Annie had a chair in a wing. Her small fur hat and trim suit had been selected for comfort; her knees were crossed, and she had a sheaf of songs, a pencil, and various note-books in her hands. She was alert, serious, authoritative; her manner expressed an anxious certainty that everything that could possibly go wrong was about to do so. Men protested jovially to Annie, girls whimpered and complained, maids delivered staggering messages into her ear. Annie frowningly yet sympathetically sent them all away, one by one; persisted that the rehearsal proceed. Never mind the hat, we could get along without the hat; never mind Dixie Jadwin, someone could read her part; never mind this, never mind that; go on, go on—we must get on!

At five o'clock she was very tired, and Norma, fully arrayed, was tired, too. The girl had been sitting on a barrel for almost an hour, patiently waiting for the tardy Mr. Roy Gillespie to arrive, and permit their particular song to be rehearsed. Everything that could be done in the way of telephoning had been done: Mr. Gillespie had left his office, he was expected momentarily at his home, he should be given the message immediately. Nothing to do but wait.

Suddenly Norma's heart jumped to her throat, began to hammer wildly. A man had come quietly in between her and Annie, and she heard the voice that echoed in her heart all day and all night. It was Chris.

He did not see her, perhaps did not recognize her in a casual glance, and began to talk to his sister-in-law in low, quick tones. Almost immediately Annie exclaimed in consternation, and called Norma.

"Norma! Chris tells me that poor old Mr. Gillespie died this afternoon. That's what's been the matter. What on earth are we to do now? I declare it's too much!"

Norma got off her barrel. The great lighted stage seemed to be moving about her as she went to join them.

What Chris saw strained his tried soul to its utmost of endurance. He had not permitted himself to look at her squarely for weeks. Now there was a new look, a look a little sad, a little wistfully expectant, in the lovely face. Her eyes burned deeply blue above the touch of rouge and the crimson lips. Her dark, soft hair fell in loose ringlets on her shoulders from under the absurd little tipped and veiled hat of the late seventies. Her gown, a flowered muslin, moved and tilted with a gentle, shaking majesty over hoop skirts, and was crossed on the low shoulders by a thin silk shawl whose long fringes were tangled in her mitted fingers. The white lace stockings began where the loose lace pantalettes stopped, and disappeared into flat-heeled kid slippers. Norma carried a bright nosegay in lace paper, and on her breast a thin gold locket hung on a velvet ribbon.

She herself had been completely captivated by the costume when Madame Modiste had first suggested it, and when the first fittings began. But that was weeks ago, and she was accustomed to it now, and conscious in this instant of nothing but Chris, conscious of nothing but the possibility that he would have a word or a smile, at last, for her.

"Stay right here, both of you—don't move a step—while I telephone Lucia Street!" said the harassed Annie, her eyes glittering with some desperate hope. She hurried away; they were alone.

"Poor old Roy—he adored his father!" Chris said, with dry lips, and in a rather unnatural voice. Norma, for one second, simulated mere sympathy. Then with a rush the pride and hurt that had sustained her ever since that weary September evening in the hotel lobby vanished, and she came close to Chris, so that the fragrance and sweetness of her enveloped him, and caught his coat with both her mitted hands, and raised her face imploringly, commandingly to his.

"Chris—for God's sake—what have I done? Don't you know—don't you know that you're killing me?"

He looked down at her, wretchedly. And suddenly Norma knew. Not that he liked her, not that she fascinated and interested him, not that they were friends. But that he loved her with every fibre of his being, even as she loved him.

The revelation carried her senses away with it upon a raging sea of emotion and ecstasy. He drew her into a dim corner of the wings, and put his arms about her, and her whole slender body, in its tilting hoops, strained backward under the passion and fury of his first embrace. Again and again his lips met hers, and she heard the incoherent outpouring of murmured words, and felt the storm that shook him as it was shaking her. Norma, after the first kiss, grew limp, let herself rest almost without movement in his arms, shut her eyes.

Reason came back to them slowly; the girl almost rocking upon her feet as the vertigo and bewilderment passed, and the man sustaining her with an arm about her shoulders, neither looking at the other. So several seconds, perhaps a full minute, went by, while the world settled into place about them; the dingy, unpainted wood of the wings, the near-by stage where absorbed groups of people were still coming and going, the distant gloom of the house.

"So now you know!" Chris said, breathlessly, panting, and looking away from her, with his hands hanging at his sides. "Now you know! I've tried to keep it from you! But now—now you know!"

Norma, also breathing hard, did not answer for a little space.

"I've known since that time we were in town, in September!" she said, almost defiantly. Chris looked toward her, surprised, and their eyes met. "I've known what was the matter with me," she added, thoughtfully, even frowning a little in her anxiety to make it all clear, "but I couldn't imagine what it was with you!"

But this brought him to face her, so close that she felt the same sense of drowning, of losing her footing, again.

"Chris—please!" she whispered, in terror.

"But, Norma—say it! Say that you love me—that's all that matters now! I've been losing my mind, I think. I've been losing my mind. Just that—that you do care!"

"I have——" Tears came to her lifted blue eyes, and she brushed them away without moving her gaze from him. "I think I have always loved you, Chris—from the very first," she whispered.

Instantly she saw his expression change. It was as if, with that revelation, a new responsibility began for him.

"Here, dear, you mustn't cry!" he said, composedly. He gave her his handkerchief, helped her set the tipped hat and lace veil straight, smiled reassurance and courage into her eyes. "I'll see you, Norma—we'll talk," he said. "Oh, my God, to talk to you again! Come, now, we'll have to be here when Annie comes back—that's right. I—I love the little gown—terribly sweet. I haven't seen it before, you know; my crowd has done all its rehearsing at Mrs. Hitchcock's. Here's Annie now——"

"Christopher," said Annie, in deadly, almost angry earnest, as she came up desperate and weary, "you'll have to sing this thing with Norma. Burgess Street absolutely refuses. He's in the chorus, and he sings, but he simply won't do a solo! His mother says he has a cold, and so on, and I swear I'll throw the whole thing up; I will, indeed!—rather than have this number ruined. There's no earthly reason why you can't do both—of course the poor old man couldn't help dying—but if you knew——"

"My dear girl, of course I'll do it!" All the youth and buoyancy that had been missing from his voice for weeks had come back. Christopher laughed his old delightful laugh. "I'll have to have Roy's costume cut down, but Smithers will do it for me. I'll do my very best——"

"Oh, Chris, God bless you," Annie said. "You'll do it better than he ever did. Take my car and stop for his suit, and express whatever's decent—the funeral will be Saturday morning and we'll all have to go, but there's no help for it. And come to my house for dinner, and you and Norma can go over it afterward; you poor girl, you're tired out, but it's such a Godsend to have Chris fill in. And it will be the prettiest number of all."

Tired out? The radiant girl who was tripping away to change to street attire was hardly conscious that her feet touched the ground. The stage, the theatre, the fur coat into which she buttoned herself, the fragrance of the violets she wore, were all touched with beauty and enchantment.

Snow was still falling softly, when she and Annie went out to the car. Annie was so exhausted that she could hardly move, but Norma floated above things mortal. The dark sidewalk was powdered with what scrunched under their shoes like dry sugar, and up against the lighted sky the flakes were twirling and falling. The air was sweet and cold and pure after the hot theatre. Chris put them in the motor-car. He would see his tailor, have a bite of dinner at home, and be at Annie's at eight o'clock for the rehearsal.

"I'll do something for you, for this, Norma!" her aunt assured the girl, gratefully. Norma protested in a voice that was almost singing. It was nothing at all!

She felt suddenly happy and light. It was all right; there was to be no more agony and doubt. Alice should lose nothing, the world should know nothing, but Chris loved her! She could take his friendship fearlessly, there would be nothing but what was good and beautiful and true between them. But what a changed world!

What a changed room it was into which she danced, to brush her hair for dinner, and laugh into her mirror, where the happy girl with starry eyes and blazing cheeks laughed back. What a changed dinner table, at which the old lady drowsed and cooed! Norma's blood was dancing, her head was in a whirl, she was hardly conscious that this soaring and singing soul of hers had a body.

At eight she and Mrs. Melrose went to Mrs. von Behrens's, and Norma and Chris went through the song again and again and again, for the benefit of a small circle of onlookers. Hendrick, who had sworn that wild horses would not drag him to the entertainment, sat with a small son in his lap, and applauded tirelessly. Annie criticized and praised alternately. Mrs. Melrose went to sleep, and Annie's new secretary, a small, lean, dark girl of perhaps twenty-two, passionately played the music. Norma knew exactly how this girl felt, how proud she was of her position, how anxious to hold it, and how infinitely removed from her humble struggle the beautiful Miss Sheridan seemed! Yet she herself had been much the same less than two years ago!

