THE OLD CAT!

"Would he like to have one or two young people asked to meet them? Alice Warder, for instance, and her cousin. How would they do?" Did his face cloud a little?

"I don't know," he said slowly, and his voice suggested a cloud, or at least a diminution of his pleasure.

"Is that necessary, do you think, mother? It is not as though we were at home, of course. Several guests at one time would hardly be expected at a boarding-house."

His mother reminded him of their hostess's cordial offer of a separate table for themselves and three or four guests whenever they cared to give her a half-day's notice; and added that Alice was so used to being called upon to help entertain their guests, that to count her out would seem almost strange to her. Besides, wouldn't this be a convenient time to show her cousin some attention? He was not to be with her long.

Apparently Erskine had no more arguments to offer.

"Oh, very well," he said. Those were matters for her to settle, and it must all be just as she thought, of course. Then he kissed her, lavishly, and went away; but she felt that she had destroyed much of his pleasure in the proposed visit. And he used to be so fond of Alice!

During the next two days she spent much time and thought over her little boarding-house dinner-party. She had adhered to her resolve to include Alice and her cousin among the guests, although she had given herself time to look steadily in the face the reason why she was so insistent about this when Erskine evidently desired it otherwise.

Alice Warder was Flossy Shipley's dear friend, and being introduced by her to the Burnhams was at once established on the footing of an old friend. It had taken but a very short time to learn to love her for herself. Even the careful mother of one son of marriageable age would have found it hard to find flaws in Alice Warder. She was beautiful to look upon, with regular, well-modelled features and a complexion that was faultless. Perhaps her great brown eyes were what a stranger noticed first; they were certainly very expressive. But she was much more than beautiful. There was about her a charm of manner and movement that are difficult to define and impossible to describe, but that made their invariable impression even on those who met her casually. Ruth Burnham, who in her womanhood was, as she had been in her girlhood, fastidious to a fault with regard to young women, had yielded to the subtle charm of this one at their very first meeting; and as the intimacy between them deepened into friendship she had found graces of heart and mind that fully harmonized with the lovely exterior.

The Warders bought a home very near to the Burnham place, and so far as social life was concerned the two families speedily became as one.

Mrs. Burnham, singularly enough, as she reflected afterward, had not once, during the early days of their friendship, coupled the names of Alice and Erskine in her thoughts, congenial as they were. Although they were almost to a day of the same age, Alice, who had been for several years the nominal head of her father's house, appeared much the older, and more like a mature young woman than a girl still in the charge of a governess. It might have been this apparent disparity in their ages that helped Mrs. Burnham to take the girl to her heart and think of her as the daughter she had often wished for; not by any means as Erskine's wife, but as his sister.

Erskine had been from the first of their acquaintance drawn to the young woman in the frank and brotherly way that his mother desired. When the plans for college were matured, one of the loudly spoken regrets on the part of both mother and son was that they must be separated from the Warders.

It came to pass, however, in the course of their second year of absence that Mr. Warder had occasion to make the college town his headquarters for several months; so Alice and her former governess were installed in one of the hotels for the winter, that her father might have as much of her company as possible; and the Burnhams rejoiced greatly thereat.

Yet here was Erskine, barely six weeks afterwards, considering it not necessary to invite Alice to dinner! The poor mother sighed over the perversity and the blindness of young manhood, and knew for the first time that if Erskine had developed the peculiar interest which Miss Parker seemed to have awakened, for Alice Warder, instead, she could have rejoiced with her whole heart.

They came to dinner, Alice and her Boston cousin, a Harvard student of marked ability, and Miss Parker and her brother. And Alice was fully as marked a contrast to the other young woman as Ruth had believed that she would be. First, in the matter of dress. Alice Warder was an artist in dress. She wore at this quiet little dinner party a cloth gown of olive-green, so severely plain in its make-up that its richness of texture and faultless workmanship were apparent. And Miss Parker appeared in an elbow-sleeved white dress badly laundered and profusely trimmed with a quantity of lace that was startling rather than fine. Moreover, she was adorned with a mass of hothouse blooms to which she referred so significantly that the little company were at once made aware that Erskine was the giver.

