The bitterness stayed with her, and gradually robbed her life of everything that was happy and content. Her little household round, that had been so absorbing and so important, became tedious and stupid. Rose, who was expecting her second confinement, had her husband's mother with her, and in care of the old baby, and making preparations for the new, was busy, and had small time for the old companionship; the evenings were too cold for motoring now, even if Wolf had not been completely buried in engineering journals and papers of all sorts.

Norma did not call on Annie again, but a fretted and outraged sense of Annie's coolness and aloofness, and a somewhat similar impression from Leslie's manner, when they met in Fifth Avenue one day, was always in her mind. They could drop her as easily as they had picked her up, these high-and-mighty Melroses! She consoled herself, for a few days, with spectacular fancies of Annie's consternation should Norma's real identity be suddenly revealed to her, but even that poor solace was taken away from her at last.

It was Aunt Kate's unconscious hand that struck the blow, on a wild afternoon, All Hallow E'en, as it happened, when the older woman made the long trip to see Rose, and came on to Norma with a report that everything was going well, and Miggs more fascinating than ever. Mrs. Sheridan found Norma at the close of the short afternoon, moping in her unlighted house. She had been to the theatre with Wolf and a young couple from the house next door, last night, and had fallen asleep after an afternoon walk, and felt headachy, prickly with heat and cold, and stupid. Yawning and chilly, she kissed her aunt, and suggested that they move to the kitchen. It was Inga's free night and Norma was cook.

"You'll stay and surprise Wolf, he'd love it," Norma said, as the visitor's approving eyes noted the general order and warmth, the blue-checked towels and blue bowls, the white table and white walls. The little harum-scarum baby of the family was proceeding to get her husband a most satisfactory and delicious little dinner, and Aunt Kate was proud of her.

"Did you make that cake, darling?"

"Indeed I did; she can't make cake!"

"And the ham?"

"Well"—Norma eyed the cut ham fondly—"we did that together, out of the book! And I wish you'd taste it, Aunt Kate, it is perfectly delicious. I give it to Wolf every other night, but I think he'd eat it three times a day and be delighted. And last week we made bread—awfully good, too—not hard like that bread we made last summer. Rolls, we made—cinnamon rolls and plain. Harry and Rose were here. And Thanksgiving I'm going to try mincemeat."

"You're a born cook," Aunt Kate said, paying one of her highest compliments with due gravity. But Norma did not respond with her usual buoyancy. She sighed impatiently, and her face fell into lines of discontent and sadness that did not escape the watching eyes. Mrs. Sheridan changed the subject to the one of a cousin of Harry Redding, one Mrs. Barry with whose problems Norma was already dismally familiar. Mrs. Barry's husband was sick in a hospital, and she herself had to have an expensive operation, and the smallest of the four children had some trouble hideously like infantile paralysis.

Norma knew that Aunt Kate would have liked to have her offer to take at least one of the small and troublesome children for two or three days, if not to stay with the unfortunate Kitty Barry outright. She knew that there was almost no money, that all the household details of washing and cooking were piling up like a mountain about the ailing woman, but her heart was filled with sudden rebellion and impatience with the whole miserable scheme.

"My goodness, Aunt Kate, if it isn't one thing with those people it's another!" she said, impatiently. "I suppose you were there, and up with that baby all night!"

"Indeed I got some fine sleep," Mrs. Sheridan answered, innocently. "Poor things, they're very brave!"

Norma said nothing, but her expression was not sympathetic. She had been thinking of herself as to be pitied, and this ruthless introduction of the Barry question entirely upset the argument. If Mary Bishop and Katrina Thayer were the standard, then Norma Sheridan's life was too utterly obscure and insignificant to be worth living. But of course if incompetent strugglers like the Barrys were to be brought into the question, then Norma might begin to feel the solid ground melting from beneath her feet.

She did not offer the cake or the ham to Aunt Kate, as contributions toward the small Barrys' lunch next day, nor did she invite any one of them to visit her. Her aunt, if she noted these omissions, made no comment upon them.

"I declare you are getting to be a real woman, Norma," she said.

"I suppose everyone grows up," Norma assented, cheerlessly.

"Yes, there's a time when a child stops being a baby and you see that it's beginning to be a little girl," Mrs. Sheridan mused; "but it's some time later before you know what sort of a little girl it is. And then at—say fifteen or sixteen—you see the change again, the little girl growing into a grown girl—a young lady. And for awhile you sort of lose track of her again, until all of a sudden you say: 'Well, Norma's going to be sociable—and like people!' or: 'Rose is going to be a gentle, shy girl——'"

Norma knew the mildly moralizing tone, and that she was getting a sermon.