Norma could have laughed aloud. She envied no one to-night. The mystery and miracle of Chris's love for her was like an ermine mantle about her shoulders, and like a diadem upon her brows. Annie was delighted with her, and presently told her she had never before sung so well.

"I suppose practice makes perfect!" the girl answered, innocently. She was conscious of no hypocrisy. No actress enjoying a long-coveted part could have rejoiced in every word and gesture more than she. Just to move, under his eyes, to laugh or to be serious, to listen dutifully to Annie and the old lady, to flirt with Baby Piet, was ecstasy enough.

They had small opportunity for asides. But that was of no consequence. All the future was their own. They would see each other to-morrow—or next day; it did not matter. Norma's hungry heart had something to remember, now—a very flood-tide of memories. She could have lived for weeks upon this one day's memories.

Norma and Chris were placed toward the centre of the first half of the programme on the triumphant Saturday night, and could escape from the theatre before eleven o'clock to go home to tell Alice all about it. Chris played the song, on his own piano, and Norma modestly and charmingly went through it again, to the invalid's great satisfaction. Alice, when Norma and her mother were gone, tried to strike a spark of enthusiasm from her husband as to the girl's beauty and talent, but Chris was pleasantly unresponsive.

"She got through it very nicely; they all did!" Chris admitted, indifferently.

"When you think of the upbringing she had, Chris, a little nameless nobody," Alice pursued. "When you think that until last year she had actually never seen a finger-bowl, or spoken to a servant!"

"Exactly!" Chris said, briefly. Alice, who was facing the fire, did not see him wince. She was far from suspecting that he had at that moment a luncheon engagement for the next day with Norma, and that during the weeks that followed they met by appointment almost every day, and frequently by chance more often than that.



CHAPTER XXII

In the beginning, these were times brimful of happiness for Norma. She would meet Chris far down town, among the big, cold, snowbound office-buildings, and they would loiter for two hours at some inconspicuous table in a restaurant, and come wandering out into the cold streets still talking, absorbed and content. Or she would rise before him from a chair in one of the foyers of the big hotels, at tea time, and they would find an unobserved corner for the murmur that rose and fell, rose and fell inexhaustibly. Tea and toast unobserved before them, music drifting unheard about them, furred and fragrant women coming and going; all this was but the vague setting for their own thrilling drama of love and confidence. They would come out into the darkness, Norma tucking herself beside him in the roadster, last promises and last arrangements made, until to-morrow.

Sometimes the girl even accompanied him to Alice's room, to sit at the invalid's knee, and chatter with a tact and responsiveness that Alice found an improvement upon her old amusing manner. So free was Norma in these days from any sense of guilt that she felt herself nothing but generous toward Alice, in sparing the older woman some of the excess of joy and companionship in which she was so rich.

But very swiftly the first complete satisfaction in the discovery of their mutual love began to wane, or rather to be overset with the difficulties by which Norma, and many another more brilliant and older woman, must inevitably be worsted. Her meetings with Chris, innocent and open as they seemed, were immediately threatened by the sordid danger of scandal. To meet him once, twice, half-a-dozen times, even, was safe enough. But when each day of separation became for them both only an agony of waiting until the next day that should unite them, and when all Norma's self-control was not enough to keep her from the telephone summons that at least gave her the sound of his voice, then the world began to be cognizant that something was in the air.

The very maids at Mrs. Melrose's house knew that Miss Sheridan was never available any more, never to be traced to the club, to young Mrs. Liggett's, or to Mrs. von Behrens's house, with a telephone message or an urgent letter. Leslie knew that Norma hated girls' luncheons; Annie asked Hendrick idly why he supposed the child was always taking long walks—or saying that she took long walks—and Hendrick, later speculating himself as to the inaccessibility of Chris, was perhaps the first in the group to suspect the truth.

A quite accidental and innocent hint from Annie overwhelmed Norma with shame and terror, and she and Chris, in earnest consultation, decided that they must be more discreet. But this was slow and difficult work, after the radiant first plunge into danger. Despite their utmost resolution, Chris would find her out, Norma would meet him halfway, and even under Leslie's very eyes, or in old Mrs. Melrose's actual presence, the telephone message, or the quicker signals of eyes and smile, would forge the bond afresh.

Even when Norma really did start off heroically upon a bracing winter walk, determined to shake off, in solitude and exercise, the constant hunger for his presence, torturing possibilities would swarm into her mind, and weaken her almost while she thought them banished. She could catch him at his club; she might have just five minutes of him did she choose to telephone.

Perhaps she would resist the temptation, and go home nervous, high-strung, excitable—the evening stretching endlessly before her—without him. Aunt Annie and Hendrick coming, Leslie and Acton coming, the prospect of the decorous family dinner would drive her almost to madness. She would dress in a feverish dream, answer old Mrs. Melrose absently or impatiently, speculating all the time about him. Where was he? When would they meet again?

And then perhaps Leslie would casually remark that Chris had said he would join them for coffee, or Joseph would summon her gravely to the telephone. Then Norma began to live again, the effect of the lonely walk and the heroic resolutions swept away, nothing—nothing was in the world but the sound of that reassuring voice, or the prospect of that ring at the bell, and that step in the hall.

So matters went on for several weeks, but they were weeks of increasing uneasiness and pain for Norma, and she knew that Chris found them even less endurable than she. The happy hours of confidence and happiness grew fewer and fewer, and as their passion strengthened, and the insuperable obstacles to its natural development impressed them more and more forcibly, miserable and anxious times took their place. Their love was no sooner acknowledged than both came to realize how mad and hopeless it was, and that no reiteration of its intensity and no argument could ever give them a gleam of hope.

If Norma had drifted cheerfully and recklessly into this situation, she paid for it now, when petty restrictions and conventions stung her like so many bees, and when she could turn nowhere for relief from constant heartache and the sickening monotony of her thoughts. She could not have Chris; she could not give him up. Hours with him were only a degree more bearable than hours without him.

When he spoke hopefully of a possible change, of "something" making their happiness possible, she would turn on him like a little virago. Yet if he despaired, tears would come to Norma's eyes, and she would beg him almost angrily to change his tone, or she would disgrace them both by beginning to cry.

Norma grew thin and fidgety, able to concentrate her mind on nothing, and openly indifferent to the society she had courted so enthusiastically a year ago. It was a part of her suffering that she grew actually to dislike Alice, always so suave and cheerful, always so serenely sure of Chris's devotion. What right had this woman, who had been rich and spoiled and guarded all her life, to hold him away from the woman he loved? Chris had been chained to this couch for years, reading, playing his piano, infinitely solicitous and sympathetic. But was he to spend all his life thus? Was there to be no glorious companionship, no adventure, no deep and satisfying love for Chris, ever in this world? Norma wished no ill to Alice, but she hated a world that could hold Alice's claim legitimate.

"Why should it be so?" she said to Chris one day, bitterly. "Why, when all my life was going so happily, did I have to fall in love with you, I wonder? It could so easily have been somebody else!"

"I don't know!" Chris answered, soberly, flinging away his half-finished cigarette, and folding his arms over his chest, as he stared through a screen of bare trees at the river. It was a March day of warm airs and bursting buds; the roads were running water, and every bank and meadow oozed the thawing streams, but there was no green yet. Chris had come for the girl at three o'clock, just as she was starting out for one of her aimless, unhappy tramps, and had carried her off for a twenty-five-mile run to the quiet corner of the tavern's porch in Tarrytown where they were having tea. "I suppose that's just life. Things go so rottenly, sometimes!"

Norma's eyes watered as she pushed the untasted toast away from her, cupped her chin in her hands, and stared at the river in her turn.

"Chris, if I could go back, I think I'd never speak to you!" she said, wretchedly.

"You mustn't say that," he reproached her. "My darling; surely it's brought you some happiness?"

"I suppose so," Norma conceded, lifelessly, after a silence. "But I can't go on!" she protested, suddenly. "I can't keep this up! I suppose I've done something very wicked, to be punished this way. But, Chris, I loved you from the very first day I ever saw you, in Biretta's Bookstore, I think. I can't sleep," she stammered, piteously, "and I am so afraid all the time!"

"Afraid of what?" the man asked, very low.

She faced him, honestly.

"You know what! Of you—of me. It can't go on. You know that. And yet——" And Norma looked far away, her beautiful weary eyes burning in her white face. "And yet, I can't stop it!" she whispered.

