deliberately turned away her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. What an idiot I am! I had forgotten about your mother! How could I be such a—brute!”

Elsie looked at Timothy’s back steadily. “Don’t be so sorry as all that,” she replied coolly and without any apparent emotion in her voice. “My mother was killed in an automobile accident in France two years ago. But I never knew her, anyway. When I was at home she was usually somewhere else, at house-parties or sanitariums, or abroad. And I was only home for holidays. She sent me off to boarding school when I was eight. Her being dead hasn’t made much difference to me. I was terribly sorry for her when they told me, that was all. She was so pretty, and too young-seeming to be a mother. And she would have hated dying! Sometimes I ache for her when I think of that. But that’s all.”

“Oh, how can you! How can you speak about a dead mother like that!” Kate’s heart was crying. But she only said, after a second: “There are lots of jolly-looking girls and boys in this town. Do you know them all? They keep looking at us, but you never speak. Don’t you see people? Mother’s like that. She’s so absent minded.”

But even this was an unfortunate subject. Unlucky Kate!

“I know who most of them are but of course I don’t know them socially.”

This was amazing. “Why not?”

But here all Elsie’s attempt at friendliness broke down. She turned on Kate a tigerish face. “Yes, why not?” she almost hissed. “You know very well, Kate Marshall, why not. Here’s the post office.”

Kate was shocked. “Well, I certainly don’t know ‘why not’,” she contradicted. “I haven’t the least idea—unless you treat them in the rude, horrid way you treat me.”

The car had drawn up to the curb and come to a stand-still before the pride of Oakdale’s civic life, its white marble post office built on the lines of a Greek temple. Elsie’s only answer to Kate’s denial was a shrug.

“Have you letters? And are there any errands?”

Timothy stood on the sidewalk asking for orders.

Elsie stood up quickly. “I’ll post the letters myself,” she answered him. Kate noticed for the first time a package that Elsie was carrying. Across the top the word “Manuscript” was written in a round hand, and the address was that of a publishing house and caught Kate’s attention 

 Prev. P 46/161 next