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Melrose come upstairs, heard her door shut, then there was silence. Silence. Eleven struck from Madison Tower; midnight struck. Even the streets were quieter now. The squares of moonlight shifted on Norma's floor, went away. The fire died down, the big room was warm, and dim, and very still.
Turner, sufficiently intimate, and sufficiently reminiscent, to absolve Norma from any conversational duty. The girl could follow her own line of heroic and resolute thought uninterruptedly. But with the salad came utter rout again, and Norma's colour, and heart, and breath, began to fluctuate in a renewed agony of hope and fear.
Sauntering back to his work in the autumn sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not to drive a racer. So Norma's half-formed jealousies, desires, and dreams were a sealed book to him.
Was this endless evening to drag away on his terms, and were they to return to Newport to-morrow, with only the memory of that cool farewell to feed Norma's starving, starving soul? "Chris couldn't stay and have dinner," Mrs. Melrose presently was regretting, "but, after all, perhaps it's cooler up here than anywhere, and I am so tired that I'm not going to change!
I wonder what he would have said if we had told him?" "Gee, is that so?" asked Sydney, ignoring the latter half of Norma's sentence. "And is all that stuff down in the chasm yet?" "As far as we know, it is," said Norma. "And likely to remain there," she added, with a sigh.
The conversation, with its pleasant assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor.
These were instantly intent, at the bedside. But Mrs. Melrose paid no attention to them. She patted Norma's hand. "Late for you, dear!" she whispered. "Night!" Obediently she drank something the nurse put to her lips, and when she spoke it was more clearly. A moment later Doctor Murray had her pulse between his nerveless fingers. She moved her eyes lazily to smile at him.
The old lady followed Norma's spirited summary merely with an uneasy: "You mustn't let your husband get any socialistic ideas, Norma; there's too much of that now!" and Leslie, after a close study of Norma's glowing face, remarked suddenly: "Norma, I'll bet you a dollar you're rouged!" Before she left, the visitor managed a casual inquiry about Aunt Alice.
In the candlelight there was a wavering smile on Alice's quiet face, her broad forehead was unruffled, and her mouth mysteriously sweet. Norma's eyes fell upon a familiar black coat, on the kneeling woman nearest her, and with a start she recognized Aunt Kate. They left the room together a few minutes later, and Norma led her aunt to her own room, where they talked tenderly of the dead.
The baby glancing over her shoulder, with the little frown of displeasure that always greeted such ignorance on Norma's part, had but one reply: "Tante," she would declare, and continue her measured walk about the floor. So, for pastime, Norma began teaching her the figures of a dance then on the boards at the Opera House, to which her little ladyship lent herself with readiness.
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