"Oh, Chris, don't let's fool ourselves!" she interrupted his protest impatiently. "Weeks ago, weeks ago!—we said that we would see each other less, that it would taper off. We tried. It's no use! If we were in different cities—in different families, even! I tell myself that it will grow less and less," she added presently, as the man watched her in silence, "but oh, my God!—how long the years ahead look!"

And Norma put her head down on the table, pressed her white fingers suddenly against her eyes with a gesture infinitely desolate and despairing, and he knew that she was in tears. Then there was a long silence.

"Look here, Norma," said Chris, suddenly, in a quiet, reasonable tone. "I am thirty-eight. I've had affairs several times in my life, two or three before I married Alice, two or three since. They've never been very serious, never gone very deep. When we were married I was twenty-four. I know women like to pretend that I'm an awful killer when I get going," he interrupted himself to say boyishly, "but there was really never anything of that sort in my life. I liked Alice, I remember my mother talking to me a long time, and telling me how pleased everyone would be if we came to care for each other, and—upon my honour!—I was more surprised than anything else, to think that any one so pretty and sweet would marry me! I don't think there's a woman in the world that I admire more. But, Norma, I've lived her life for ten years. I want my own now! I want my companion—my chum—my wife. I've played with women since I was seventeen. But I never loved any woman before. Norma, there's no life ahead for me, without you. And there's no place so far—so lonely—so strange—but what it would be heaven for me if you were there, looking at me as you are now, and with this little hand where it belongs! My dear, the city is a blank—the men I meet might just as well be wooden Indians; I can't breathe and I can't eat or sleep. Get better? It gets worse! It can't go on!"

She was crying again. They were almost alone now. A red spring sun was sinking, far down the river, and all the world—the opposite shores, the running waters of the Hudson—was bathed in the exquisite glow. Norma fumbled with her left hand for her little handkerchief, her right hand clinging tight to Chris's hand.

"Now, Norma, I've been thinking," the man said, in a matter-of-fact tone, after a pause. "The first consideration is, that this sort of thing can't go on!"

"No; this can't go on!" she agreed, quickly. "Every day makes it more dangerous, and less satisfying! I never"—her eyes watered again—"I never have a happy second!" she said.

Chris looked at her, looked thoughtfully away.

"The great trouble with the way I feel to you, Norma," he said, quietly, "is that it seems to blot every other earthly consideration from view. I see nothing, I think nothing, I hear nothing—but you!"

"And is that so terrible?" Norma asked, touched, and smiling through tears.

"No, it is so wonderful," he answered, gravely, "that it blinds me. It blinds me to your youth, my dear, your inexperience—your faith in me! It makes me only remember that I need you—and want you—and that I believe I could make you the happiest woman in the world!"

The faint shadow of a frown crossed her forehead, and she slowly shook her head.

"Not divorce!" she said, lightly, but inflexibly. They had been over this ground before. "No, there's no use in thinking of that! Even if it were not for Aunt Alice, and Aunt Marianna, other things make it impossible. You see that, Chris? Yes, I know!"—she interrupted herself quickly, as Chris protested, "I know what plenty of good people, and the law, and society generally think. But of course it would mean that we could not live here for awhile, anyway! No—that's not thinkable!"

"No, that's not thinkable," he agreed, slowly; "I am bound hand and foot. It isn't only what Alice—as a wife—claims from me. But there are Acton and Leslie; there is hardly a month that my brother doesn't propose some plan that would utterly wreck their affairs if I didn't put my foot down. They're both absolute children in money matters; Judge Lee is getting old—there's no one to take my place. Your Aunt Marianna, too; I've always managed everything for her. No; I'm tied."

His voice fell. For awhile they sat silent, in the lingering, cool spring twilight, while the red glow faded slowly from the river, and from the opposite banks where houses and roofs showed between the bare trees.

"But what can we do, Norma? I've tried—I've tried a thousand times, to see the future, without you. But I simply can't go on living on those terms. There's nothing—nothing—nothing! I go to the piano, and before I touch a note, the utter blank futility of it comes over me and sickens me! It's the same in the office, and at the club; I seem to be only half alive. If it could be even five years ahead—or ten years ahead—I would wait. But it's never—never. No hope—nothing to live for! Life is simply over—only one doesn't die."

The girl had never heard quite this note of despair from him before, and her heart sank.

"You are young," he said, after a minute, and in a lighter tone, "and perhaps—some day——"

"No, don't believe that, Chris," Norma said, quietly. And with a gesture full of pain she leaned her elbow on the table, and pressed her hand across her eyes. "There will never be anybody else!" she said. "How could there be? You are the only person—like yourself!—that I have ever known!"

The simplicity of her words, almost their childishness, made Chris's eyes smart. He bit his lips, trying to smile.

"It's too bad, isn't it?" he said, whimsically.

Norma flung back her head, swallowing tears. She gathered gloves and hand-bag, got to her feet. He followed her as she walked across the darkening porch. They went down to the curving sweep of driveway where the car waited, the big lighted eyes of other cars picking it out in the gloom. The saturated ground gave under Norma's feet, the air was soft and full of the odorous promise of blossom and leaf. A great star was trembling in the opal sky, which still palpitated, toward the horizon, with the pale pink and blue of the sunset. Dry branches clicked above their heads, in a sudden soft puff of breeze.

Norma, as she tucked herself in beside Chris, felt emotionally exhausted, felt a sudden desperate need for solitude and silence. The world seemed a lonely and cruel place.

Almost without a word he drove her home, to the old Melrose house, and came in with her to the long, dim drawing-room for a brief good-night. He had not kissed her more than two or three times since the memorable night of the dress rehearsal, but he kissed her to-night, and Norma felt something solemn, something renunciatory, in the kiss.

They had but an unsatisfactory two or three minutes together; Mrs. Melrose might descend upon them at any second, was indeed audible in the hall when Chris said suddenly:

"You are not as brave—as your mother, Norma!"

She met his eyes with something like terror in her own; standing still, a few feet away from him, with her breath coming and going stormily.

"No," she said in a sharp whisper. "Not that!"

A moment later she was flying upstairs, her blue eyes still dilated with fright, her face pale, and her senses rocking. Unseeing, unhearing, she reached her own room, paced it distractedly, moving between desk and dressing-table, window and bed, like some bewildered animal. Sometimes she put her two hands over her face, the spread fingers pressed against her forehead. Sometimes she stood perfectly still, arms hanging at her sides, eyes blankly staring ahead. Once she dropped on her knees beside the bed, and buried her burning cheeks against the delicate linen and embroideries.

Regina came in; Norma made a desperate attempt to control herself. She saw a gown laid on the bed, heard bath water running, faced her own haggard self in the mirror, as she began dressing. But when the maid was gone, and Norma, somewhat pale, but quite self-possessed again, was dressed for dinner, she lifted from its place on her book-shelf a little picture of Chris and herself, taken the summer before, and studied it with sorrowful eyes.

He had been teaching her to ride, and Norma was radiant and sun-browned in her riding-trousers and skirted coat, her cloud of hair loosened, and her smart little hat in one hand. Chris, like all well-built men, was always at his best in sports clothes; the head of his favourite mare looked mildly over his shoulder. Behind the group stretched the exquisite reaches of bridle-path, the great trees heavy with summer foliage and heat.

Norma touched her lips to the glass.

"Chris—Chris—Chris!" she said, half aloud. "I love you so—and I have brought you, of all men, to this! To the point when you would throw it all aside—everything your wonderful and generous life has stood for—for me! God," said Norma, softly, putting the picture down, and covering her face with her hands, "don't let me do anything that will hurt him and shame him; help me! Help us both!"

A few minutes later she went down to dinner, which commenced auspiciously, with the old lady in a gracious and expansive mood, and her guests, old Judge Lee and his wife, and old Doctor and Mrs. Turner, sufficiently intimate, and sufficiently reminiscent, to absolve Norma from any conversational duty. The girl could follow her own line of heroic and resolute thought uninterruptedly.

But with the salad came utter rout again, and Norma's colour, and heart, and breath, began to fluctuate in a renewed agony of hope and fear. It was only Joseph, leaning deferentially over Judge Lee's shoulder, who said softly:

"Mr. Christopher Liggett, Judge. He has telephoned that he would like to see you for a moment after dinner, and will be here at about nine o'clock."

The dinner went on, for Norma, in a daze. At a quarter to nine she went upstairs; she was standing in the dark upper hallway at the window when Chris came, saw him leave his car, and come quickly across the sidewalk under the bare, moving boughs of the old maples. She was trembling with the longing just to speak to him again, just to hear his voice.

She went to her room, rang for Regina, meditating a message of good-night that should include a headache as excuse. But before the maid came she went quickly downstairs, and into his presence, as instinctively as a drowning man might cling to anything that meant air—just the essential air. They could not exchange a word alone, but that was not important. The one necessity was to be together.

