“Now, dearie,” she said, “you mustn’t
tire yourself out, and you’d better come and
eat something. Your father said he’d get
a bite down-town to-day—he was going down
to the bank—and Walter eats down-town all
the time lately, so I thought we wouldn’t bother
to set the table for lunch. Come on and we’ll
have something in the kitchen.”
“No,” Alice said, dully, as she went on
with the work. “I don’t want anything.”
Her mother came closer to her. “Why, what’s
the matter?” she asked, briskly. “You
seem kind of pale, to me; and you don’t look—you
don’t look happy.”
“Well——” Alice began,
uncertainly, but said no more.
“See here!” Mrs. Adams exclaimed.
“This is all just for you! You ought to
be enjoying it. Why, it’s the first
time we’ve—we’ve entertained
in I don’t know how long! I guess it’s
almost since we had that little party when you were
eighteen. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“But, dearie, aren’t you looking forward
to this evening?”
The girl looked up, showing a pallid and solemn face.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and tried
to smile. “Of course we had to do it—I
do think it’ll be nice. Of course I’m
looking forward to it.”
She was indeed “looking forward” to that
evening, but in a cloud of apprehension; and, although
she could never have guessed it, this was the simultaneous
condition of another person—none other
than the guest for whose pleasure so much cooking and
scrubbing seemed to be necessary. Moreover,
Mr. Arthur Russell’s premonitions were no product
of mere coincidence; neither had any magical sympathy
produced them. His state of mind was rather the
result of rougher undercurrents which had all the time
been running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.
Never shrewder than when she analyzed the gentlemen,
Alice did not libel him when she said he was one of
those quiet men who are a bit flirtatious, by which
she meant that he was a bit “susceptible,”
the same thing—and he had proved himself
susceptible to Alice upon his first sight of her.
“There!” he said to himself. “Who’s
that?” And in the crowd of girls at his cousin’s
dance, all strangers to him, she was the one he wanted
to know.
Since then, his summer evenings with her had been
as secluded as if, for three hours after the falling
of dusk, they two had drawn apart from the world to
some dear bower of their own. The little veranda
was that glamorous nook, with a faint golden light
falling through the glass of the closed door upon Alice,
and darkness elsewhere, except for the one round globe
of the street lamp at the corner. The people
who passed along the sidewalk, now and then, were
only shadows with voices, moving vaguely under the
maple trees that loomed in obscure contours against
the stars. So, as the two sat together, the
back of the world was the wall and closed door behind
them; and Russell, when he was away from Alice, always
thought of her as sitting there before the closed
door. A glamour was about her thus, and a spell
upon him; but he had a formless anxiety never put
into words: all the pictures of her in his mind
stopped at the closed door.
