It was a desolately unhappy Sally who began what she considered the unbearable task of living those two years which Courtney Barr had decreed should separate the orphan, Sally Ford, from the society debutante, Sally Barr. A dozen times, at least, during those first few weeks she would have run away, straight to David Nash, if she had not given her word of honor both to her mother and to her mother’s husband.

But, almost insensibly, she began to enjoy life again. It was a soul-satisfying experience to have an apparently unlimited supply of spending money and the most beautiful wardrobe of any girl in the little Virginia city to which Courtney Barr had taken her. For many days almost every mail brought her a package from New York, addressed in Enid Barr’s surprisingly big handwriting. She and her mother wrote each other twice a week, and Enid early formed the habit of sending her a weekly budget of clippings from the papers about the social set in which the Barrs moved so brilliantly—“so you will become acquainted with the names of those who will be your friends,” as Enid wrote her daughter.

Gradually the unreality of her new position and of her future expectations wore off and Sally came to regard herself as really the daughter of the Courtney Barrs.

She lived for the rest of the summer with Courtney Barr’s third cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Barr, who were glad of both the money and the companionship which Sally brought them. To their friends the Charles Barrs explained that Sally was an orphaned cousin, and the story apparently was never questioned. She was accepted cordially by the carefree young people of the small city’s best social set, and was sometimes ashamed of the pleasure she had in being a popular, well-dressed, pretty young girl.

She reproached herself for not mourning constantly for David, but she knew that not for an instant were her loyalty and love for him threatened by her strange new experiences. And, although she had given her promise not to write to David, she composed long, intimate letters to him every week, putting them away in her trunk in the confident belief that he would some day read them and love them, because she had written them.

She told him everything in these letters she could not send—told him of the two or three nice boys who declared their puppy love for her; confessed, with tears that blistered the pages, that she had let one of them kiss her, because he seemed so hurt at her first refusal; described her new clothes with child-like enthusiasm; tucked snapshots of herself in the enchanting new dresses between the folded pages; in fact, poured out her heart to him far more unaffectedly than would have been possible if she had been mailing the letters.

Not feeling at all that she was breaking her promise, she subscribed to The Capital City Press and to the college newspaper, avidly searching them for any news of David and jealously hoarding the clippings with which her diligence was rewarded.

In this way she learned that he was elected president of the junior class; that he “made” the football eleven as halfback; that—and she almost fainted with terror—that he was slightly injured during the Thanksgiving game, when A. & M. beat the State University team in a bitterly fought contest.

By that time she was in the finishing school which Courtney Barr had chosen for her, and was herself becoming prominent in school activities through her talent for dramatics. When David’s college paper printed a two-column picture of her sweetheart she cut it out and framed it. The greatest joy she had that first year of her new life was to hear the other girls rave about his good looks and his athletic record, of which she bragged swaggeringly.

During the spring term she was chosen by the dramatic director to take the lead in the school’s last play of the year, “The Clinging Vine.” Sally Ford, or Sally Barr, as she was known at the school, was again happy “play-acting.” Enid and Courtney Barr came down from New York for the play and for commencement exercises, though Sally would not graduate for another year. It was the first time she had seen her mother since they had parted in the little mid-western town where Enid had found Sally being married to David Nash.

“But how adorably pretty you are!” Enid exclaimed wonderingly, when she had the girl safe in the privacy of her own suite in a nearby hotel. “I wanted to nudge every fond mama sitting near me and exult, ‘That’s my daughter! Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she a wonderful little actress?’ Are you happy, darling?”

Sally, her cheeks poppy-red with excitement and pleasure in her success in the school play, twirled lightly on the toe of her silver slipper, so that her pink chiffon skirt belled out like a ballet dancer’s.

“Happy? I’m thrilled and excited right now, and happy that you’re here, but sometimes I’m lonely, in spite of my new friends—Oh, Mother,” she cried, catching Enid’s hands impulsively, “won’t you let me go back with you and Mr. Barr now? I want to be with someone I belong to! I don’t fit in here, really. I—I guess I’m still Orphan Sally Ford inside. I’m always expecting them to snub me, or to taunt me.”

Enid’s eyes filmed over with tears, but she shook her head. “We must try to be patient, darling. I want you to be at home with girls like these—girls who have always had money and social position and—and culture. It’s a loathsome word, but I don’t know any better one for what I mean. Don’t you see, sweetheart? Mother wants you to be ready for New York when you come, so that you will be happy, but not timid and ill-at-ease. Court was really very wise. I’ve come to see that now. Please try to be patient, darling.”