Before ten o'clock Norma went back to her room. She undressed, and put on a loose warm robe, and seated herself before the old-fashioned fireplace. When Regina came, she asked the girl to put out all the lights.

Voices floated up from the front hall: the great entrance door closed, the motors wheeled away. The guests were gone—Chris was gone. Norma heard old Mrs. Melrose come upstairs, heard her door shut, then there was silence.

Silence. Eleven struck from Madison Tower; midnight struck. Even the streets were quieter now. The squares of moonlight shifted on Norma's floor, went away. The fire died down, the big room was warm, and dim, and very still.

Hugged in her warm wrap, curled into her big chair, the girl sat like some tranced creature, thinking—thinking—thinking.

At first her thoughts were of terror and shame. In what fool's paradise had she been drifting, she asked herself contemptuously, that she and Chris, reasonable, right-thinking man and woman, could be reduced to this fearful and wretched position, could even consider—even name—what their sane senses must shrink from in utter horror! Norma was but twenty-two, but she knew that there was only one end to that road.

So that way was closed, even to the brimming tide that rose up in her when she thought of it, and flooded her whole being with the ecstatic realization of her love for Chris, and of what surrender to him would mean.

That way was closed. She must tell herself over and over. For her own sake, for the sake of Aunt Kate and Aunt Marianna, for Rose even, she must not think of that. Above all, for his sake—for Chris, the fine, good, self-sacrificing Chris of her first friendship, she must be strong.

And Norma, at this point in her circling and confused thoughts, would drop her face in the crook of her bent arm, and the tears would brim over again and again. She was not strong. She could not be strong. And she was afraid.



CHAPTER XXIII

Regina, coming through the hallway at seven o'clock, was amazed to encounter Miss Sheridan, evidently fresh from a bath, a black hat tipped over her smiling eyes, and her big fur coat belted about her. Norma's vigil had lasted until after two o'clock, but then she had had four hours of restful sleep, for she knew that she had found the way.

She left a message with Regina for Mrs. Melrose; she was going to Mrs. Sheridan's, and would telephone in a day or two. Smiling, she slipped out into the quiet street, where the autumn sunlight was just beginning to strike across the damp pavements, and smilingly she disappeared into the great currents of men and women who were already pouring to and fro along the main thoroughfares.

But she did not go quite as far as her aunt's, after all. For perhaps fifteen minutes she waited on the corner of the block, walking slowly to and fro, watching the house closely.

Then Wolf Sheridan came out, and set off at his usual brisk walk toward the subway. Norma stepped before him, trembling and smiling.

"Nono—for the Lord's sake! Where did you come from?"

He took her suit-case from her as she caught his arm, drew him aside, and looked up at him with her old childish air of coaxing.

"Wolf——! I've been waiting for you. Wolf, I'm in trouble!" She laughed at his concern. "Not real trouble!" she reassured him, quickly. "But—but——"

And suddenly tears came, and she found she could not go on.

"Is it a man?" Wolf asked, looking down at her with everything that was brotherly and kind in his young face.

"Yes," Norma answered, not raising her eyes from the overcoat button that she was pushing in and out of its hold. "Wolf," she added, quickly, "I'm afraid of him, and afraid of myself! You—you told me months ago——" She looked up, suffocating.

"I know what I told you!" Wolf said, clearing his throat.

"And—do you still feel—that way?"

"You know I do, Norma," Wolf said, more concerned for her emotion than his own. "Do you—do you want me to send this—this fellow about his business?"

"Oh, no!" she said, laughing nervously. "I don't want any one to know it; nobody must dream it! I can't marry him, I shall never marry him. But—he won't let me alone. Wolf——" She seemed to herself to be getting no nearer her point, and now she seized her courage in both hands, and looked up at him bravely. "Will you—take care of me?" she faltered. "I mean—I mean as your wife?"

"Do you mean——" Wolf began. Then his expression changed, and his colour rose. "Norma—you don't mean that!"

"Yes, but I do!" she said, exquisite and flushed and laughing, in the sweet early sunlight.

"You mean that you will marry me?" Wolf asked, dazedly.

"To-day!" she answered, fired by his look of awe and amazement and rapture all combined. "I want to be safe," she added, quickly. "I trust you more than any other man I know—I've loved you like a little sister all my life."

"Ah—Norma, you darling—you darling!" he said. "But are you sure?"

"Oh, quite sure!" Norma turned him toward Broadway, her little arm linked wife-fashion in his. "Don't we go along together nicely?" she asked, gaily.

"Norma—my God! If you knew how I love you—how I've longed for you! But I can't believe it; I never will believe it! What made you do it?"

Her face sobered for a second.

"Just needing you, I suppose! Wolf"—her colour rose—"I want you to know who it is; it's Chris."

"Who—the man who annoys you?" Wolf asked in healthy distaste.

"The man I'm afraid of," she answered, honestly.

"But—Lord!" Wolf exclaimed, simply, "he has a wife!"

"I know it!" the girl said, quickly. "But I wanted you to know. I want you to know why I'm running away from them all." Relief rang in her voice as his delighted eyes showed no cloud. "That's all!" she said.

"Norma, I can't—my God!—I can't tell whether I'm awake or dreaming!" Wolf was all joy again. "We'll—wait a minute!—we'll get a taxi; I'll telephone the factory later——" He paused suddenly. "Mother's in East Orange with Rose. Shall we go there first?"

"No; you're to do as I say from now on, Wolf!"

"Ah, you darling!"

"And I say let's be married first, and then go and see Rose."

"Norma——" He stopped in the street, and put his two hands on her shoulders. "I'll be a good husband to you. You'll never be sorry you trusted me. Dearest, it's—well, it's the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my whole life! Here's our taxi—wait a minute; what day is this?"

"Whatever else it is," she said, half-laughing and half-crying, "I know it is my wedding day!"



CHAPTER XXIV

To Rose and her mother, Wolf's and Norma's marriage remained one of the beautiful surprises of life; one of the things that, as sane mortals, they had dared neither to dream nor hope. Life had been full enough for mother and daughter, and sweet enough, that March morning, even without the miracle. The baby had been bathed, in a flood of dancing sunshine, and had had his breakfast out under the budding bare network of the grape arbour. The little house had been put into spotless order while he slept, and Rose had pinned on her winter hat, and gone gaily to market, with exactly one dollar and seventy-five cents in her purse. And she had come back to find her mother standing beside the shabby baby-coach, in the tiny backyard, looking down thoughtfully at the sleeping child, and evidently under the impression that she was peeling the apples, in the yellow bowl that rested on her broad hip. Rose had also studied her son for a few awed seconds, and then, reminding her mother that it was past twelve o'clock, had led the way toward tea-making, and the general heating and toasting and mincing of odds and ends for luncheon. And they had been in the kitchen, talking over the last scraps of this meal, when——

When there had been laughter and voices at the open front doorway, and when Mrs. Sheridan's startled "Wolf!" had been followed by Rose's surprised "Norma!" Then they had come in, Wolf and Norma, laughing and excited and bubbling with their great news. And in joy and tears, confused interruptions and exclamations, explanations that got nowhere, and a plentiful distribution of kisses, somehow it got itself told. They had been married an hour ago—Norma was Wolf's wife!

The girl was radiant. Never in her life had these three who loved her seen her so beautiful, so enchantingly confident and gay. Rose and her mother had some little trouble, later on, in patching the sequence of events together for the delighted but bewildered Harry, Rose's husband. But there could be no doubt, even to the shrewd eyes of her Aunt Kate, that Norma was ecstatically happy. Her mad kisses for Rose, the laughter with which she described the expedition to bank and jeweller, the license bureau and the church in Jersey City—for in order to have the ceremony performed immediately it had been necessary to be married in New Jersey—her delicious boldness toward the awed and rapturous and almost stupefied Wolf, were all proof that she entertained not even the usual girlish misgivings of the wedding day.

"You see, I've not been all tired out with trousseau and engagement affairs and photographers and milliners and all that," she explained, gaily. "I've only got what's in my bag there, but I've wired Aunt Marianna, and told her to tell them all. And we'll be back on Monday—wait until I ask my husband; Wolftone, dear, shall we be back on Monday?"

She had the baby in her lap; they were all in the dining-room. Rose had been assured that the bride and groom were not hungry; they had had sandwiches somewhere—some time—oh, down near the City Hall in Jersey City. But Rose had made more tea, and more toast, and she had opened her own best plum jam, and they were all eating with the heartiness of children. Presently Norma went to get in Aunt Kate's lap, and asked her if she was glad, and made herself so generally engaging and endearing, with her slender little body clasped in the big motherly arms and her soft face resting against the older, weather-beaten face, that Wolf did not dare to look at her.