"You never knew that I was going to be a good housekeeper!" she asserted, inclined toward contrariety.

"I think you're going through another change now, Baby," her aunt said. "You've become a woman too fast. You don't quite know where you are!"

This was so unexpectedly acute that Norma was inwardly surprised, and a little impressed. She sat down at one end of the clean little kitchen table, and rested her face in her hands, and looked resentfully at the older woman.

"Then you don't think I'm a good housekeeper," she said, looking hurt.

"I think you will be whatever you want to be, Norma, it'll all be in your hands now," Mrs. Sheridan answered, seriously. "You're a woman, now; you're Wolf's wife; you've reached an age when you can choose and decide for yourself. You can be—you always could be—the best child the Lord ever made, or you can fret and brood over what you haven't got."

The shrewd kindly eye seemed looking into Norma's very soul. The girl dropped her hard bright stare, and looked sulky.

"I don't see what I'm doing!" she muttered. "I can't help wanting—what other people that are no better than I, have!"

"Yes, but haven't you enough, Norma? Think of women like poor Kitty Barry——"

"Oh, Kitty Barry—Kitty Barry!" Norma burst out, angrily. "It isn't my fault that Kitty Barry has trouble; I had nothing to do with it! Look at people like Leslie—what she wastes on one new fur coat would keep the Barrys for a year! Eighty-two hundred dollars she paid for her birthday coat! And that's nothing! Katrina Thayer——"

"Norma—Norma—Norma!" her aunt interrupted, reproachfully. "What have you to do with girls like the Thayer girl? Why, there aren't twenty girls in the country as rich as that. That doesn't affect you, if there's something you can do for the poor and unfortunate——"

"It does affect me! I can't"—Norma dropped her tone, and glanced at her aunt. She knew that she was misbehaving—"I can't help inheriting a love for money," she said, breathing hard. "I know perfectly well who I am—who my mother is," she ended, with a half-defiant and half-fearful sob in her voice. "How do you mean that you know about your mother, Norma?" Mrs. Sheridan demanded, sharply.

"Well"—Norma had calmed a little, and she was a trifle nervous—"Chris told me; and Aunt Alice knows, too—that Aunt Annie is my mother," she said.

"Chris Liggett told you that?" Mrs. Sheridan asked, with a note of incredulity in her voice.

"Yes. Aunt Alice guessed it almost as soon as I went to live there! And I've known it for over a year," Norma said.

"And who told Chris?"

"Well—Aunt Marianna, I suppose!"

There was silence for a moment.

"Norma," said Mrs. Sheridan, in a quiet, convincing tone that cooled the girl's hot blood instantly, "Chris is entirely wrong; your mother is dead. I've never lied to you, and I give you my word! I don't know where Miss Alice got that idea, but it's like her romantic way of fancying things! No, dear," she went on, sympathetically, as Norma sat silent, half-stunned by painful surprise, "you have no claim on Miss Annie. Both your father and mother are dead, Norma; I knew them both. There was a reason," Mrs. Sheridan added, thoughtfully, "why I felt that Mrs. Melrose might want to be kind to you—want to undo an injustice she did years ago. But I've told myself a thousand times that I did you a cruel wrong when I first let you go among them—you who were always so sensible, and so cheerful, and who would always take things as they came, and make no fuss!"

"Oh, Aunt Kate," Norma stammered, bitterly, her lip trembling, and her voice fighting tears, "you don't have to tell me that in your opinion I've changed for the worse—I see it in the way you look at me! You've always thought Rose was an angel—too good to live!—and that I was spoiled and lazy and good-for-nothing; you were glad enough to get rid of me, and now I hope you're satisfied! They've told me one thing, and you've told me another—and I guess the truth is that I don't belong to anybody; and I wish I was dead, where my f-f-father and m-m-mother are——!"

And stumbling into incoherence and tears, Norma dropped her head on her arm, and sobbed bitterly. Mrs. Sheridan's face was full of pain, but she did not soften.

"You belong to your husband, Norma!" she said, mildly.

Norma sat up, and wiped her eyes on a little handkerchief that she took from the pocket of her housewifely blue apron. She did not meet her aunt's eye, and still looked angry and hurt.

"Well—who am I then? Haven't I got some right to know who my mother and father were?" she demanded.

"That you will never hear from me," Mrs. Sheridan replied, firmly.

"But, Aunt Kate——"

"I gave my solemn promise, Norma, and I've kept my word all these years; I'm not likely to break it now."

"But—won't I ever know?"

Mrs. Sheridan shrugged her broad shoulders and frowned slightly.

"That I can't say, my dear," she said, gently. "Some day I may be released from my bond, and then I'll be glad to tell you everything."

