"Don't matter if I was!" said Julia, airily gracious, but watching shrewdly.

"Well, I--I hope you won't think this is funny, but, well, I'll tell you," stammered Barbara, very red. "I know you don't know us all very well, you know--it's different with us--we've all been brought up together--but I didn't know whether you knew--perhaps you did--that Carter Hazzard is married?"

Julia felt stunned, and a little sick. She got only the meaning of the words, their value would come later. But with a desperate effort she pulled herself together, and smiled with dry lips.

"Yes, I knew that," she said, pleasantly, not meeting Barbara's eye.

"Oh, well, then it's all _right_," Barbara said hastily, relieved. "But he--he has a teasing sort of way, you know. His wife is in San Diego now, with her own people."

"Yes, he told me that," Julia said, only longing to escape before a maddening impulse to cry overpowered her. Barbara saw the truth, and laid a friendly hand on Julia's arm.

"I just wanted you to know," she said in her kindliest tone.

Suddenly Julia burst out crying, childishly blubbering with her wrists in her eyes. Barbara, very much distressed, shielded her as well as she could from the eyes of possible pa.s.sers-by, and patted her shoulder with a gloved hand.

"I don't know why--perfectly _crazy_--" gulped Julia, desperately fighting the sobs that shook her. "And I've had a dreadful headache all day," she broke out, pitifully, beginning to mop her eyes with a folded handkerchief, her face still turned away from Barbara.

"Oh, poor thing!" said Barbara. "And the rehearsal must have made it worse!"

"It's splitting," Julia said sombrely. She gave Barbara one grave, almost resentful, look, straightened her hat and fluffed up her hair, and went away. Barbara looked after her, and thought that Carter was a beast, and that there was something very pitiful about common little ignorant Miss Page, and that she wouldn't tell the girls about this, and give them one more cause to laugh at the little actress. For Barbara Toland was a conscientious girl, and very seriously impressed with the gravity of her own responsibility toward other people.

Meanwhile Julia walked toward the Mechanics' Library in a very fury of rage and resentment. She hated the entire caste of "The Amazons," and she hated Barbara Toland and Carter Hazzard more than the rest! He could play with her and flirt with her and deceive her, and while she, Julia, fancied herself envied and admired of the other girls, this delicately perfumed and exquisitely superior Barbara could be deciding in all sisterly kindness that she must inform Miss Page of her admirer's real position. Angry tears came to Julia's eyes, but she went into the Mechanics' Library and washed the evidences of them away, and made herself nice to meet Mark.

But a subtle change in the girl dated from that day; casual and foolish as the affair with Carter had been, it left its scar. Julia's heart winced away from the thought of him as she herself might have shrunk from fire. She never forgave him.

It was good to find Mark still enslaved, everything soothing and rea.s.suring. When Julia left him, at her own door at six o'clock, she was her radiant, confident self again, and they kissed each other at parting like true lovers. To his eager demand for a promise Julia still returned a staid, "Mama'd be crazy, Mark. I ain't sixteen yet!" but on this enchanted afternoon she had consented to linger, on Kearney Street, before the trays of rings in jewellers' windows, and it was in the wildest spirits that Mark bounded on upstairs to his own apartment.

Julia had expected to find her mother at home. Instead the room was empty, but the gas was flaring high, and all about was more than the customary disorder; there were evidences that Emeline had left home in something of a hurry. The girl searched until she found the explanatory note, and read it with knitted brow.

"I'm going to Santa Rosa on important business, deary," Emeline had scribbled, "and you'd better go to Min's for a few days. I'll write and leave you know if there is anything in it, otherwise there's no use getting Min and the girls started talking. There's ten dollars in the hairpin box. With love, Mama."

"Well, I'd give a good deal to know what struck Em," said Mrs. Tarbury, for the hundredth time. It was late in the evening of the same day, and the lady and Julia were in the room shared by Miss Connie Girard and Miss Rose Ransome. Both the young actresses had previously appeared in a skit at a local vaudeville house, but had come home to prepare for a supper to be given by friends in their own profession, after the theatres had closed. Each girl had a bureau of her own, hopelessly cluttered and crowded, and over each bureau an unshielded gas jet flared.

"Well, I'm _going_ to know!" Julia added, in a heavy, significant tone.

She had come to feel herself very much abused by her mother's treatment, and was inclined to entertain ugly suspicions.

"Oh, come now!" Rose Ransome said, scowling at herself in a hand mirror as she carefully rouged her lips. "Don't you get any silly notions in your head!"

"No," Mrs. Tarbury added heavily, as she rocked comfortably to and fro, "no, that ain't Em. Em is a cut-up, all right, and she's a great one for a josh with the boys, but she's as straight as a string! You'll find that she's got some good reason for this!"

"Well, she'd better have!" Julia said sulkily. "I'm going out to see my grandmother to-morrow and see if she knows anything!"

But she really gave less thought to her mother than to the stinging memory of Barbara Toland's generosity and Carter Hazzard's deception.