They were going to Atlantic City; neither had ever been there, and if this warm weather lasted it would be lovely, even in early spring. It was almost four o'clock when the younger women went upstairs for the freshening touches that Norma declared she needed, and then Wolf and his mother were left alone.

He knelt down beside the big rocker in which she was ensconced with the baby, and she put one arm about him, and kissed the big thick crest of his brown hair.

"You're glad, aren't you, Mother?"

"Glad! I've prayed for it ever since she came to me, years ago," Mrs. Sheridan answered. But after a moment she added, gravely: "She's pure gold, our Norma. They've sickened her, just as I knew they would! But, Wolf, she may swing back for a little while. She's like that; she always has been. She was no more than a baby when she'd be as naughty as she could be, and then so good that I was afraid I was going to lose her. Go gently with her, Wolf; be patient with her, dear. She's going to make a magnificent woman, some day."

"She's a magnificent woman, now," the man said, simply. "She's too good for me, I know that. She's—you can't think how cunning she is—how wonderful she's been, all day!"

"Go slowly," his mother said again. "She's only a baby, Wolf; she's excited and romantic and generous because she's such a baby! Don't make her sorry that she's given herself to you so—so trusting——"

She hesitated.

"I'll take care of her!" Wolf asserted, a little gruffly.

There was time for no more; they heard her step on the stairs, and she came dancing back with Rose. Her cheeks were burning with excitement; she gave her aunt and cousin quick good-bye kisses, and caught the baby's soft little cheek to her own velvety one. She and Wolf would be back on Sunday night, they promised; as they ran down the path the sun slipped behind a leaden cloud, and all the world darkened suddenly. A brisk whirl of springtime wind shook the rose bushes in Rose's little garden, and there was a cool rushing in the air that promised rain.

But Norma was still carried along on the high tide of supreme emotion, and to Wolf the day was radiant with unearthly sunshine, and perfumed with all the flowers of spring. The girl had flung herself so wholeheartedly into her role that it was not enough to bewilder and please Wolf, she must make him utterly happy. Dear old Wolf—always ready to protect her, always good and big and affectionate, and ready to laugh at her silliest jokes, and ready to meet any of her problems sympathetically and generously. Her beauty, her irresistible charm as she hung on his arm and chattered of what they would do when they started housekeeping, almost dizzied him.

She liked everything: their wheeling deep upholstered seats in the train; the seaside hotel, with the sea rolling so near in the soft twilight; the dinner for which they found themselves so hungry. Afterward they climbed laughing into a big chair, and were pushed along between the moving lines of other chairs, far up the long boardwalk. And Norma, with her soft loose glove in Wolf's big hand, leaned back against the curved wicker seat, and looked at the little lighted shops, and listened to the scrape of feet and chatter of tongues and the solemn roll and crash of the waves, and stared up childishly at the arch of stars that looked so far and calm above this petty noise and glare. She was very tired, every muscle in her body ached, but she was content. Wolf was taking care of her and there would be no more lonely vigils and agonies of indecision and pain. She thought of Christopher with a sort of childish quiet triumph; she had solved the whole matter for them both, superbly.

Wolf was a silent man with persons he did not know. But he never was silent with Norma; he always had a thousand things to discuss with her. The lights and the stir on the boardwalk inspired him to all sorts of good-natured criticism and speculation, and they estimated just the expense and waste that went on there day by day.

"Really to have the ocean, Wolf, it would be so much nicer to be even in the wildest place—just rocks and coves. This is like having a lion in your front parlour!"

"Lord, Norma—when I got up this morning, if somebody had told me that I would be married, and down at Atlantic City to-night——!"

"I know; it's like a dream!"

"But you're not sorry, Norma; you're sure that I'm going to make you happy?" the man asked, in sudden anxiety.

"You always have, Wolf!" she answered, very simply.

He never really doubted it; it was a part of Wolf's healthy normal nature to believe what was good and loving. He was not exacting, not envious; he had no real understanding of her giddy old desires for wealth and social power. Wolf at twenty-five was working so hard and so interestedly, sleeping so deeply, eating his meals with such appetite, and enjoying his rare idle time so heartily, that he had neither time nor inclination for vagaries. He had always been older than his years, schooled to feel that just good meals and a sure roof above him marked him as one of the fortunate ones of the earth, and of late his work in the big factory had been responsible enough, absorbing enough, and more than gratifying enough to satisfy him with his prospects. He was liked for himself, and he knew it, and he was already known for that strange one-sightedness, that odd little twist of mechanical vision, that sure knowledge of himself and his medium, that is genius. The joy of finding himself, and that the world needed him, had been strong upon Wolf during the last few months, and that Norma had come back to him seemed only a reason for fresh dedication to his work, an augury that life was going to be kind to him.

She was gone when he wakened the next morning, but he knew that the sea had an irresistible fascination for her, and followed her quite as surely as if she had left footprints on the clear and empty sands. He found her with her back propped against a low wooden bulkhead, her slender ankles crossed before her, her blue eyes fixed far out at sea.

She turned, and looked up at him from under the brim of her hat, and the man's heart turned almost sick with the depth of sudden adoration that shook him; so young, so friendly and simple and trusting was the ready smile, so infinitely endearing the touch of the warm fingers she slipped into his! He sat down beside her, and they dug their heels into the sand, and talked in low tones. The sun shone down on them kindly, and the waves curved and broke, and came rushing and slithering to their feet, and slid churning and foaming noisily under the pier near by. Norma buried her husband's big hand in sand, and sifted sand through her slender fingers; sometimes she looked with her far-away look far out across the gently rocking ocean, and sometimes she brought her blue eyes gravely to his. And the new seriousness in them, the grave and noble sweetness that he read there, made Wolf suddenly feel himself no longer a boy, no longer free, but bound for ever to this exquisite and bewildering child who was a woman, or woman who was a child, sacredly bound to give her the best that there was in him of love and service and protection.

She showed him a new Norma, here on the sunshiny sands, one that he was to know better as the days went by. She had always deferred to his wisdom and his understanding, but she seemed to him mysteriously wise this morning—no longer the old little sister Norma, but a new, sage, keen-eyed woman, toward whom his whole being was flooded with humility and awe and utter, speechless adoration.

At nine o'clock, when nurses and children began to come down to the shore, they got to their feet, and wandered in to breakfast. And here, to his delight, she was suddenly the old mad-cap Norma again, healthily eager for ham and eggs and hot coffee, interested in everything, and bewitchingly pretty in whatever position she took.

"I wish we had the old 'bus, Nono," Wolf said. He usually spoke of his motor-car by this name. "They've been overhauling her in that Newark place. She was to be ready—by George, she was ready yesterday!"

"We'll go over—I'll come over and meet you next Saturday," his young wife promised, busy with rolls and marmalade, "and you'll take me to lunch, and then we'll get the car, and go and take Rose and the baby for a ride!"

"Norma," the man exclaimed, suddenly struck with a sense of utter felicity, and leaning across the table to stop, for the minute, her moving fingers with the pressure of his own, "you haven't any idea how much I love you—I didn't know myself what it was going to mean! To have you come over to the factory, and to have somebody say that Mrs. Sheridan is there, and to go to lunch—Dearest, do you realize how wonderful and how—well, how wonderful it's going to be? Norma, I can't believe it. I can't believe that this is what love means to everybody. I can't believe that every man who marries his—his——"

"Girl," she supplied, laughing.

"Girl—but I didn't mean girl. I meant his ideal—the loveliest person he ever knew," Wolf said, with a new quickness of tongue that she knew was born of happiness. "I can't believe that just going to Childs' restaurants, or taking the car out on Sunday, or any other fool thing we do, means to any man what it's going to mean to me! I just—well, I told you that. I just can't believe it!"

Two days later they came home for Sunday supper, and there was much simple joy and laughter in the little city apartment. Aunt Kate of course had fried chicken and coffee ice-cream for her four big children. Harry Junior, awakening, was brought dewy and blinking to the table, where his Aunt Norma kissed the tears from his warm, round little cheeks, and gave him crumbs of sponge cake. Rose and Harry left at ten o'clock for their country home, leaving the precious baby for his grandmother and aunt to bring back the next day, but the other three sat talking and planning until almost midnight, and Kate could feast her eyes to her heart's content upon the picture of Wolf in his father's old leather chair, with Norma perched on the wide arm, one of her own arms about her husband's neck and their fingers locked together.

It was settled that they were to find a little house in East Orange, near Rose, and furnish it from top to bottom, and go to housekeeping immediately. Meanwhile, Norma must see the Melroses, and get her wedding announcements engraved, and order some new calling cards, and do a thousand things. She and Wolf must spend their evenings writing notes—and presents would be arriving——!