"Perhaps Wolf will tell me he's nothing to me, now!" the girl continued, with childish temper. "Wolf—and all of us—think that there's nobody like you," the older woman said, tenderly. But Norma did not brighten. She went in a businesslike way to the stove, and glanced at the various bowls and saucepans in which dinner was baking and boiling, then sliced some stale bread neatly, put the shaved crusts in a special jar, and began to toast the slices with a charming precision.

"Change your mind and stay with us, Aunt Kate?" she said, lifelessly.

"No, dear, I'm going!" And Aunt Kate really did bundle herself into coat and rubber overshoes and woolly scarf again. "November's coming in with a storm," she predicted, glancing out at the darkness, where the wind was rushing and howling drearily.

Norma did not answer. No mere rushing of clouds and whirl of dry and colourless leaves could match the storm of disappointment that was beginning to rage in her own heart.

Yet she felt a pang of repentance, when cheerful Aunt Kate had tramped off in the dark, to Rose's house, which was five blocks away, and perhaps afterward to the desolate Barrys', and wished that she had put her arms about the big square shoulders, and her cheek against her aunt's cheek, and said that she was sorry to be unreasonable.

Rushing to another extreme of unreason, she decided that she and Wolf must go see Rose to-night—and perhaps the Barrys, too—and cheer and solace them all. And Norma indulged in a little dream of herself nursing and cooking in the Barrys' six little cluttered rooms, and earning golden opinions from all the group. There was money, too; she had not used all of October's allowance, and to-morrow would find another big check at the bank.

Wolf interrupted by coming in so tired he could hardly move. He ate his dinner, yawned amiably in the kitchen while she cleared it away, and was so sound asleep at nine o'clock that Norma's bedside light and the rustling of the pages of her book, three feet away from his face, had no more effect upon him than if the three feet had been three hundred.

And then the bitter mood came back to her again; the bored, restless, impatient feeling that her life was a stupid affair. And deep in her heart the sense of hurt and humiliation grew and spread; the thought that she was not of the charmed circle of the Melroses, not secretly and romantically akin to them, she was merely the casual object of the old lady's fantastic sense of obligation. Aunt Kate, who had never said what was untrue—who, Norma and her children firmly believed, could not say what was untrue—had taken away, once and for all, the veil of mystery and romance that had wrapped Norma for three exciting years.

For Leslie, and Katrina, and Mary Bishop, perhaps, travel and the thrill of foreign shores or European courts. But for Wolf Sheridan's wife, this small, orderly, charming house on the edge of the New Jersey woods, and the laundry to think of every Monday, and the two-days' ordering to remember every Saturday, as long as the world went round!

For a few days Norma really suffered in spirit, then the natural healthy current of her life reËstablished itself, and she philosophically determined to make the best of the matter. If she was not Aunt Annie's daughter and Leslie's cousin, she was at least their friend. They—even unsuspecting of any strange relationship—had always been kind to her. And Aunt Marianna and Aunt Alice had been definitely affectionate, to say nothing of Chris!

So one day, when she happened to be shopping in the winter briskness of the packed and brilliant Avenue, she telephoned Leslie at about the luncheon hour. Leslie when last they met had said that she would confidently expect Norma to run out and lunch with her some day—any day.

"Who is it?" Leslie's voice asked, irritably, when at last the telephone connection was established. "Oh, Norma! Oh——? What is it?"

"Just wondering how you all were, and what the family news is," Norma said, with an uncomfortable inclination to falter.

"I don't hear you!" Leslie protested, impatiently. The insignificant inquiry did not seem to gain much by repetition, and Norma's cheeks burned in shame when Leslie followed it by a blank little pause. "Oh—everyone's fine. The baby wasn't well, but she's all right now."

Another slight pause, then Norma said:

"She must be adorable—I'd like to see her."

"She's not here now," Leslie answered, quickly.

"I've been shopping," Norma said. "Any chance that you could come down town and lunch with me?"

"No, I really couldn't, to-day!" Leslie answered, lightly and promptly.

A moment later Norma said good-bye. She walked away from the telephone booth with her face burning, and her heart beating quickly with anger and resentment. "Snob—snob—snob!" she said to herself, furiously, of Leslie. And of herself she presently added honestly, "And I wasn't much better, for I don't really like her any more than she does me!" And she stopped for flowers, and a little box of pastry, and went out to delight her Aunt Kate's heart with an unexpected visit.

But a sting remained, and Norma brooded over the injustice of life, as she went about her little house in the wintry sunlight, and listened to Wolf, and made much of Rose and the new baby girl. By Thanksgiving it seemed to her that she had only dreamed of "AÏda" and of Newport, and that the Norma of the wonderful frocks and the wonderful dreams had been only a dream herself.