"If he is, I hope it's with a club in his hand," muttered the other angrily. "Why wasn't she 'able to come,' I'd like to know?"

"Perhaps she died. Or, she couldn't get enough money, or oh--oh, Ellen, don't you _see_? She didn't dare to come for him! He was getting too big, noticing things. For his own sake she had to give him up!" There were tears in Joan's eyes, ready to spill over.

Ellen paused and stared at her. "Well!" she said at last. "If I had your imagination, Joan Darcy, I'd go to a hospital and get it cut out. It ain't safe! Here you are blubbering over the troubles of a woman who maybe never lived, and probably was a bad lot if she did--and a'most making me blubber over her myself!"

Joan laughed and jumped up. "Here, let me help with the dishes. You wash and I'll wipe. But what a funny, pitiful little boy he must have been with those stick-out ears and those big, innocent-looking front teeth of his! I wonder why it is that big front teeth always do make a person look so innocent, Ellen?"

"Seems to me you noticed a lot to have seen Mr. Blair only once."

Joan did not think it necessary to mention that she had seen him more than once.

"I always notice things--I can't help it. Anyway, I'm glad you keep the poor thing darned and comfy! It's only charity."

"Charity nothing. He pays me good, and prompter than I ever got paid before in all _my_ life," disclaimed the other rather tactlessly.

While she washed and put away her dishes, the girl made a tour of inspection about the rooms that were so full of a.s.sociations to her. She smiled and nodded at the two familiar Landseer dogs on the wall, which had been a familiar part of every dining-room she remembered. She patted the worn chairs affectionately, and went in to pay her respects to the shorn four-post bed, which looked more at ease in its present surroundings than in others where she had seen it. The panelled walls, as nearly white as scrubbing could make them, the wide-silled windows with arched cas.e.m.e.nts, the tall mantel-shelf, the finely molded ceiling which years of coal soot and cobwebs and general neglect had not sufficed to rob of dignity, all made a more suitable setting than Ellen guessed for her mistress's household goods; and to Joan these two bare and shabby rooms had become a haven of refuge. Tenement though it was, there was more of genuine beauty in the place where Ellen did plain dressmaking for very humble customers than in all the elaborate establishment with which Richard Darcy had managed to provide his daughter. Joan was very dependent upon beauty.

Later, Ellen walked out with her through the languorous summer evening to the house which she never called home. Nothing more had been said between them of the loss of her independence; but the girl felt soothed and comforted, strengthened as the heart is always strengthened in the presence of a deep though inarticulate devotion. She slipped her hand into the other's thin arm, and so linked they walked along without much talk between them, listening as they pa.s.sed to pleasant sounds from many a shadowed porch and garden, guitar music, singing, the inevitable hushed murmur of boy and girl voices commingled, which is as natural to a summer gloaming as the twitter of birds in spring.

There came again to Joan, for the first time in weeks, something of the glamour, the sense of promise, which had touched her in the summer past when she walked at night with her father through the strange city where he had once been young. It was as if Romance brushed her in pa.s.sing with shadowy skirts, and Joan felt that she must catch at them, cling to them, before it was too late. Youth is so short, so short!...

Ellen, too, felt the witchery of the soft night; but to the Ellens, Romance comes only vicariously.

"Joie," she said after a long silence, "ain't it time you was having some steady company yourself, child?"

The girl did not smile at the phrase. It voiced too well her own secret thoughts. There had been something strangely unreal, unnatural, about the past weeks. She had brought nothing out of her experience with life so far, not even a friend--for Stefan Nikolai was merely an inheritance.

"You're right," she said soberly "I suppose I ought to have a 'steady company' at least by this time. That ought to be simple enough!--Marriage is about the only thing left for a girl in my position, isn't it?"

"Who's talking about marriage? You don't have to marry every fellow you walk out with, I should hope," said Ellen surprisingly. "I've walked out with quite a few myself!... But as to gettin' married, Jo--it's about the only thing for a girl in any position, I guess, even if she finds out afterwards that she's picked a lemon. Lemons are better than nothing."

"Why, Mrs. Neal!" laughed Joan. "What sentiments from a confirmed spinster-person!"

To which Ellen replied quietly, "It's the spinsters who know."

CHAPTER XII

The discovery of her dependence upon her step-mother marked an end to one period of Joan's existence: the apathetic period. Heretofore she had allowed their daily life, their amus.e.m.e.nts, their acquaintanceships, to remain in the hands of Effie May. If that lady chose, as she navely put it, to "break into society," and society was willing, Joan was amenable, though a little dubious as to society's taste. She was amenable, that is, so long as she was not called upon too actively to a.s.sist in the process. Pride forbade her making any effort to interest or to be interested in people who chose to accept the present Mrs. Darcy as one of themselves. To the Louisville she knew so far, she was merely the appendage of her parents, a captive chained to the triumphal chariot-wheel of her step-mother.

That was all very well so long as she knew that she might snap the chain at any moment and be free. But a dependence that seemed likely to continue indefinitely was not to be borne by what the Major would have called "the proud spirit of a Darcy." Joan, waking in the early dawn, rose and dressed (not in negligee), demanded breakfast at an hour when the astonished servants were barely awake themselves, and proceeded to clear her decks for action....