“And this summer?” Sally quivered. “He said I could be with you at your Long Island home—”

But Enid was shaking her head again, her eyes infinitely fond and pitying. “I’m going abroad, dear. I haven’t been very well this winter—just tired from too much gayety, I think. The doctors advise a rest cure in southern France. I want you to go to a girls’ camp in New Hampshire. It’s really a part of your education, social and physical. I want you to ride and swim and hike all summer, with the sort of girls whom you’ll be meeting when you do join us in New York.

“You’re to learn to play golf, perfect your game of tennis. By the way, I want you to go to as many house parties on your holidays as you can. Learn to flirt with the college youngsters you’ll meet; be gay, don’t be—”

“Institutional,” Sally interrupted in a low voice as she turned sharply away from her mother.

It was almost a relief to the girl when Enid was gone. Her mother’s exquisite, fragile beauty, her unconscious arrogance, her sophistication, her sometimes caustic wit, formed a barrier between them, in spite of the almost worshipful love that Sally felt for her.

Enid, when she was with her, somehow made the 17-year-old-girl feel gawky, underdone, awkward, shy. Those cornflower blue eyes, when they were not misted with tears of affection for this daughter whom she had so recently discovered, seemed to Sally to be a powerful microscope trained upon all her deficiencies, enlarging them to frightening proportions. She knew that in these moments of critical survey her mother was looking upon her, not as a beloved daughter miraculously restored to her, but as a future debutante, bearer of the proud name of Barr, and as a pawn in the marriage game as it is played in the most exclusive circles in New York Society.

And Sally squirmed miserably, pitifully afraid that she would never measure up to the standard which her mother and Courtney Barr had set for her, knowing, too, deep in her heart, that she did not want to. For her heart had been given to a golden young god of a man, whose kingdom was the soil, and whose wife needed none of the qualities which Enid Barr was bent upon cultivating in her daughter.

But twelve years of implicit obedience to the authorities at the orphanage had left their indelible mark upon Sally Ford, who was now Sally Barr. She would do her best to become the radiant, cultured, charming, beautiful young creature whom Enid Barr wanted as a daughter. And since she had Enid’s letters to help her, the task was not so impossible as it had seemed to her. For in the letters Enid was more real as a mother than she could yet be in actual contact. The fat weekly envelopes were crammed with love, maternal advice, encouragement, tenderness.

Sally sometimes had the feeling that through these letters of her mother’s she knew Enid Barr better than anyone had ever known her. And she loved her with a passionate devotion, which sometimes frightened her with its intensity. Gazing at David’s picture, clipped from the college newspaper, she wondered, with a cruel pain banding her heart, if this almost idolatrous love for her mother would ultimately force her to give up David. If it should ever come to a choice between those two well-beloved, what should she do?

Sometimes she agonized over the fear that David might have ceased to love her, might have found another girl, might even be married. Sometimes her hands shook so as they spread out the flat-folded sheets of the college newspaper and of the Capital City Press that she had to clasp them tightly until the spasm of fear subsided. And each time the relief was so great that she sang and laughed and danced like a joy-crazy person.

The other girls jeered at her good-naturedly because she was always singing, “I’ll be loving you—always!” But she did not care. It was her song—and David’s.

She followed, with that obedience so deeply implanted in her, every phase of the program which Enid and Courtney Barr had mapped out for her. She went to the girls’ camp in New Hampshire and returned to school in Virginia that fall strong and tanned and boyish-looking, and was able to report to Enid that she could swim beautifully if not swiftly, could ride gracefully, could hold her own decently in a hard game of tennis, could play golf well enough not to be conspicuous on the links.

During her last term at the finishing school she obediently paid a great deal of attention to her dancing, to drawing room deportment, and to her own beautiful young body, learning to groom it expertly. And during the Christmas and Easter vacations she netted three proposals of marriage, from brothers of classmates in whose homes she visited. She learned, somehow, to say “no” so tactfully that her suitors were almost as flattered by her refusals as they would have been if she had accepted them.

Enid and Courtney Barr came down from New York to see her graduate, and with them they brought the news of her legal adoption.