She made infinitesimal lists, and put them into her shopping bag, or stuck them in her mirror, but Wolf laughed at them all. And instead of disposing of them, they developed a demoralizing habit of wandering out into Broadway, in their old fashion, after dinner, looking into shop windows, drifting into little theatres, talking to beggars and taxi-cab men and policemen and strangers generally, mingling with the bubbling young life of the city that overflowed the sidewalks, and surged in and out of candy and drug stores, and sat talking on park benches deep into the soft young summer nights.

Sometimes they went down to the shrill and crowded streets of the lower east side, and philosophized youthfully over what they saw there; and, as the nights grew heavier and warmer, they often took the car, and skimmed out into the heavenly green open spaces of the park, or, on Saturday afternoon, packed their supper, and carried it fifty miles away to the woods or the shore.



CHAPTER XXV

Before she had been married ten days Norma dutifully went to call upon old Mrs. Melrose, being fortunate enough to find Leslie there. The old lady came toward Norma with her soft old wavering footsteps, and gave the girl a warm kiss even with her initial rebuke:

"Well, I don't know whether I am speaking to this bad runaway or not!" she quavered, releasing Norma from her bejewelled and lace-draped embrace, and shaking her fluffed and scanty gray hair.

"Oh, yes, you are, Aunt Marianna," the girl said, confidently, with her happy laugh. Leslie, coming more slowly forward, laughed and kissed her, too.

"But why didn't you tell us, Norma, and have a regular wedding, like mine?" she protested. "I didn't know that you and your cousin were even engaged!"

"We've worked it out that we were engaged for exactly three hours and ten minutes," Norma said, as they all settled down in the magnificent, ugly, comfortable old sitting-room for tea. She could see that both Leslie and her grandmother were far from displeased. As a matter of fact, the old lady was secretly delighted. The girl was most suitably and happily and satisfactorily married; justice had been done her, and she had solved her own problem splendidly.

"But you knew he liked you," Leslie ventured, diverted and curious.

"Oh, well——" Norma's lips puckered mischievously and she looked down.

"Oh, you were engaged!" Leslie said, incredulously. "He's handsome, isn't he, Norma?"

"Yes," the wife admitted, as if casually. "He really is—at least I think so. And I think everyone else thinks so. At least, when I compare him to the other men—for instance——"

"Oh, Norma, I'll bet you're crazy about him," Leslie said, derisively.

Norma looked appealingly at the old lady, her eyes dancing with fun.

"Well, of course she loves her husband," Mrs. Melrose protested, with a little cushiony pat of her hand for the visitor.

"I don't see that it's 'of course'," Leslie argued, airily, with a little bitterness in her tone. Her grandmother looked at her in quick reproof and anxiety. "The latest," she said, drily, to Norma, "is that my delightful husband is living at his club."

"Now, Leslie, that is very naughty," the old lady said, warmly. "You shouldn't talk so of Acton."

"Well," Leslie countered, with elaborate innocence, turning to Norma, "all I can say is that he walked out one night, and didn't come back until the next! Of course," she added, with a suppressed yawn that poorly concealed her sudden inclination to tears, "of course I don't care. Patsy and I are going up to Glen Cove next week—and he can live at his club, for all me!"

"Money?" Norma asked. For Leslie's extravagance was usually the cause of the young Liggetts' domestic strife.

Leslie, who had lighted a cigarette, made an affirmative grimace.

"Now, it's all been settled, and Grandma has straightened it all out," old Mrs. Melrose said, soothingly. "Acton was making out their income tax," she explained, "and some money was mentioned—how was that, dear?—Leslie had sold something—and he hadn't known of it, that was all! Of course he was a little cross, poor boy; he had worked it all out one way, and he had no idea that this extra—sixteen thousand, was it?—had come in at all, and been spent——"

"Most of it for bills!" Leslie interpolated, bitterly. Norma laughed.

"Sixteen thou——! Oh, heavens, my husband's salary is sixty dollars a week!" she confessed, gaily.

"But you have your own money," the old lady reminded her, kindly, "and a very nice thing for a wife, too! I've talked to Judge Lee about it, dear, and it's all arranged. You must let me do this, Norma——"

"I think you're awfully good to me, Aunt Marianna," Norma said, thoughtfully. "I told Wolf about it, and he thinks so, too. But honestly——"

Even with her secret knowledge of her own parentage, Norma was surprised at the fluttered anxiety of the old lady, and Leslie was frankly puzzled.

"No, Norma—no, Norma," Mrs. Melrose said, nervously and imploringly. "I don't want you to discuss that at all—it's settled. The check is to be deposited every month, or quarter, or whatever it was——"

"Don't be a fool, Norma, you'll need it, one way or another," Leslie assured her. But in her own heart Leslie wondered at her grandmother's generosity.

"Everybody needs more money. I'll bet you the King of England——"

"Oh, kings!" Norma laughed. "They're the worst of all. I don't know about this one, but they're always appealing for special funds—all of them. And that's one thing that makes Wolf so mad—the fact that all they have to do, for ridiculous extravagances, is clap on a tax."

But Leslie and her grandmother were not interested in the young engineer's economic theories. The old lady followed Norma's spirited summary merely with an uneasy: "You mustn't let your husband get any socialistic ideas, Norma; there's too much of that now!" and Leslie, after a close study of Norma's glowing face, remarked suddenly:

"Norma, I'll bet you a dollar you're rouged!"

Before she left, the visitor managed a casual inquiry about Aunt Alice.

Aunt Alice was fine, Leslie answered carelessly, adding immediately that no, Aunt Alice really wasn't extremely well. Doctor Garrett didn't want her to go away this summer, thought that move was an unnecessary waste of energy, since Aunt Alice's house was so cool, and she felt the heat so little. And Chris said that Alice had always really wanted to stay in town, in her own comfortable suite. She liked her second nurse immensely, and Miss Slater was really running the house now, the third nurse coming only at night.

"But Aunt Alice never had a nurse at night," Norma was going to say. But she caught the stricken and apprehensive look on the old lady's face, and substituted generously: "Well, I remember Aunt Alice told me she had one of these wretched times several years ago."

"Yes, indeed she did—frightened us almost to death," Mrs. Melrose agreed, thankfully.

"And how is—how is Chris?" Norma felt proud of the natural tone in which she could ask the question.

"Chris is fine," Leslie answered. She rarely varied the phrase in this relation. "He's hunting in Canada. He had a wire from some man there, and he went off about a week ago. They're going after moose, I believe; Chris didn't expect to get back for a month. Aunt Alice was delighted, because she hates to keep him in town all summer, but Acton told me that he thought Chris was sick—that he and Judge Lee just made him go."

Well, her heart would flutter, she could not stop it or ignore it. Norma found no answer ready, and though she lifted her cup to her lips, to hide her confusion, she could not taste it. The strangeness of Chris's sudden departure was no mystery to her; he had been shocked and stunned by her marriage, and he had run away from the eyes that might have pierced his discomfiture.

Still, her hands were trembling, and she felt oddly shaken and confused. Leslie carried the conversation away to safer fields, and shortly afterward Norma could say her good-byes. Everybody, Leslie said, walking with her to the corner, wanted to know what the bride wanted for a wedding-present. Norma told Wolf, over their candle-lighted supper table, an hour or two later, that he and she would be bankrupted for life returning them.

Yet she loved the excitement of receiving the gifts; naturally enough, loved Rose's ecstasies over the rugs and silver and mahogany that made the little New Jersey house a jewel among its kind. It was what Norma had unhesitatingly pronounced an "adorable" house, a copy of the true colonial green-and-white, quaint and prim enough to please even Leslie, when Leslie duly came to call. It stood at the end of a tree-shaded street, with the rising woods behind it, and Norma recklessly invested in brick walks and a latticed green fence, hydrangeas in wooden tubs and sunflowers and hollyhocks, until her stretch of side garden looked like a picture by Kate Greenaway.

When it was all done, midsummer was upon them, but she and Wolf thought that there had never been anything so complete and so charming in all the world. The striped awnings that threw clean shadows upon the clipped grass; the tea table under the blue-green leaves of an old apple tree; the glass doors that opened upon orderly, white-wainscoted rooms full of shining dark surfaces and flowered chintzes and gleaming glass bowls of real flowers; the smallness and completeness and prettiness of everything filled them both with utter satisfaction.

Norma played at housekeeping like a little girl in a doll's house. She had a rosy little Finnish maid who enjoyed it all almost as much as she did, and their adventures in hospitality were a constant amusement and delight. On Saturdays, when Rose and Harry and Aunt Kate usually arrived, Wolf could hardly believe that all this ideal beauty and pleasure was his to share.