Ellen had sowed a useful suggestion in her brain. There was one freedom open to all young girls who were not too exacting in their demands: the freedom of marriage. Joan decided to marry. She also selected the victim.

It was the first time she had thought of him for weeks; or of "the girls," those heart's companions with whom she had shared for two years her inmost hopes and desires (to say nothing of hats and gloves and handkerchiefs); with whom at parting she had exchanged vows of lifelong fealty. Their letters had acc.u.mulated unanswered. In the shock and shame of her father's marriage, she had put away childish things, among them her schoolmates, who seemed in the retrospect immature and puerile. Even Eduard of the interesting past had been put away for the moment with outgrown things, and had remained (fortunately) unthanked for his parting flowers. As for the love-letter which had accompanied them--Joan wondered with a start of dismay what had become of it.

She found it neatly smoothed of its tell-tale wrinkles (the reader will remember that for a day and a night it had reposed against Joan's heart), filed among the letters in her desk, where it had been duly placed after being duly read, doubtless, by one of Mrs. Darcy's efficient housemaids.

The girl studied it with a more dispa.s.sionate eye than she had brought to its first perusal:

My flowers must tell you what I dare not, dearest little girl of my heart. You will understand why I cannot say good-by.

Truly, "to part is to die a little." Forgive me!--EDUARD.

Joan decided that this could not, after all, be called a love-letter; or if so, it was of a noncommittal type distinctly piquing to the vanity.

She had given a good many of her precious holidays to the reforming of Mr. Desmond.

"So!" she thought, with a small gleam in her eye. "I was merely a child that amused him for the moment! He was probably laughing at me.... I wonder if he would laugh now?"

She went to her mirror and examined the reflection within impartially.

Something of what she had always candidly recognized as her plainness seemed to have disappeared. She was no longer scrawny, for one thing.

Her lazy life of the past weeks, and possibly Effie May's beauty experts, whose ministrations she accepted so ungratefully, had put a gracious covering over her young bones, and she discovered with some excitement the rudiments of a figure. Her straight, burnished hair (she had so far resisted all temptations to "marcel" it) gave her what she fancied a rather _distingue_ air, and her skin had that rare, pale transparency of perfect health which is lovelier even than rosiness. Her eyes had always given perfect satisfaction. She nodded to them in affectionate fashion, as to good friends (she had always fancied that one of them was her brain and the other her soul, and even suspected which was which--the left wearing rather a twinkle, in comparison with the right, which had a mild, innocuous expression). Her mouth was too large.

"But then," she reflected, "large mouths are very much worn by heroines nowadays, and mine isn't mushy or loose at the corners, anyway. There's a draw-string to it."

Of the nose the less said the better. It was merely a nose.

On the whole, standing there in her pretty morning dress, with the grace and freshness of nineteen years about her like an aura, young Joan decided in all modesty that she was one of the women who have their moments, and that such moments ought not to be wasted.

She sat down at once and indited a little note to Eduard Desmond expressing grat.i.tude for "flowers which had meant so much to her," and explaining that she had not written before "because it had seemed best not to"--the inference being that now danger was past, and time had made it safe for her to think of him.

"That," mused Joan nibbling her penholder, "ought to make him sit up and take notice, I should think?" She had been from her cradle something of a student of her fellow-creatures.

She wrote to his niece, her friend Betty, as well; a long, confidential screed, mentioning the fact of her father's marriage without comment and allowing her friend to read between the lines. Betty had an adored mother of her own.

Then Joan rested on her oars and awaited results, which were prompt in coming. Not for nothing had she been the prize letter-writer of her school, entrusted by friend and foe alike with the handling of anything that was most delicate in the way of correspondence.

A few days later she was able to remark to her family that she had been invited to visit her schoolmate, Betty Desmond, at the Desmond country place near Philadelphia.

"The people you spent the Christmas holidays with in Washington? A fine old Irish name," commented the Major, who made something of a specialty of names. "I have not the pleasure of their acquaintance, but I am sure the good Sisters would not have permitted you to visit them if they had not been--ah! desirable acquaintances."

"They are quite rich, if that is what you mean," said his daughter bluntly. Her manner to her father had latterly undergone a change which was not altogether nice.

The Major's eyebrows shot up in pained surprise. "Joan! That is certainly irrelevant, not to say--"

"And there's an eligible young man in the family," continued the girl imperturbably.

He stared at her, speechless. "My child!" he exclaimed after a moment.

"One would suppose you were actually--"

"Hunting for a husband? I am," she finished. "What else did you expect me to do?"

A burst of laughter from Effie May relieved the situation. "Of course she's hunting for a husband! All girls are, unless they're lookin' for trouble. Good for you, dearie! You'll land him, too, I'll bet my hat.

Men? Lord," she cried, "they're as easy as fallin' off a log, once you get the hang of 'em!"

But the Major continued to gaze at his daughter incredulously. "To think," he murmured, "that I should live to hear _my daughter_ speak in such a manner!" It was evidently not the idea which shocked him, so much as the indelicate expression of it.