But the dress was perfection compared with the poor girl's manner. She gayly and unblushingly appropriated Erskine to herself and rallied her brother on the situation.

"Poor Jim! you haven't any girl at all, have you? Since Miss Warder—must I call you 'Miss Warder'? it sounds ever so much more friendly and cosey to say 'Alice.' You must look after your cousin, I suppose. Are you sure he is your cousin? You know that is a dodge girls have when—Oh, well, never mind; I won't bother you. This is good for Jim; he always has half a dozen strings to his bow and can never decide which one of them he wants the most; so this will be excellent discipline for him, leaving him out in the cold. Dear me! What am I talking about? Here is Mrs. Burnham looking young enough this minute to be one of us."

All this, while they were making their way through the boarding-house halls and large dining-room to a cosey little alcove, where a table had been set for the Burnhams and their guests. Erskine's face had flushed deeply during the outburst, and he had darted an annoyed look at his mother to see if she was hearing it. He led the way across the dining-room much to the irrepressible Mamie's disappointment, though she chose to seem to ridicule it.

"Dear me!" she said in a stage whisper to Alice, "do look at that ridiculous boy walking off alone. Where I come from, the fellows take the girls out to supper. Can't I borrow your cousin for this evening, and get even with him?"

Mrs. Burnham felt the color rising in her face, but Alice was gracious and lovely. She laughed pleasantly as though used to such jokes, linked her arm in the girl's, and said merrily:—

"We will give them all the slip, my dear, and go in together."

Throughout that embarrassing and long-drawn-out dinner Alice was a help and comfort at least to her hostess, and did steadily and patiently what she could to cover the blunders of the girl beside her. Utterly unaccustomed to even the formalities of a fashionable boarding-house table, Mamie made constant blunders with forks and spoons and other instruments of torture for the uninitiated; but these were trifles compared with the blunders of her tongue. She made evident attempts to cover her ignorance with regard to table formalities by much gay talk. She laughed incessantly, and told many jokes at her brother's expense. She said: "him and me," and "her and I," and "you folks," and a dozen other provincialisms. When they returned to Mrs. Burnham's parlor, it was almost worse—for then Mamie sang; and it was hard for her hostess to determine of which she was most ashamed, the bad taste of the girl's selections or the less than mediocre execution.

Still, the music was by no means the worst feature of that memorable hour. Mamie's next startling venture was a pretence of being offended by what she called Erskine's desertion of her at dinner-time.

"Oh, you needn't come around," she said rudely, as he rose to arrange her music. "I can fix things myself, thank you, and Mr. Colchester will turn the music for me, I know; won't you, Mr. Colchester?" with a jaunty little smile for the stately Boston cousin. "You can't make up for rudeness to me, sir, as easy as you think. I make fellows who want my company mind their p's and q's, don't I, Jim?"

The stalwart brother thus appealed to replied only by a slight embarrassed laugh, and the hostess had time out of her own embarrassment to bestow a swift glance of pity upon him. He had already seen enough of another sort of world to realize that his pretty, pert little sister, the idol of his country home, was not making as good an impression on these new friends of his as he wished she were. If the ladies had but known it, the poor young fellow was at that moment saying to himself:—

"Why can't Mamie act more like that Miss Warder, I wonder? There's an awful difference between them, and she doesn't catch on, somehow."

Throughout the interminable evening, Alice Warder proved not only the excellent foil that Mrs. Burnham had foreseen, but a faithful and efficient coadjutor. Not a lift of her eyebrows or a stray glance of any kind betrayed a second's surprise at the character of the guests invited to meet her dignified cousin and herself. She was gracious and friendly to such an extent that before the evening was over, Mamie, who was frankness itself, said admiringly:—

"How long you going to stay in this place? Dear me! I wish you was going to be here all winter; I can see that you and me would be real cronies."

