"Afterwards."

"Well, yes--afterwards. Though it makes me feel like a swine."

"n.o.body our age who hasn't been one or felt like one--some of the time--except Christers and the dead," said Oliver, and they proceeded for several minutes on the profundity of that aphorism. The silence was broken by Ted's saying violently,

"I _will_ marry her! I don't give a d.a.m.n what's happened."

"Good egg. Of course you will." Oliver chuckled.

Ted turned to him anxiously after another silence.

"Look Ollie, that b.u.mp on my head--you've seen the size it is. Well, is it going to just show up like _thunder_ at this silly dance?"

XLV

Half-past five in the morning and Oliver undressing wearily by the light of a pale pink dawn.

Now and then he looks at his bed with a gloating expression that almost reaches the proportions of a l.u.s.t--he is so tired he can hardly get off his clothes. The affairs of the last twenty-four hours mix in his mind like a jumble of colored postcards, all loose and disconnected and brightly unreal. Ted--Elinor--Mrs. Severance--Mr. Piper--the dance he has just left--sleep--oh--sleep!

Where is Ted? Somewhere with Elinor of course--it doesn't matter--both were looking suspiciously starry when he last saw them across the room--engagements--marriages--sleep--Mr. Piper's revolver--sleep. How will he return Mr. Piper's revolver? Can't do it tactfully--can't leave it around to be lost, the servants are too efficient--send it to Ted and Elinor as a wedding present--no, that's not tactful either--what silly thoughts--might have been dead by this time--rather better, being alive--and in bed--and asleep--and asleep. Oh, _bed!_ and he falls into it as if he were diving into b.u.t.ter and though he murmurs "Nancy" once to himself before his head sinks into pillows, in two seconds he is drugged with such utter slumber that it is only the blind stupefied face of a man under ether that he is able to lift from his haven when Ted comes in half an hour later and announces, in the voice of one proclaiming a new revelation, that Elinor is the finest person that ever lived and that everything is most wholly and completely all right.

XLVI

"A letter for you, dear Nancy."

Mrs. Winters gestures at it refinedly--she never points--as Nancy comes in to breakfast looking as if whatever sleep she had had not done her very much good.

"From your dear, dear mother, I should imagine," she adds in sugared watery tones.

Nancy opens it without much interest--Mother, oh, yes, Mother. Six crossed pages of St. Louis gossip and wanderingly fluent advice. She sets herself to read it, though, dutifully enough--she is under Mrs.

Winters' eyes.

Father's usual September cold. The evil ways of friends' servants.

Good wishes to Mrs. Winters. "Heart's Gold--such a really _inspiring_ moving-picture." Advice. Advice. Then, half-way down the next to last page Nancy stops puzzledly. She doesn't quite understand.

"And hope, my daughter, that now you are really cured though you may have pa.s.sed through bitter waters but all such things are but G.o.d's divine will to chasten us. And when the young man told me of his _escapade_ I felt that even over the telephone he might have"

She sets herself wearily to decode some sort of definite meaning out of Mother's elliptic style. An escapade. Of Oliver? and over the telephone--what was that? Mother hadn't said anything--

She finishes the letter and then rereads all the parts of it that seem to have any bearing on the cryptogram, and finally near the end, and evidently connected with the "telephone," she comes upon the phrase "that day."

There is only one day that Mother alludes to as "That Day" now. Before her broken engagement "That Day" was when Father failed.

But Oliver _hadn't_ telephoned--she'd asked Mother _particularly_ if he had, and he hadn't. But surely if he had telephoned, surely, surely, Mother would have told her about it--Mother would have known that there were a few things where she really hadn't any right to interfere.

Mother had never liked Oliver, though she'd pretended. Never.

Nancy remembers back and with fatally clear vision. It is fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott cannot turn over with Nancy that little shelf-full of memories--all the small places where she was not quite truthful with Nancy, where she was not quite fair, where she "kept things from her"--Mrs. Ellicott has always been the kind of woman who believes in "keeping things from" people as long as possible and then "breaking them gently." Almost any sort of things.

It is still more fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott cannot see Nancy's eyes as she reviews all the tiny deceptions, all the petty affairs about which she was never told or trusted--and all for her own best interests, my dear, Mrs. Ellicott would most believingly a.s.sure her--but when parents stand so much in Loco Dei to nearly all children--and when the children have long ago found out that their G.o.d is not only a jealous G.o.d but one that must be wheedled and propitiated like an early Jehovah because that is the only thing to be done with G.o.ds you can't trust--

Nancy doesn't _want_ to believe. She keeps telling herself that she won't, she absolutely won't unless she absolutely has to. But she is lucky or unlucky enough to be a person of some intuition--she knows Oliver, and, also, she knows her mother--though now she is beginning to think with an empty feeling that she really doesn't know the latter at all.

What facts there are are rather like Mrs. Ellicott's handwriting--vague and crossed and illegibly hard to read. But Nancy stares at them all the time that she is eating her breakfast and responding mechanically to Mrs. Winters' questions. And then, suddenly, she _knows_.

Mrs. Ellicott like many inexperienced criminals, has committed the deadly error of letting her mind dwell too long on the _mise-en-scene_ of her crime. And her pen--that tell-tale pen that all her life she has taken a delight almost sensual in letting run on from unwieldy sentence to pious formless sentence, has at last betrayed her completely. There is genuine tragedy in store for Mrs. Ellicott--Nancy in spite of being modern, is Nancy and will forgive her--but Nancy, for all her trying, will never quite be able to respect her again.

Nancy doesn't finish her breakfast as neatly as Mrs. Winters would have wished. She goes into the next room to telephone.

"Business, dear?" says Mrs. Winters brightly from the midst of a last piece of toast and "Yes--something Mother wants me to do" from Nancy, unfairly.

Then she gives the number--it is still the same number she and Oliver used when they used to talk after he had caught the last train back to Melgrove and both by all principles that make for the Life Efficient should have gone to bed--though to Nancy's mind that seems a great while ago. "Can I speak to Mrs. Crowe, please?" The explaining can be as awful as it likes, Nancy doesn't care any more. An agitated rustle comes to her ears--that must be Mrs. Winters listening.

"Mrs. Crowe? This--is--Nancy--Ellicott."

She says it very loudly and distinctly and for Mrs. Winters to hear.

XLVII

Oliver wakes around one o'clock with a dim consciousness that noisy crowds of people have been talking very loudly at him a good many too many times during the past few hours, but that he has managed to fool them, many or few, by always acting as much like a Body as possible. His chief wish is to turn over on the other side and sleep for another seven hours or so, but one of those people is standing respectfully beside his bed and though Oliver blinks eyes at him reproachfully, he will not vanish back into his proper nonent.i.ty--he remains standing there--obsequious words come out of his mouth.

"Ten minutes to one, sir. Lunch is at one, sir."

Oliver stares at the blue waistcoat gloomily. "What's that?"

"Ten minutes to one, sir. Lunch is at one, sir."

"Lunch?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then I'd better get up, I suppose. Ow-_ooh!_" as he stretches.

"Yes, sir. A bath, sir?" "Bath?"

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, yes, bath. No--don't bother--I mean, I'll take it myself. You needn't watch me."