The ten Hutchinsons having left the library entirely alone in the hour before dinner, David and Margaret had appropriated it and were sitting companionably together on the big couch drawn up before the fireplace, where a log was trying to consume itself unscientifically head first.

“I would stay to dinner if urged,” David suggested.

“You stay,” Margaret agreed laconically.

She moved away from him, relaxing rather limply in the corner of the couch, with a hand dangling over the farther edge of it.

“You’re an inconsistent being,” David said. “You buoy all the rest of us up with your faith in the well-being of our child, and then you pine yourself sick over her absence.”

“It’s Christmas coming on. We always had such a beautiful time on Christmas. It was so 293 much fun buying her presents. It isn’t like Christmas at all with her gone from us.”

“Do you remember how crazy she was over the ivory set?”

“And the bracelet watch?”

“Do you remember the Juliet costume?” David’s eyes kindled at the reminiscence. “How wonderful she was in it.”

Margaret drew her feet up on the couch suddenly, and clasped her hands about her knees. David laughed.

“I haven’t seen you do that for years,” he said.

“What?”

“Hump yourself in that cryptic way.”

“Haven’t you?” she said. “I was just wondering—” but she stopped herself suddenly.

“Wondering what?” David was watching her narrowly, and perceiving it, she flushed.

“This is not my idea of an interesting conversation,” she said; “it’s getting too personal.”

“I can remember the time when you told me that you didn’t find things interesting unless they were personal. ‘I like things very personal,’ you said—in those words.”

“I did then.” 294

“What has changed you?” David asked gravely.

“The chill wind of the world, I guess; the most personal part of me is frozen stiff.”

“I never saw a warmer creature in my life,” David protested. “On that same occasion you said that being a woman was about like being a field of clover in an insectless world. You don’t feel that way nowadays, surely,—at the rate the insects have been buzzing around you this winter. I’ve counted at least seven, three bees, one or two beetles, a butterfly and a worm.”

“I didn’t know you paid that much attention to my poor affairs.”

“I do, though. If you hadn’t put your foot down firmly on the worm, I had every intention of doing so.”

“Had you?”

“I had.”

“On that occasion to which you refer I remember I also said that I had a queer hunch about Eleanor.”

“Margaret, are you deliberately changing the subject?”

“I am.” 295

“Then I shall bring the butterfly up later.”

“I said,” Margaret ignored his interruption, “that I had the feeling that she was going to be a storm center and bring some kind of queer trouble upon us.”

“Yes.”

“She did, didn’t she?”

“I’m not so sure that’s the way to put it,” David said gravely. “We brought queer trouble on her.”

“She made—you—suffer.”

“She gave my vanity the worst blow it has ever had in its life,” David corrected her. “Look here, Margaret, I want you to know the truth about that. I—I stumbled into that, you know. She was so sweet, and before I knew it I had—I found myself in the attitude of making love to her. Well, there was nothing to do but go through with it. I wanted to, of course. I felt like Pygmalion—but it was all potential, unrealized—and ass that I was, I assumed that she would have no other idea in the matter. I was going to marry her because I—I had started things going, you know. I had no choice even if I had wanted one. It never occurred 296 to me that she might have a choice, and so I went on trying to make things easy for her, and getting them more tangled at every turn.”

“You never really—cared?” Margaret’s face was in shadow.

“Never got the chance to find out. With characteristic idiocy I was keeping out of the picture until the time was ripe. She really ran away to get away from the situation I created and she was quite right too. If I weren’t haunted by these continual pictures of our offspring in the bread line, I should be rather glad than otherwise that she’s shaken us all till we get our breath back. Poor Peter is the one who is smashed, though. He hasn’t smiled since she went away.”

“You wouldn’t smile if you were engaged to Beulah.”

“Are they still engaged?”

“Beulah has her ring, but I notice she doesn’t wear it often.”

“Jimmie and Gertrude seem happy.”

“They are, gloriously.”

“That leaves only us two,” David suggested. “Margaret, dear, do you think the time will ever come when I shall get you back again?” 297

Margaret turned a little pale, but she met his look steadily.

“Did you ever lose me?”

“The answer to that is ‘yes,’ as you very well know. Time was when we were very close—you and I, then somehow we lost the way to each other. I’m beginning to realize that it hasn’t been the same world since and isn’t likely to be unless you come back to me.”

“Was it I who strayed?”

“It was I; but it was you who put the bars up and have kept them there.”

“Was I to let the bars down and wait at the gate?”

“If need be. It should be that way between us, Margaret, shouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Margaret said, “I don’t know.” She flashed a sudden odd look at him. “If—when I put the bars down, I shall run for my life. I give you warning, David.”

“Warning is all I want,” David said contentedly. He could barely reach her hand across the intervening expanse of leather couch, but he accomplished it,—he was too wise to move closer to her. “You’re a lovely, lovely being,” he said 298 reverently. “God grant I may reach you and hold you.”

She curled a warm little finger about his.