The girls would pose and photograph the baby tirelessly, laughing as he toppled and protested, and kissing the fat legs that showed between his pink romper and his pink socks. They would pack picnic lunches, rushing to and fro breathlessly with thermos bottles and extra wraps for Miggs, as Harry Junior was usually called. Once or twice they cleaned the car, with tremendous splashing and spattering, assuming Wolf's old overalls for the operation, and retreating with shrieks into the kitchen whenever the sound of an approaching motor-car penetrated into their quiet road. Mrs. Sheridan characterized them variously as "Wild Indians", "Ay-rabs", and "poor innocents" but her heart was so filled with joy and gratitude for the turn of events that had brought all these miracles about, that no nonsense and no noise seemed to her really extravagant.

It was an exceptionally pleasant community into which the young Sheridans had chanced to move, and they might have had much more neighbourly life than they chose to take. There were about them beginners of all sorts: writers and artists and newspaper men, whose little cars, and little maids, and great ambitions would have formed a strong bond of sympathy in time. But Wolf and Norma saw them only occasionally, when a Sunday supper at the country club or a Saturday-night dance supplied them with a pleasant stimulating sense of being liked and welcomed, or when general greetings on the eight-o'clock train in the morning were mingled with comments on the thunderstorm or the epidemic of nursery chicken-pox.

When Rose and Harry were gone, on Sunday evenings, Wolf and Norma might sit on the side steps of the side porch, looking off across the gradual drop descent of tree-tops and shingled roofs, into a distant world silvering under the summer moon. These were their happiest times, when solitude and quiet spread about them, after the hospitable excitements of the day, and they could talk and dream and plan for the years ahead.

She was an older Norma now, even though marriage had not touched her with any real responsibility, and even though she was more full of delicious childish absurdities than ever. The first months of their marriage had curiously reversed their relationship, and it was Norma now who gave, and Wolf who humbly and gratefully accepted. It was Norma who poured comfort and beauty and companionship into his life, who smiled at him over his morning fruit, and who waited for him under the old maple at the turn of the road, every night. And as her wonderful and touching generosity enveloped him, and her strange wisdom and new sweetness impressed him more and more, Wolf marvelled and adored her more utterly. He had always loved her as a big brother, had even experienced a definite heartache when she grew up and went away, a lovely and unattainable girl in the place where their old giddy dear little Norma had been.

But now his passion for his young wife was becoming a devouring fire in Wolf's heart; she absorbed him and possessed him like a madness. A dozen times a day he would take from his pocket-book the thin leather case she had given him, holding on one side a photograph of the three heads of Rose, his mother, and the baby, and on the other an enchanting shadow of the loosened soft hair and the serious profile that was Norma.

And as he stood looking at it, with the machinery roaring about him, and the sunlight beating in through steel-barred windows sixty feet high, in all the confusion of shavings and oil-soaked wood, polished sliding shafts streaked with thick blue grease, stifling odours of creosote and oily "wipes", Wolf's eyes would fill with tears and he would shake his head at his own emotion, and try to laugh it away.

After awhile he took another little picture of her, this one taken under a taut parasol in bright sunlight, and fitted it over the opposite faces; and then when he had studied one picture he could turn to the other, and perhaps go back to the first before his eyes were satisfied.

And if during the day some thought brought her suddenly to mind, he would stop short in whatever he was doing, and remember her little timid upglancing look as she hazarded, at breakfast, some question about his work, or remember her enthusiasm, on a country tramp, for the chance meal at some wayside restaurant, and sheer love of her would overwhelm him, and he would find his eyes brimming again.



CHAPTER XXVI

So the summer fled, and before she fairly realized it Norma saw the leaves colouring behind the little house like a wall of fire, and rustled them with her feet when she tramped with Wolf's big collie into the woods. The air grew clearer and thinner, sunset came too soon, and a delicate beading of dew loitered on the shady side of the house until almost noon.

One October day, when she had been six months a wife, Norma made her first call upon Annie von Behrens. Alice she had seen several times, when she had stopped in, late in the summer mornings, to entertain the invalid with her first adventures in housekeeping, and chat with Miss Slater. But Chris she had quite deliberately avoided. He had written her from Canada a brief and charming note, which she had shown Wolf, and he and Alice had had their share in the general family gift of silver, the crates and bags and boxes of spoons and bowls and teapots that had anticipated every possible table need of the Sheridans for generations to come. But that was all; she had not seen Chris, and did not want to see him.

"The whole thing is rather like a sickness, in my mind," she told Wolf, "and I don't want to see him any more than you would a doctor or a nurse that was associated with illness. I don't know what we—what I was thinking about!"

"But you think he really—loved you—Nono?"

"Well—or he thought he did!"

"And did you like him terribly?"

"I think I thought I did, too. It was—of course it was something we couldn't very well discuss——."

"Well, I'm sorry for him." Wolf had dismissed him easily. On her part, Norma was conscious of no particular emotion when she thought of Chris. The suddenness and violence with which she had broken that association and made its resumption for ever impossible, had carried her safely into a totally different life. Her marriage, her new husband and new home, her new title indeed, made her seem another woman, and if she thought of Chris at all it was to imagine what he would think of these changes, and to fancy what he would say of them, when they met. No purely visionary meeting can hold the element of passion, and so it was a remote and spiritualized Chris of whom Norma came to think, far removed from the actual man of flesh and blood.

Her call upon Annie she made with a mental reserve of cheerful explanation and apology ready for Annie's first reproach. Norma never could quite forget the extraordinary relationship in which she stood to Annie; and, perhaps half consciously, was influenced by the belief that some day the brilliant and wonderful Mrs. von Behrens would come to know of it, too.

But Annie, who happened to be at home, and had other callers, rapidly dashed Norma's vague and romantic anticipations by showing her only the brisk and aloof cordiality with which she held at bay nine tenths of her acquaintance. Annie's old butler showed Norma impassively to the little drawing-room that was tucked in beyond the big one; two or three strangers eyed the newcomer cautiously, and Annie merely accorded her a perfunctory welcome. They were having tea.

"Well, how do you do? How very nice of you, Norma. Do you know Mrs. Theodore Thayer, and Mrs. Thayer, and Miss Bishop? Katrina, this is—the name is still Sheridan, isn't it, Norma?—this is Mrs. Sheridan, who was with Mama and Leslie last summer. You have lots of sugar and cream, Norma, of course—all youngsters do. And you're near the toast——" And Annie, dismissing her, leaned back in her chair, and dropped her voice to the undertone that Norma had evidently interrupted. "Do go on, Leila," she said, to the older of the three women, "that's quite delicious! I heard something of it, but I knew of course that there was more——"

A highly flavoured little scandal was in process of construction. Norma knew the principals slightly; the divorced woman, and the second husband from whom she had borrowed money to loan the first. She could join in the laughter that broke out presently, while she tried to identify her companions. The younger Mrs. Thayer had been the Miss Katrina Davenport of last month's brilliant wedding. Pictures of her had filled the illustrated weeklies, and all the world knew that she and her husband were preparing to leave for a wonderful home in Hawaii, where the family sugar interests were based. They were to cross the continent, Norma knew, in the Davenport private car, to be elaborately entertained in San Francisco, and to be prominent, naturally, in the island set. Little Miss Bishop had just announced her engagement to Lord Donnyfare, a splendid, big, clumsy, and impecunious young Briton who had made himself very popular with the younger group this winter. They were to be married in January and her ladyship would shortly afterward be transferred to London society, presented at court, and placed as mistress over the old family acres in Devonshire.

They were both nice girls, pretty, beautifully groomed and dressed, and far from unintelligent as they discussed their plans; how their favourite horses and dogs would be moved, and what instructions had been given the maids who had preceded them to their respective homes. Katrina Thayer was just twenty, Mary Bishop a year younger; Norma knew that the former was perhaps the richest girl in America, and the latter was also an heiress, the society papers having already hinted that among the wedding gifts shortly to be displayed would be an uncle's casual check for one million dollars.

"And of course it'll be charming for Chris, Mary," Annie presently said, "if he's really sent to Saint James's."

Norma felt her throat thicken.

"Chris—to England—as Ambassador?" she said.

"Well, there's just a possibility—no, there's more than that!" Annie told her. "I believe he'll take it, if it is offered. Of course, he's supremely well fitted for it. There's even"—Annie threw out to the company at large, with that air of being specially informed in which she delighted—"there's even very good reason to suppose that influence has been brought to bear by——But I don't dare go into that. However, we feel that it will be offered. And the one serious drawback is naturally my sister. Alice—poor child! And yet, of us all, Alice is most desperately eager for Chris to take it."