“A surprise, too!” Enid chanted, swinging her daughter’s hands excitedly. “Court and I are going to take you to Europe with us this summer, and keep you away from New York until almost time for you to make your debut.”

“Europe!” Sally was dazed. Her first thought was that Europe was so far away from Capital City and David. He was getting his diploma now, just as she was getting hers—“Oh, Mother, you haven’t forgotten your promise, have you?”

Enid frowned slightly, abashed by Sally’s lack of enthusiasm. “Promise, darling?”

“That I could invite David to my coming-out party? Mother, I’ve lived for two years on that promise!” she cried desperately, as the frown of annoyance and anger deepened on her mother’s exquisite, proud little face.

Periodically, during the four months that the Barrs spent in wandering over Europe, Enid’s evasive reply to Sally’s urgent question thrust itself frighteningly through the new joys she was experiencing.

Enid had shrugged and said: “Remind me when we’re making up the invitation list this fall, Sally.” She knew now that her mother had counted on her forgetting David, that Enid had told herself until she believed it, because she wanted to believe, that the transformed Sally, the Sally whom she had remade into the kind of girl who could take her place in society as the daughter of Enid and Courtney Barr, would be a little ashamed of her 16-year-old infatuation for a penniless young farmer.

But Sally’s heart had not changed, no matter how radically Enid’s money, the finishing school and Europe had altered her, mentally and physically.

One morning in November Sally knocked at the door of the small, pleasant room known to the Barr household as “Miss Rice’s office.” Linda Rice held the difficult, exacting but always exciting position of Enid Barr’s social secretary. Sally liked Linda, envied her her independence, her tactful, firm handling of her sometimes unreasonable employer. As she knocked now, fear of her mother fluttered in the heart that was so full of love and admiration for her. For she knew that Enid and Linda were making up the invitation list for the long-discussed coming-out party.

“Come in,” Enid’s contralto voice called impatiently. “Oh, it’s you, darling. How cunning you look! Turn around so I can see how that new bob looks from the back. Oh, charming! Max is a robber, but he does know the art of cutting hair. Isn’t she precious, Linda?”

Sally, dressed in a deceptively simple little frock of dark blue French crepe which half revealed her slender knees, whirled obediently. The heavy, silken masses of her black hair had long since been ruthlessly sacrificed to the shears, and now with the new Parisian cut, later to be the rage in America and known as the “wind-blown bob,” she looked like an impudent little gamin, amazingly pretty and pert.

Her clear white skin contradicted the effect of the impish hair-cut, however, and persisted in making her look appealingly feminine.

“To think she can eat anything she wants and still keep that figure!” Enid exclaimed with humorous envy. “I’d give my soul to be able to eat bread and candy again.” But she looked at her own tiny body, no bigger than an ethereal 12-year-old girl’s and smiled with satisfaction. “What did you want, darling? Linda and I are awfully busy.—Oh, by the way, you mustn’t forget Claire’s tea this afternoon. You’re going to Bobby Proctor’s luncheon at the Ritz, too, aren’t you? Like the social whirl, sweet?”

“It still frightens me a little,” Sally confessed with a slight shiver. “Mother,” she began with a desperate attempt at casualness, “you’re sending David an invitation, aren’t you? You promised, you know—”

Enid frowned and pretended to consult the copy of the long list which she had been checking when Sally interrupted. “Is David Nash’s name on the list, Linda? Never mind. I’ll look for it. And Linda, will you please run down and tell Randall that Mrs. Barrington will be here for luncheon today? He’ll have to have gluten bread for her. Thank you, dear. I don’t know what I should do without you, Linda, you priceless thing!”

When the secretary had left the room, Enid turned to Sally, who was standing beside the desk, twisting her hands nervously. “Darling, I’ve counted so on your not holding me to that foolish promise I made two years ago. You must realize that David—dear and sweet and good as he undoubtedly is—belongs to your past, a past which I want you to forget as completely as if it had never existed.”

Sally opened her lips to speak, but the futility of the retort she was about to make overwhelmed her. How could she forget those twelve lonely, miserable years in a state orphanage? And how could her mother possibly expect her to forget David, who had been her only friend, her “perfect knight” when such dreadful trouble as Enid, in her sheltered life, could hardly imagine, had made her a hunted, terror-stricken fugitive from “justice”? David to whom she was “half married,” David whom she would always love, even if she never saw him again? But she would see him!