In the privacy of Mrs. Burnham's bedroom, whither Alice was taken to put on her wraps, the girl bestowed her closing touch of sweetness and balm upon her hostess.

"I had quite a little visit with Mr. Parker while you were entertaining the others with those pictures; I was much interested in him; he is a young man of good principle, isn't he? One on whom education will tell. It is lovely in you and Erskine to open your home to him in this way; it will be sure to mean much to him; and it ought to help the little sister, too. It is pleasant to see how fond he is of her."

"You helped," said Mrs. Burnham, significantly. "I am more grateful for your help to-night than the mere words will express."

She kissed her as she spoke, and felt in her heart that she was willing that Erskine should marry this girl to-morrow, if he would.

"I was glad of the opportunity," the girl said simply. "And so, I am sure, was Ranford. He is very much interested in young men of this type."

For a full half hour after "Jim" had carried off his pouting sister,—whose parting shot had been that she considered it "awfully pokey" for a girl to go home from a dinner-party with "nothing but her brother"—spoken in a pretended confidence to him, but loud enough for all to hear,—silence reigned in the Burnham parlor.

Erskine had a desk in one of its corners, where he kept certain of his books, and studied, whenever he chose to remain with his mother. He flung himself down before it the moment the door closed after their guests, as though work pressed hard.

His mother took a book and sat silent and apparently absorbed, although as a matter of fact, instead of reading, she was studying the half-averted face that was drawn in almost stern lines, and the eyes that stared at the open page as though they did not see its words. She did not believe that Erskine was studying Latin.

What had this terrible evening done for him, and for her? Had that pretty-faced, ill-dressed, ill-bred girl secured in some unaccountable way a permanent hold on her son's heart? Might it not be possible that in giving him this awful view of her in sharp contrast with Alice Warder she had but alienated him from herself? Perhaps she had blundered, and perhaps the consequences of her blunder would be fatal to them both. Why had she done it? Why had she not waited, and watched, and understood better before she attempted anything? What should she do now? How was she to bear this silence? And yet, what might not Erskine say when at last he broke it?

A half-hour passed and neither mother nor son had turned a page. Suddenly he wheeled his chair around so that she could get a full view of his face, and smiled a half-sad, half-whimsical smile, and spoke his word:—

"I don't believe we can do it, Mommie. It was good in you to try, and you did it royally, as you do things, but—she can't be assimilated. She doesn't belong. We shall have to wait until she goes home before we can do much for Parker. All the same, mother, you understand that I thank you for the effort. Alice was superb to-night, wasn't she?"

Then Ruth Burnham understood that it was her business to understand that her son's interest lay solely in the young man Parker, and that in the desire to help the brother the sister must be thought of as simply tolerated. Already Erskine had put away his first illusion so utterly that he did not propose to own it to himself, much less to his mother.

Poor Mamie Parker spent her fruitless winter in the college town, and tried by many innocent and a few questionable ways to win back to interest and special attention her brother's handsome friend, whose sudden defection she could not understand. She tortured herself in a vain effort to discover what could have happened on that evening which she had expected to be memorable to her for other reasons than now appeared. Why had it so utterly changed the attitude toward her of the young man who, she had confidently assured Jim, was "caught, all right," she "knew the signs"?

By degrees, without any clearly defined reason for doing so, she came to associate the defection with the young man's mother, and called her "that old cat!" with a bitterness that had more than mere anger behind it; there was a lump in her throat and a curious stricture about the little organ that she called her heart, which was new to the frivolous girl.

Jim's handsome college friend had afforded his sister Mamie a glimpse into a new, strange world, one that she felt she could have loved, and in which she believed that she could have shone; and in some way, she did not understand how, his mother had closed the door.

"The old cat!" she said. "I should like to get even with her!" And then she cried.