! Don't talk about it--just rest. You've worked yourself into a perfect fever." If there was latent in the indulgent accent of this speech the coda, "All about nothing," it escaped Lydia's ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure, clean manliness.

But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a nightmare. Lydia's father and mother were temporarily out of town and their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta and her husband from her guests. "If you won't give but one, we've just _got_ to invite the important ones," he had said. "Your sister can take dinner with us any day, and you know her husband _isn't_ the most--"