“Please don’t get that sulky, stubborn look on your face, Sally!” Enid spoke almost sharply. “I am thinking of David, too. Do you really think it would be fair to him to ask him to come to New York merely for a party, to see the girl he cannot hope to marry make her debut in a society to which he could never belong? Don’t be utterly selfish, darling! Think of me a little, too! David knows—the truth. You must know it would be painful for me to see him, after the story I told you in his presence. I want to forget, Sally, and just be happy, now that I have my daughter with me—” The lovely voice trembled with threatened tears, and the cornflower-blue eyes pleaded almost humbly with implacable sapphire ones.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Sally answered steadily. “But—you promised. I’ve done everything you asked me to do for more than two years. I kept my promise not to write to David, because all the time I was counting on you to keep yours.”

Enid Barr flushed and tapped angrily with her pen against the edge of the desk. “Of course, if you put it that way, I have no choice! How shall Linda address the invitation?”

“Thank you, Mother,” Sally cried, stooping swiftly to lay her lips against her mother’s golden hair. “You’ve made me awfully happy.” Her voice shook a little with awed delight as she gave her mother the only address she knew—David’s grandfather’s name and the R. F. D. route on which his farm lay.

“I suppose I’m having all this bother for nothing,” Enid brightened. “The boy would be an idiot to spend the money on the trip—even if he has it to spend!”

A beautiful light glowed in Sally’s wide, dreaming eyes. “David will come,” she said softly. “He will come if he has to walk.”

“A hiking costume would be so appropriate at a society girl’s debut,” Enid pointed out, a little maliciously, but she smiled then, a little secret, satisfied smile, as if she hoped he would look a rube among the sleek young men who would be asked to view her daughter when she was officially put “on the market.”

But Sally was too happy to notice. “May I write him, too, Mother? It would look so queer, just sending him an invitation, without a word—”

“Absolutely not!” Enid was stern. “The invitation is more than sufficient. Now run along, darling, and dress for Bobby’s luncheon. It seems to me there were never so many sub-deb parties as there are this year, but you simply must go to all of them, if your first season is to be a success. The list is going to be miles long,” she worried. “Perhaps it would have been wiser to have your party at the Ritz, as Mrs. Proctor and most of the others are doing, but there seems to be little reason to keep up an enormous establishment like this if you can’t entertain in it.”

“‘Coming out’ seems so silly,” Sally protested with sudden, unusual spirit. “Of course with me it’s different. The crowd doesn’t know me very well yet, but nearly all of the debs have been really ‘out’ for two or three years. They’ve been prom-trotting and going to the opera and the theater alone with me, even to night clubs—I can’t see what real difference it will make to most of them—”

“Of course you can’t,” Enid said with unintentional cruelty. “You haven’t been reared to this sort of thing. But you’ll learn. Run along now, and look your prettiest. And by the way, if you have a minute, won’t you stop by the photographers to choose the poses to be released for publication? The society editors are calling up frantically. All they’ve had are snapshots of you, and I want them to print a picture that will do you justice. You’re really the loveliest thing on the deb list this year, you know. But do run along! I shan’t get a blessed thing done if you stay here gossiping with me.”

Sally laughed, kissed her mother and ran from the room, bumping into Linda Rice, who was discreetly waiting outside the office until the interview between mother and daughter should be finished.

“Linda,” she whispered, her face rosy with sweet embarrassment, “I gave Mother the name of a very special friend of mine, to put on the invitation list. You’ll be a darling and mail it out today, won’t you? You see, he lives in the Middle West and I want him to have plenty of time to plan to come. David Nash is the name.” Her voice caressed the three beloved syllables more tenderly than she realized, and Linda Rice nodded her a knowing smile.

“Of course, Sally. And I hope he comes. I’ll mail it this very afternoon.”

Sally ran up the broad, circular staircase to the third floor, scorning to use the “lift” which Courtney Barr had had installed in the Fifth Avenue mansion a few years before.

She never entered her own suite of rooms—sitting room, bedroom, dressing room and bath—without first an uneasy feeling that she was trespassing and then a shock of delight that it was hers indeed. Now she passed slowly through the rooms, trying to see them with David’s eyes, or even with the eyes of the forlorn little Sally Ford who had slaved sixteen hours a day on the Carson farm for her “board and keep.”