"I should think," Norma said, "that Aunt Alice could almost be moved——?"

"Oh, she would be!" Annie agreed, with her quick, superior definiteness. "That's the very question. Whether the north Atlantic passage, say in May, when it oughtn't to be so hard, would be too much for her. Of course it would tire her and shake her cruelly, no doubt of that. But Hendrick even talks of some sort of balanced bed—on the hammock idea—and Miss Slater would see that everything that was humanly possible was done. I believe it could be managed. Then she would be met by one of those big, comfortable English ambulances, at Southampton, and taken right to her apartment, or hotel, or whatever Chris arranges."

"Not so much harder," Norma ventured, "than the trip to Newport, after all."

"Well, she didn't go to Newport last summer," Annie said, "but she is certainly better now than she was then, and I believe it could be done; I really do. We're not talking a great deal about it, because nothing is settled, but if it becomes definite, I shall certainly advise it."

Norma drank her tea, and listened, and threw in an occasional word. When the other women rose to go, she rose, too, perhaps half-hoping that Annie would hold her for a more intimate word. But Annie quite suavely and indifferently included her in her general farewells, and Norma had cordial good-byes from the two young women, and even a vague invitation from the older Mrs. Thayer to come and see her, when Katrina was gone.

Then she was walking down the Avenue, with her head and heart in a confused whirl of bitterness and disappointment. The three quarters of an hour in Aunt Annie's big, dim, luxurious palace had been like a dose of some insidious poison.

The very atmosphere of richness and service and idleness, the beauty of wide spaces and rich tones, the massed blossoms and dimmed lights, struck sharply upon senses attuned to Aunt Kate's quick voice, Rose's little house with its poverty and utility, and Wolf's frank enjoyment of his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and underlings, to speak well of their neighbours, to pay their bills and keep their promises.

"They make me tired!" she tried to tell herself, walking briskly, and filling her lungs with the sweet fresh air. It was twilight, and the north-bound tide of traffic was halting and rushing, halting and rushing, up the Avenue; now held motionless at a crossing, now flowing on in mad haste, the lumbering omnibuses passing each other, little hansoms threading the mass, and foot passengers scampering and withdrawing, and risking all sorts of passages between. The distance was luminous and blue, and lights pricked against it as against a scarf of gauze.

Oh, it was sickening—it was sickening—to think that life was so grim and hard for the thousands, and so unnecessarily, so superlatively beautiful for the few! What had Mary Bishop and Katrina ever done, that they should travel in private cars, fling aside furs that had cost as much as many a man's yearly salary, chatter of the plantation near the beach at Hawaii, or of reaching Saint James's for the January Drawing-Room!

Norma stopped to give twenty-five cents to an old Italian organ grinder, and worked him into her theme as she went on. Why should he look so grateful for her casual charity, he, seventy years old, Katrina and Mary averaging less than twenty!

She reached Aunt Kate's flat in a thorough temper, angry, headachy, almost feverish after the rich scones and the rich tea, and the even less wholesome talk. The apartment house seemed, as indeed it was, grimy and odorous almost to squalor, and Aunt Kate almost hateful in her cheerfulness and energy. This was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings she was always happy, for then Wolf and Norma came to dinner with her. To-night, busily manipulating pans and pots, she told Norma that she had rented the two extra bedrooms of the apartment to three young trained nurses, ideal tenants in every way.

"They'll get their breakfasts here, and—if I'm away—there's no reason why they shouldn't cook themselves a little dinner now and then," said Aunt Kate, in her rich, motherly voice. "They were tickled to death to get the two rooms for twenty dollars, and that makes my own rent only seventeen more. I asked them if that was too much, and they said, no, they'd expected to pay at least ten apiece."

Norma listened, unsympathetic and gloomy. It was all so petty and so poor—trained nurses, and apple pie, and Aunt Kate renting rooms, and Wolf eager to be promoted to factory manager.

She wanted to go back—back to the life in which Annie really noticed her, gave her luncheons, included her. She wanted to count for something with Mary and Katrina and Leslie; she wanted to talk to Chris about his possible ambassadorship; she wanted them all to agree that Norma's wit and charm more than made up for Norma's lack of fortune. While she brushed her hair, in the room that would shortly accommodate two of the three little nurses, she indulged in an unsatisfying dream in which she went to London with Alice—and that autocratic little Lady Donnyfare.

Lady Donnyfare! She would be "your ladyship!" Nineteen years old, and welcomed to the ancestral mansion as her little ladyship!

Norma set the dinner table for three, with jerks and slams that slightly relieved her boiling heart. She got the napkins from the sideboard drawer, and reached for the hand-painted china sugar bowl that was part of a set that Aunt Kate had won at a fair. She set the blue tile that she had given Aunt Kate on a long-ago Christmas where the brown Rebecca teapot would stand, and cut a square slice of butter from the end of the new pound for the blue glass dish. And all the time her heart was bursting with grief and discontent, and she was beginning to realize for the first time the irrevocable quality of the step she had taken, and just how completely it had shut her off from the life for which she thirsted.

Wolf came in, hungry, dirty, radiantly happy, with a quick kiss for his mother and an embrace for his wife into which her slender figure and cloudy brown head almost disappeared. Lord, he was starving; and Lord, he was dead; and Lord, it was good to get home, said Wolf, his satisfaction with life too great to leave room for any suspicion of his wife's entire sympathy.

She told them, over the meal, of Mary and Katrina, in whom their interest was of a simple and amazed quality that Norma resented, and of Chris's prospect, which did awaken some comment from Mrs. Sheridan. They were a clever family, she said.

But now Wolf, bursting with long suppression, suddenly took the floor with his own great news. Voorhies, the fifty-year-old manager of the California plant, had been drifting about the Newark factory for several days, and Wolf had talked with him respectfully, as a man of twenty-five, whose income is three thousand a year, may talk to a six-thousand-dollar manager, and to-day Voorhies, and Jim Palmer, the Newark manager, and Paul Stromberg, the vice-president, had taken Wolf to lunch with them, apparently casually, apparently from mere friendliness. But Voorhies had asked him if he had ever seen the West; and Stromberg had said that he understood Sheridan's family consisted merely of a young wife, and Palmer had chanced to drop carelessly the fact that Mr. Voorhies was not going back to California——!

That was all. But it was enough to send Wolf back to his work with his head spinning. California—and a managership of a mine—and six thousand! It must be—it must be—that he had been mentioned for it, that they had him in mind! He wasn't going even to think of it—and Norma mustn't—but Lord, it meant being picked out of the ranks; it meant being handed a commission on a silver platter!

Norma tried not to be cold, tried to rise to the little he asked of her, as audience. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that he noticed nothing amiss in her manner, and of seeing him go off to sleep, when they had made the long trip home, with his head in a whirl of glorious hopes. But Norma, for the first time since her marriage, cried herself to sleep.



CHAPTER XXVII

The bitterness stayed with her, and gradually robbed her life of everything that was happy and content. Her little household round, that had been so absorbing and so important, became tedious and stupid. Rose, who was expecting her second confinement, had her husband's mother with her, and in care of the old baby, and making preparations for the new, was busy, and had small time for the old companionship; the evenings were too cold for motoring now, even if Wolf had not been completely buried in engineering journals and papers of all sorts.

Norma did not call on Annie again, but a fretted and outraged sense of Annie's coolness and aloofness, and a somewhat similar impression from Leslie's manner, when they met in Fifth Avenue one day, was always in her mind. They could drop her as easily as they had picked her up, these high-and-mighty Melroses! She consoled herself, for a few days, with spectacular fancies of Annie's consternation should Norma's real identity be suddenly revealed to her, but even that poor solace was taken away from her at last.

It was Aunt Kate's unconscious hand that struck the blow, on a wild afternoon, All Hallow E'en, as it happened, when the older woman made the long trip to see Rose, and came on to Norma with a report that everything was going well, and Miggs more fascinating than ever.

Mrs. Sheridan found Norma at the close of the short afternoon, moping in her unlighted house. She had been to the theatre with Wolf and a young couple from the house next door, last night, and had fallen asleep after an afternoon walk, and felt headachy, prickly with heat and cold, and stupid. Yawning and chilly, she kissed her aunt, and suggested that they move to the kitchen. It was Inga's free night and Norma was cook.

"You'll stay and surprise Wolf, he'd love it," Norma said, as the visitor's approving eyes noted the general order and warmth, the blue-checked towels and blue bowls, the white table and white walls. The little harum-scarum baby of the family was proceeding to get her husband a most satisfactory and delicious little dinner, and Aunt Kate was proud of her.