Just before Roger and Deborah left, Edith drew her father aside, and with a curious concern and pity in her voice, she said,

“I’m so sorry I shan’t be able to help you with the wedding, dear, and make it the sweet old-fashioned kind that mother would have wanted.  Of course there’s Deborah, she’ll be there.  But her head is so full of new ideas.  I’m afraid she may find the house rather a burden after Laura has gone away.”  Edith gave a worried little sigh.  “I’ll be so glad,” she added, “when we get that place in Morristown.  We’ll want you out there often, and for good long visits too.  You may even find you’ll care to try staying there with us for a while.”

Roger scowled and thanked her.  She had given him a shock of alarm.

“So she thinks that Deborah will find the housekeeping too hard,” he reflected anxiously.  And as he walked home with his daughter, he kept glancing at her face, which for all its look of quiet had so much tensity beneath.  She had packed her life so full of school.  What if she wanted to give up their home?  “She’ll try, of course, she’ll try her best—­but she’ll find it too much of an added strain.”  And again he felt that sickening dread.  Deborah said nothing.  He felt as though they had drifted apart.

And at night in his bed, as Roger stared up at the beetling cliff of apartment windows just outside, drearily he asked himself how it would feel to live like that.

CHAPTER V

One afternoon a few days later Roger was riding in the park.  He rode “William,” a large lazy cob who as he advanced in age had so subtly and insidiously slackened his pace from a trot to a jog that Roger barely noticed how slowly he was riding.  As he rode along he liked to watch the broad winding bridle path with its bobbing procession of riders that kept appearing before him under the tall spreading trees.  Though he knew scarcely anyone by name, he was a familiar figure here and he recognized scores of faces.  To many men he nodded at passing, and to not a few alluring young dames, ardent creatures with bright eyes who gave him smiles of greeting, Roger gravely raised his hat.  One was “The Silver Lady” in a Broadway musical show, but he thought she was “one of the Newport crowd.”  He liked to make shrewd guesses like that.  There were so many kinds of people here.  There were stout anxious ladies riding for figures and lean morose gentlemen riding for health.  There were joyous care-free girls, chatting and laughing merrily.  There were some gallant foreigners, and there were riding masters, and Roger could not tell them apart.  There were mad boys from the Squadron who rode at a furious canter, and there were groups of children, eager and flushed, excited and gay, with stolid grooms behind them.  The path in several places ran close beside the main road of the park, and with the coming of the dusk this road took on deep purple hues and glistened with reflections from countless yellow motor eyes.  And from the polished limousines, sumptuous young women smiled out upon the riders.