“What would Mrs. Bolling say?” she asked practically.

“To tell you the truth, she spoke of it the other day. I told her the Eleanor story, and that rather brought her to her senses. She wouldn’t have liked that, you know; but now all the eligible buds are plucked, and she wants me to settle down.”

“Does she think I’m a settling kind of person?”

“She wouldn’t if she knew the way you go to my head,” David murmured. “Oh, she thinks that you’ll do. She likes the ten Hutchinsons.”

“Maybe I’d like them better considered as connections of yours,” Margaret said abstractedly.

David lifted the warm little finger to his lips and kissed it swiftly.

“Where are you going?” he asked, as she slipped away from him and stood poised in the doorway.

“I’m going to put on something appropriate to the occasion,” she answered.

When she came back to him she was wearing the most delicate and cobwebby of muslins with a design of pale purple passion flowers trellised all 299 over it, and she gave him no chance for a moment alone with her all the rest of the evening.

Sometime later she showed him Eleanor’s parting letter, and he was profoundly touched by the pathetic little document.

As the holidays approached Eleanor’s absence became an almost unendurable distress to them all. The annual Christmas dinner party, a function that had never been omitted since the acquisition of David’s studio, was decided on conditionally, given up, and again decided on.

“We do want to see one another on Christmas day,—we’ve got presents for one another, and Eleanor would hate it if she thought that her going away had settled that big a cloud on us. She slipped out of our lives in order to bring us closer together. We’ll get closer together for her sake,” Margaret decided.

But the ordeal of the dinner itself was almost more than they had reckoned on. Every detail of traditional ceremony was observed even to the mound of presents marked with each name piled on the same spot on the couch, to be opened with the serving of the coffee.

“I got something for Eleanor,” Jimmie remarked 300 shamefacedly as he added his contributions to the collection. “Thought we could keep it for her, or throw it into the waste-basket or something. Anyhow I had to get it.”

“I guess everybody else got her something, too,” Margaret said. “Of course we will keep them for her. I got her a little French party coat. It will be just as good next year as this. Anyhow as Jimmie says, I had to get it.”

“I got her slipper buckles,” Gertrude admitted. “She has always wanted them.”

“I got her the Temple Shakespeare,” Beulah added. “She was always carrying around those big volumes.”

“You’re looking better, Beulah,” Margaret said. “Are you feeling better?”

“Jimmie says I’m looking more human. I guess perhaps that’s it,—I’m feeling more—human. I needed humanizing—even at the expense of some—some heartbreak,” she said bravely.

Margaret crossed the room to take a seat on Beulah’s chair-arm, and slipped an arm around her. 301

“You’re all right if you know that,” she whispered softly.

“I thought I was going to bring you Eleanor herself,” Peter said. “I got on the trail of a girl working in a candy shop out in Yonkers. My faithful sleuth was sure it was Eleanor and I was ass enough to believe he knew what he was talking about. When I got out there I found a strawberry blonde with gold teeth.”

“Gosh, you don’t think she’s doing anything like that,” Jimmie exclaimed.

“I don’t know,” Peter said miserably. He was looking ill and unlike himself. His deep set gray eyes were sunken far in his head, his brow was too white, and the skin drawn too tightly over his jaws. “As a de-tec-i-tive, I’m afraid I’m a failure.”

“We’re all failures for that matter,” David said. “Let’s have dinner.”

Eleanor’s empty place, set with the liqueur glass she always drank her thimbleful of champagne in, and the throne chair from the drawing-room in which she presided over the feasts given in her honor, was almost too much for them. Margaret 302 cried openly over her soup. Peter shaded his eyes with his hand, and Gertrude and Jimmie groped for each other’s hands under the shelter of the table-cloth.

“This—this won’t do,” David said. He turned to Beulah on his left, sitting immovable, with her eyes staring unseeingly into the centerpiece of holly and mistletoe arranged by Alphonse so lovingly. “We must either turn this into a kind of a wake, and kneel as we feast, or we must try to rise above it somehow.”

“I don’t see why,” Jimmie argued. “I’m in favor of each man howling informally as he listeth.”

“Let’s drink her health anyhow,” David insisted. “I cut out the Sauterne and the claret, so we could begin on the wine at once in this contingency. Here’s to our beloved and dear absent daughter.”

“Long may she wave,” Jimmie cried, stumbling to his feet an instant after the others.

While they were still standing with their glasses uplifted, the bell rang.

“Don’t let anybody in, Alphonse,” David admonished him.

They all turned in the direction of the hall, but 303 there was no sound of parley at the front door. Eleanor had put a warning finger to her lips, as Alphonse opened it to find her standing there. She stripped off her hat and her coat as she passed through the drawing-room, and stood in her little blue cloth traveling dress between the portiÈres that separated it from the dining-room. The six stood transfixed at the sight of her, not believing the vision of their eyes.

“You’re drinking my health,” she cried, as she stretched out her arms to them. “Oh! my dears, and my dearests, will you forgive me for running away from you?”