Suddenly a picture flashed across her mind—the two-rooms-and-lean-to shack in which she and David had eaten what was to have been their wedding breakfast. A great nostalgia swept over her—not only for David, but for plain people working together to make a home and to support their children.

All her life in the orphanage she had dreamed of delicate foods, skin-caressing, lovely fabrics, spacious, gracious rooms. And now she had them—and she was frightened to nausea, because they were a barrier between her and David and all the realities of life and love which she had so nearly grasped when she was slaving on the farm, working as “Princess Lalla” in the carnival, fleeing from the pursuit of the law with only David to protect her.

She dressed listlessly for the sub-deb luncheon at the Ritz, chatted and laughed and pretended to be as frivolous and “wild” as any of her new friends; went to Claire Bainbridge’s tea that afternoon; went to the theater with her mother and adopted father that night, went, went, went during the next few days, but her heart was concerned with only one question: would David come? She had been so sure, so arrogantly, proudly sure that he would come even if he had to walk—

On the fifth day after the invitation was despatched his telegram came.

Color—all colors swirling together in a mad kaleidoscope of incredible beauty; the muted, insistent throbbing of a violin played by an unseen artist; the rosy glow of light which apparently had no source; the rustling whisper of silks; the polite, subdued buzz of middle-aged conversation; the shrill but musical clamor of very young voices; the subtle, faint odor of French perfumes; the stronger, more sickening odor of too many hothouse flowers—

Sally Barr, who had been Sally Ford, was “play-acting” again. She was playing the role of a society debutante. She was “playing-acting” and enjoying it, with a sort of surface enjoyment that made her look the perfect picture of the popular and beautiful debutante.

She knew that her cheeks were like tea roses, her sapphire eyes as brilliant as the jewel whose color they had imitated so perfectly. She knew that her wind-blown bob of gleaming, silky-soft black hair was ravishing, that her “period costume” of sea-shell pink taffeta and silver lace, made sinfully expensive by its intricate embroidery of seed pearls, was the most beautiful dress worn by any debutante of the season so far.

She knew all these things because the enviously ecstatic compliments of the other girls had told her so, because Enid Barr, her mother, who all these people thought was only her adopted mother, was luminous with pride and joy in her, because even Courtney Barr, with whom she still felt ill-at-ease, looked like a pouter-pigeon in his possessive satisfaction.

But Sally Barr was play-acting and the Sally Ford she had been looked on, in a skimpy little white lawn dress edged with five-cent lace, and watched the performance with critical eyes, or, rather, watched as often as those hungry, desperate eyes turned away from the door, unable to bear the sight of newcomers because none of them was David.

The Sally Ford in the skimpy little white lawn dress which the orphanage provide for Sundays and for rare dress-up occasions wondered how these strange, glamorous people could not see her beneath the sea-shell pink taffeta with its silver lace and precious seed-pearl embroidery. And this Sally Ford whom they could not see kept telling herself over and over that her dreams had come true: she had a mother who was rich and beautiful and tender and wise—nearly always wise, except about David; she was living in a mansion more magnificent than the orphaned “play-actress” had ever been able to conjure; she was beautiful and popular; these strange people who were “in society” were here because Sally Ford—no, Sally Barr!—was making her debut, was being accepted as one of them.

She told herself these things and her eyes again darted to the door, hungry for the sign of a penniless, 23-year-old farmer boy who would be as much out of place in this ballroom among these strange, glamorous people as Sally Ford in her skimpy little white lawn dress.

Three words hammered their staccato message ceaselessly on her listening, watching nerves: “Coming. Thanks. David.” Three words which had broken the silence of two and a half years. Coming—thanks—David—Coming—thanks—David—

“Darling, this is Mrs. Allenby, a very old and dear friend of mine—”

Sally Barr smiled her shy, sweet, little-girl smile and Sally Ford noted the success of it critically as the frumpy, dyed-haired little old lady passed on down the receiving line. Coming—thanks—David—But, oh, was he coming?

She stole a glance at the tiny watch set in the circle of diamonds that banded her bare arm just below the elbow. Half past eleven. Dancing would begin at twelve. She had been smiling and twittering and looking sweet and demure or provocative and gay since eight o’clock, when the dinner for the debutantes had begun.

How much longer could she keep it up? It was really absurd for them to suppose that she could go on like this until three or four o’clock in the morning, when her heart was broken—