She settled down contentedly enough, sharing the room with Connie and Rose, and sharing their secrets, and her visit to old Mrs. c.o.x was indefinitely postponed. The girls drifted about together, in and out of theatres, in and out of restaurants and hotels, reading cheap theatrical magazines, talking of nothing but their profession. The days were long and dull, the evenings feverish; Julia liked it all. She had no very high ideal of home life; she did not mind the disorder of their room, the jumbled bureau drawers, the chairs and tables strewn with garments, the fly-specked photographs nailed against the walls. It was a comfortable, irresponsible, diverting existence, at its worst.

Emeline did not write her daughter for nearly two weeks, but Julia was not left in doubt of her mother's moral and physical safety for that time. Only two or three days after Emeline's disappearance Julia was called upon by a flashily dressed, coa.r.s.e-featured man of perhaps forty who introduced himself--in a hoa.r.s.e voice heavy with liquor--as d.i.c.k Palmer.

"I used to know your Pop when you's only a kid," said the caller, "and I know where your Mamma is now--she's gone down to Santa Rosa, see?"

"What'd she go there for?" Julia demanded clearly.

Mr. Palmer cast an agitated glance about Mrs. Tarbury's dreadful drawing-room, and lowered his voice confidentially:

"Well, d'ye see--here's how it is! Your Papa's down there in Santa Rosa.

I run acrost him in a boarding-house a few days ago, and d'ye see--he's sick. That's right," added the speaker heavily, "he's sick."

"Dying?" said Julia dramatically.

"No, he ain't dying. It's like this," pursued the narrator, still with his air of secrecy, "there's a party there that runs the boarding-house--her name's Lottie Clute, she's had it for years, and she's got on to the fact that George is insured for nine thousand dollars, d'ye see? Well, she's got him to promise to make the policy over to her."

"Ha!" said Julia, interested at last.

"Well, d'ye see?" said Mr. Palmer triumphantly. "So I come up to town last week, and I thought I'd drop in on your Mamma! No good letting this other little lady have it _all_ her own way, you know!"

"That's right, too, she's no more than a thief!" Julia commented simply.

"I don't know what Mama can do, but I guess you can leave it to Mama!"

Mr. Palmer, agreeing eagerly to this, took his leave, after paying a hoa.r.s.e tribute to the beauty of his old friend's daughter, and Julia dismissed the matter from her mind.

She told Connie that she meant, as soon as this amateur affair was over, to try the stage in real earnest, and Connie, whose own last venture had ended somewhat flatly, was nevertheless very sanguine about Julia's success. She took Julia to see various managers, who were invariably interested and urbane, and Julia, deciding bitterly that she would have no more to do with her fellow-performers in the caste of "The Amazon,"

had Connie accompany her to rehearsals, and went through her part with a sort of sullen hauteur.

She and Connie were down in the dressing-rooms one day after a rehearsal chatting with the woman star of a travelling stock company, who chanced to be there, when Barbara Toland suddenly came in upon them.

"Oh, Miss Page," said Barbara in relief, "I _am_ so glad to find you! I don't know whether you heard Mr. Pope announce that we're to have our dress rehearsal on Sat.u.r.day, at the yacht club in Sausalito? There is quite a large stage."

Julia shook her head.

"I don't know that I can come Sat.u.r.day," she objected, only anxious to be disobliging.

"Oh, you _must_," said Barbara brightly. "_Do_ try! You take the one-forty-five from the Sausalito ferry, and somebody'll meet you! And if we should be kept later than we expect, somebody'll bring you home!"

"I have a friend who would come for me," said Julia stiffly, thinking of Mark.

For just a second mirth threatened Barbara's dignity, but she said staidly:

"That's fine! And remember, we _depend_ on you!"

CHAPTER IV

The family of Dr. Robert Toland, discovered at breakfast in the Tolands'

big house in Sausalito on an exquisite May morning, presented to the casual onlooker as charming a picture of home life as might be found in the length and breadth of California. The sunny dining-room, with its windows wide open to sunshine and fresh sea air, the snowy curtains blowing softly to and fro, the wide sideboard where the children's outgrown mugs stood in a battered and glittering row, the one or two stiff, flat, old oil portraits that looked down from the walls, the jars of yellow acacia bloom, and bowls of mingled wild flowers; these made a setting wonderfully well suited to the long table and the happy family about it.

There were seven children, five girls and two boys; there was the gracious, genial mother at the head and the wiry, gray-haired and gray-bearded surgeon at the foot; there was, as usual, Jim Studdiford, and to-day, besides, there was Aunt Sanna, an unmarried younger sister of the doctor, and a little black-eyed, delicate ten-year-old guest of the eleven-year-old Janie, Keith Borroughs, who was sitting near to Janie, and evidently adoring that spirited chatterbox. And there was Addie, a cheerful black-clad person in a crackling white ap.r.o.n, coming and going with m.u.f.fins and bacon, and Toy, who was a young cousin of Hee, the cook, and who padded softly in Addie's wake, making himself generally useful.