LITMIR.BIZ

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he will be more than glad—depend upon that. Goodbye—not for very long, I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again—especially at this time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and was gone.

      "'Especially at this time'—I wonder what he meant by that?" thought Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that his face was clouded with worry.

      An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing, holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura, gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise, considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome, superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her mother at her home-coming.

      "Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her again, and hugged her once more.

      Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter bending toward her.

      "You are grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are well, dear? You are looking excessively well."

      Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.

      "But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up, and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.

      Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.

      "You are not to make game of me, my dear, whatever else you do," she said, icily, to her astonished daughter. Laura laughed outright and caught Louise's arm in her own as they started through the station.

      "Don't be absurd, Antoinette—the dear is not making game of you, as you call it," said Laura. "You know she is incapable of that."

      "But I am all at sea," said Louise, still mystified over her mother's inexplicable outbreak. "What is it? What did I say that was wrong?"

      Her mother looked at her and saw that the girl was wholly innocent of the sarcasm she had hastily attributed to her.

      "You know very well, Louise," she said, in a tone meant to be appeasing, "that I am hideously, scandalously, shockingly fat; and you cannot expect me to be cheerful when you begin to taunt me with it before you have had more than one glance at me."

      "But you are anything but stout, mother dear, and I really meant what I said," put in Louise. "Why, it perfectly stuns me to think you could suppose that I——"

      "Tut-tut—can't we find something more engaging to talk about than what the weighing scales do or do not tell us?" broke in Laura, gaily. "Antoinette, dear, won't you see if you can attract that taxicab man's attention?"

      When Mrs. Treharne walked over to the curb to summon the chauffeur of the taxicab Laura seized the moment to say to Louise in a low tone.

      "Some things have occurred to disturb your mother, dear; so don't mind if she seems a bit difficile tonight, will you? She is a little annoyed over your intention not to return to the school; but I shall help you out there. I am going home with you now for a little while. You'll depend upon your old friend Laura?"

      Louise, watching her mother, furtively pressed Laura's hand.

      "You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply. Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came—and she more than dimly apprehended that come it would—when such a thing need be.

      Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her, Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty pretence of annoyed hostility.

      "Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'? Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.

      On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.

      "How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs—you know he is my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such a way? Didn't you find him rather—well, distingué, we'll say, Louise?"

      "I thought him very fine and——" Louise strove for a word haltingly.

      "And with an air about him—of course you did, my dear; everybody does," Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed, wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've known him ever since——"

      Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a girl just that day out of school.

      "Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with me—permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining in the conversation.

      Louise reflected a moment before replying.

      "Why, yes, mother, I did; he asked me about it, I recall now," she said.

      "Did he have any comment to make?" asked her mother in a reduced tone.

      "Why, no, dear," said Louise. "In fact, he appeared to be considerably worried about something, and so——" Louise felt herself being furtively prodded by Laura, and she left off suddenly.

      Opportunely, the taxicab drew up in front

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