Often, in those weeks before Laura's wedding, Mrs. Payton, working out a puzzle, or playing Canfield on the big rosewood table in the sitting-room, would stop and stare straight before her, with unseeing eyes.... Like a needle working its way through nerveless flesh toward some vital spot, a new emotion, anger, was penetrating the routine of her meaningless days.

Laura had cut Freddy out!


Love for Morty, the dam love, which is the habit of the body and has nothing to do with the intellect, was pushed aside by the new idea: Freddy was suffering because Laura had stolen her lover.

"It was despicable in her!" Mrs. Payton said to herself—and the needle-point of anger came a little nearer to that sleeping nerve of maternity, which, when it was reached, would, in a pang of exquisite pain, make her love Fred as she had never loved anything in her life.

Mrs. Payton put a black nine on a red eight; saw her mistake, frowned, and put out a mechanical hand to correct it. "I wonder if she would drink a glass of malted milk at night, if I fixed it for her?" she thought; and uncovered an ace. "Laura hasn't half her brains!" she said, and put the card in the ace row; "how could Mr. Maitland[Pg 250] see anything to her—except looks? She is pretty. But Freddy is worth a dozen of her, and he was head over ears in love with her! Yes; Laura simply took him from her! I shall never feel the same to Laura again;—and I suppose Bessie and William expect me to give her a handsome wedding-present." She wondered, with vague malice, whether there wasn't something in the house—the old wonder of the reluctant giver of gifts!—that she could send Laura? Some family silver; the epergne, for instance, three silver squirrels holding a platter on their heads.

The question of the wedding-present was so irritating to her, that in the afternoon, when Freddy came in, rather listlessly (this was in November—a month before the wedding), Mrs. Payton referred the matter to her—shifting her angry pain to Freddy's galled young shoulders. There was no wincing.

"What shall we give Laura?"

"Something bully! I was talking to her about it to-day, and asked her what she wanted. I think a rug is the thing."

"I wonder if some of the Payton silver—" Mrs. Payton began—but Fred threw up horrified hands.

"No! No second-hand goods! And it's got to be something first rate, too; (if it takes my last dollar!)" she added, under her breath.

The rug did not take quite the last dollar, but it took more than she could afford, and Laura was perfectly delighted with it. Howard, standing on it, his hands in his pockets, dug an appreciative heel into its silky nap, and[Pg 251] made his usual comment: "It's bully! Fred's taste is great!"

Sometimes, looking back on the night that Flora died, Howard wondered if it all (except the poor soul's suicide) was not a dream? For Fred was so "bully"!... Entering into all Laura's ecstasies and anxieties; crazy to know who would make the wedding-dress; perfectly wild over Howard's present to his bride; frantic because it was too early to get jonquils for the rope down each side of the aisle.... That astounding moment in the bungalow must have been, Howard told himself, a dream! Two dreams—his and Fred's, for she evidently cared no more for him than for old Weston.

So the days passed (Howard thought they never would pass!) and the Day drew near. When it came, Frederica Payton's head was as high as any of the other young heads. There were eight of them, in most marvelous and expensive yellow hats, to follow the shimmering Laura up the aisle. At the reception afterward, Frederica, in her vivid joyousness almost—so her Uncle William said—"took the shine off the bride! Remember Shakespeare (as you'd say)—
"Bring in our daughter
Clothed like a bride ...
See, where she comes,
Appareled like the spring,"—

Mr. Childs quoted, puffing happily—"but that frock you've got on is spring-like, too—all yellow and white, like buttercups and daisies."

[Pg 252]

"I'm rather stuck on it, myself," Fred said, complacently; she was standing beside Arthur Weston, eating ice-cream with appetite.

"Well," her uncle said, chuckling, "I may tell you in confidence—Hey, Howard!" he interrupted himself, clutching at the passing bridegroom, "I was just telling Freddy that I was very much astonished when I learned that you were to be my son-in-law. I thought you were making up to her!"

"To me?" said Fred, incredulously; "he never knew I existed when Laura was around!"

"I'm just looking for Laura now," Howard said, with a gasp; "she's deserted me!" he complained, laughing—and escaped.

"Oh," Mr. Childs said, clapping his niece on the shoulder so heartily that her ice-cream spilled over, "of course I know, now, that it's always been Laura!"

"Yes," Fred agreed, gaily, "he's been dead set for Lolly for the last two years."

So she got through with the Day.... When she reached home, and up in her own room took off the yellow hat, she took off that gallant smile, too; she had worn it until the muscles about her lips were stiff. She was profoundly fatigued; too fatigued to feel anything but relief that the wedding was over. Even the old ache of wishing she "hadn't told him" was numbed. It was part of the generosity of her honest, sore young heart, that she felt a faint satisfaction in the fact that, anyhow, he was happy; as for Laura—"how mean I am to—dislike her! It wasn't her fault, and she's just the same old Lolly. I[Pg 253] won't dislike her! I'll love her, just as I've always loved her." When she went down to dinner that night she put the smile on again, and was very airy and smart in her comments to Mrs. Payton upon the Childs family, and the company in general.

"Laura was perfectly sweet! But Aunt Bessie is too fat to wear such tight clothes. Why do the fat fifties always wear tight clothes?... Grandmother wasn't shy on powder, was she?... Billy-boy would talk about Bacon at his own funeral!... How many kinds of a fool do you suppose that old hag, Maria Spencer, is?... I—I guess I'll go to bed. I was an idiot to eat ice-cream; it always makes my head ache."

Perhaps her head ached too badly for sleep. At any rate, hours later, when 15 Payton Street had sunk into midnight darkness, she heard a board creak under a careful step in the hall, and sat up in bed, saying, sharply, "Who's that?"

"It's I, dear. Don't be frightened." Mrs. Payton came feeling her way across the room to Fred's bedside.

"Is anything the matter? Is Mortimore—"

"No, no; nothing! Only, Freddy, my darling, I—I just want to tell you something." She sat down on the edge of the bed, and Frederica heard her draw in her breath in a sob.

"Mother! Are you ill?"

"No—no. But Freddy, I—I didn't mean it when I said that about Mortimore."

"Said what?" Fred said, frowning with anxiety; "here, let me light the gas!"<............