She passed her mother, where she stood in the entry. “You can come too, if you want to, mamma,” she said.
She opened Penelope’s door without knocking, and went in. Penelope sat at the window, as in the morning. Irene did not go to her; but she went and laid a gold hairpin on her bureau, and said, without looking at her, “There’s a pin that I got today, because it was like his sister’s. It won’t become a dark person so well, but you can have it.”
She stuck a scrap of paper in the side of Penelope’s mirror. “There’s that account of Mr. Stanton’s ranch. You’ll want to read it, I presume.”
She laid a withered boutonniere on the bureau beside the pin. “There’s his buttonhole bouquet. He left it by his plate, and I stole it.”
She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed about to fall.
Her mother sprang forward with an imploring cry, “O ’Rene, ’Rene, ’Rene!”
Irene recovered herself before her mother could reach her. “Don’t touch me,” she said icily. “Mamma, I’m going to put on my things. I want papa to walk with me. I’m choking here.”
“I—I can’t let you go out, Irene, child,” began her mother.
“You’ve got to,” replied the girl. “Tell papa ta hurry his supper.”
“O poor soul! He doesn’t want any supper. He knows it too.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. Tell him to get ready.”
She left them once more.
Mrs. Lapham turned a hapless glance upon Penelope.
“Go and tell him, mother,” said the girl. “I would, if I could. If she can walk, let her. It’s the only thing for her.” She sat still; she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing that lay in her lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the sachet powder with which Irene liked to perfume her boxes.
Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk with her, crazily, incoherently, enough.
She mercifully stopped him. “Don’t talk, papa. I don’t want anyone should talk with me.”
He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aimless course they reached the new house on the water side of Beacon, and she made him stop, and stood looking up at it. The scaffolding which had so long defaced the front was gone, and in the light of the gas-lamp before it all the architectural beauty of the façade was suggested, and much of the finely felt detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly satisfied himself in that rich façade; certainly Lapham had not stinted him of the means.
“Well,” said the girl, “I shall never live in it,” and she began to walk on.
Lapham’s sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily after her. “Oh yes, you will, Irene. You’ll have lots of good times there yet.”
“No,” she answered, and said nothing more about it. They had not talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak of it now. Lapham understood that she was trying to walk herself weary, and he was glad to hold his peace and let her have her way. She halted him once more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary’s window.
“Isn’t there something they give you to make you sleep?” she asked vaguely. “I’ve got to sleep tonight!”
Lapham trembled. “I guess you don’t want anything, Irene.”
“Yes, I do! Get me something!” she retorted wilfully. “If you don’t, I shall die. I must sleep.”
They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a nervous person sleep. Irene stood poring over the showcase full of brushes and trinkets, while the apothecary put up the bromide, which he guessed would be about the best thing. She did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her father’s expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary’s cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, “You want to take a tablespoonful of that, as long as you’re awake. I guess it won’t take a great many to fetch you.”
“All right,” said Lapham, and paid and went out. “I don’t know but I shall want some of it,” he said, with a joyless laugh.
Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, “I want you should let me go up to Lapham tomorrow.”
“To Lapham? Why, tomorrow’s Sunday, Irene! You can’t go tomorrow.”
“Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here.”
“Well,” said the father passively. He made no pretence of asking her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade her.
“Give me that bottle,” she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.
The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother; the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham looked sleep-broken and careworn.
The girl glanced at her. “Don’t you fret about me, mamma,” she said. “I shall get along.” She seemed herself as steady and strong as rock.
“I don’t like to see you keeping up so, Irene,” replied her mother. “It’ll be all the worse for you when you do break. Better give way a little at the start.”
“I
