was at rest now, for the meeting between the cousins was over, and Luella was to have a good time too. Aunt Crete was never the least bit selfish. It seemed to her that her good time was only blooming into yet larger things, after all.
Behind her walked her sister and niece in mortified humiliation. Luella was trying to recall just what she had said about “country cousins” over the telephone, and exactly what she had said to the girl in the pony-cart the morning she left home. The memory did not serve to cool her already heated complexion. It was beginning to dawn upon her that she had made a mighty mistake in running away from such a cousin and in such a manner.
All her life, in such a case, Luella had been accustomed to lay the blame of her disappointments upon some one else, and vent, as it were, her spite upon that one. Now, in looking about to find such an object of blame her eyes naturally fell upon the one that had borne the greater part of all blame for her. But, try as she would to pour out blame and scorn from her large, bold eyes upon poor Aunt Crete, somehow the blame seemed to slip off from the sweet gray garments, and leave Aunt Crete as serene as ever, with her eyes turned trustingly toward her dear Donald. Luella was brought to the verge of vexation by this, and could scarcely eat any dinner.
The dessert was just being served when the waiter brought Aunt Crete a dainty note from which a faint perfume of violets stole across the table to the knowing nostrils of Luella.
With the happy abandonment of a child Aunt Crete opened it joyously.
“Who in the world can be writing to me?” she said wonderingly. “You’ll have to read it for me, Donald; I’ve left my glasses up in my room.”
Luella made haste to reach out her hand for the note, but Donald had it first, as if he had not seen her impatient hand claiming her right to read Aunt Crete’s notes.
“It’s from Mrs. Grandon, auntie,” he said.
“‘Dear Miss Ward,’” he read, “‘I am sorry that I am feeling too weary to go to the concert this evening as we had planned, and my son makes such a baby of me that he thinks he cannot leave me alone; but I do hope we can have the pleasure of the company of yourself and your nephew on a little auto trip to-morrow afternoon. My brother has a villa a few miles up the shore, and he telephoned us this morning to dine with them to-night. When he heard of your being here, he said by all means to bring you with us. My brother knows of your nephew’s intimacy with Clarence, and is anxious to meet him, as are the rest of his family. I do hope you will feel able to go with us.
“‘With sincere regrets that I cannot go with you to the Casino this evening,
Helen Grandon.’”
For the moment Luella forgot everything else in her amazement at this letter. Aunt Crete receiving notes from Mrs. Grandon, from whom she and her mother could scarcely get a frigid bow! Aunt Crete invited on automobile trips and dinners in villas! Donald an intimate friend of Clarence Grandon’s! O, fool and blind! What had she done! Or what had she undone? She studied the handsome, keen face of her cousin as he bent over the letter, and writhed to think of her own words, “I’m running away from a backwoods cousin”! She could hear it shouted from one end of the great dining-hall to the other, and her face blazed redder and redder till she thought it would burst. Her mother turned from her in mortified silence, and wondered why Luella couldn’t have had a good complexion.
Studied politeness was the part that Donald had set for himself that evening. He began to see that his victims were sufficiently unhappy. He had no wish to see them writhe under further tortures, though when he looked upon Aunt Crete’s happy face, and thought how white it had turned at dread of them, he felt he must let the thorns he had planted in their hearts remain long enough to bring forth a true repentance. But he said nothing further to distress them, and they began to wonder whether, after all, he really had seen through their plan of running away from him.
It was all Aunt Crete’s fault. She ought to have arranged it in some way to get them quietly home as soon as she found out what kind of cousin it was that had come to see them. It never occurred to Luella that nothing her poor, abused aunt could have said would have convinced her that her cousin was worthy of her home-coming.
As the concert drew near to its close, Luella and her mother began to prepare for a time of reckoning for Aunt Crete. When she was safely in her room, what was to hinder them from going to her alone and having it out? The sister’s face hardened, and the niece’s eyes glittered as she stonily thought of the scornful sentences she would hurl after her aunt.
Donald looked at her menacing face, and read its thoughts. He resolved to protect Aunt Crete, whatever came; so at the door, when he saw a motion on his Aunt Crete’s part to pause, he said gently: “Aunt Crete, I guess we’ll have to say ‘Good night’ now; for you’ve had a hard day of it, and I want you to be bright and fresh for morning. We want to take an early dip in the ocean. The bathing-hours are early to-morrow, I see.”
He bowed good-night in his pleasantest manner, and the ladies from the fourth floor reluctantly withdrew to the elevator, but fifteen minutes later surreptitiously tapped at the private door of the room they understood to be Aunt Crete’s.
CHAPTER VII
LUELLA’S HUMILIATION
The door was opened cautiously by the maid, who was “doing” Aunt Crete’s hair, having just finished a most refreshing facial massage given at Donald’s express orders.
Aunt Crete looked round upon her visitors with a rested, rosy countenance, which bloomed out under her fluff of soft, white hair, and quite startled her sister with its freshness and youth. Could it be possible that this was really her sister Crete; or had she made a terrible mistake, and entered the wrong apartment?
But a change came suddenly over the ruddy countenance of Aunt Crete as over the face of a child that in the midst of happy play sees a trouble descending upon it. A look almost of terror came over her, and she caught her breath, and waited to see what was coming.
“Why, Carrie, Luella!” she gasped weakly. “I thought you’d gone to bed. Marie’s just doing up my hair for night. She’s been giving me a face-massage. You ought to try one. It makes you feel young again.”
“H’m!” said her affronted sister. “I shouldn’t care for one.”
Marie looked over Luella and her mother, beginning with the painfully elaborate arrangement of hair, and going down to the tips of their boots. Luella’s face burned with mortification as she read the withering disapproval in the French woman’s countenance.
“Let’s sit down till she’s done,” said Luella, dropping promptly on the foot of Aunt Crete’s bed and gazing around in frank surprise over the spaciousness of the apartment.
Thereupon the maid ignored them, and went about her work, brushing out and deftly manipulating the wavy white hair, and chattering pleasantly meanwhile, just as if no one else were in the room. Aunt Crete tried to forget what was before her, or, rather, behind her; but her hands trembled a little as they lay in her lap in the folds of the pretty pink and gray challis kimono she wore; and all of a sudden she remembered the unwhitewashed cellar, and the uncooked jam, and the unmade shirt-waists, and the little hot brick house gazing at her reproachfully from the distant home, and she here in this fine array, forgetting it all and being waited upon by a maid—a lazy truant from her duty.
Did
