Part 80

Cissy, studying the adjustment of her veil, confessed, "He hasn't asked me."

"But he will--"

Mrs. Beale shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows?"

In the weeks which followed, the little lady was conscious that things were not drawing to a comfortable climax. By all the rules of the game, Landry should long ago have declared himself. But he seemed to be slipping more and more into the fatal role of good friend and comrade.

Cissy's pride would not let her admit, even to herself, that she had failed to attract at the final moment. But there was something deeper than her pride involved, and she found her days restless and her nights sleepless. One night in the dense darkness she faced the truth relentlessly. "You're in love, Cissy Beale," she told herself, scornfully. "You're in love for the first time in your life--and you a--grandmother!"

Then she turned over on her pillow, hid her face in its white warmth, and cried as if her heart would break.

In the meantime the baby drooped. Cecily, worried, consulted her mother continually. Thus it came about that Mrs. Beale lived a double life. From noon until midnight she was of to-day--smartly gowned, girlish; from midnight until dawn she was of yesterday--waking from her fitful slumbers at the first wailing note, presiding in gray gown and slippers over strange brews of catnip and of elderflower.

Cecily's doctor, being up-to-date, remonstrated at this return to the primitive, but was forced to admit, after the baby had come triumphantly through a half-dozen critical attacks, that Cissy's back-to-grandma methods were effective.

It was on a morning following one of these struggles that Cissy said to her daughter, wearily, "I can't escape it--"

"Escape what?" demanded Cecily, who, in the pale-gray bedroom was endeavoring to observe the doctor's injunction to let the wailing baby stay in her bassinet, instead of walking the floor with her.

"The black-silk-and-mitt destiny," said the depressed lady.

"What has happened?" Cecily demanded.

"Nothing has happened," responded her weary little mother, and refused to discuss the matter further.

But to herself she was beginning to admit that she had lost Landry. An hour later she had a telephone message from him.

"I want you to go with me for a last ride together," he said. "I leave to-morrow."

"To-morrow!" Her voice showed her dismay.

"But why this sudden decision--"

"I have played long enough," he said; "business calls--"

As Mrs. Beale made ready for the ride she surveyed herself wistfully in her mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, and faint little lines toward the corners of her lips--it even seemed to her that her chin sagged. She had a sudden sense of revolt. "If I were young, really young," she thought, "he would not be going away--"

With this idea firmly fixed in her mind, she exerted herself to please him; and her little laugh made artificial music in his ears, her fixed smile wore upon his nerves, her staccato questions irritated him.

Again they had dinner together, and as she sat opposite him, gorgeous and gay in her gown of geranium red, he began to talk with her of her daughter.

"I've never met her. It has seemed to me that you might have let me see her--"

Cissy flushed. "She's such a great grown-up," she said. "Somehow when I'm with her I feel--old--"

"You will never seem old," he said, with the nearest approach to tenderness that had softened his voice for days. "You have in you the spirit of eternal youth--"

Then he floundered on. "But a mother and a daughter--when you used to speak of her in Chicago, it seemed to me that I could see you together, and I liked the sweetness and womanliness of the thought; but I have never seen you together."

With a sense of recklessness upon her, Cissy suddenly determined to tell him the truth. "Cecily hasn't been going out much. You see, there's the baby--"

He stared. "The baby--?"

"Her baby--Cecily's--"