That evening at supper Laura Lou again came in late. She wore a faded yellow muslin which became her, and looked flushed and animated; but she contributed no more to the conversation than on the previous day. Mrs. Tracy seemed tired, and more discouraged than ever—Vance supposed it was the washing. When supper was over, and they were going back to the porch, she said she guessed she’d go to bed early; and would Upton be sure to remember to put out the lamp in the hall, and fasten the door chain when they went upstairs? Upton said he would, and Mrs. Tracy turned back to speak through the window of the dining room, where she was clearing the table unaided by either of her children. “Don’t forget now, Upton; tomorrow’s Saturday, and it’s the Willows afternoon.”
“All right, Mother; I won’t.”
“You say that; and then you get home hours late for dinner,” his mother insisted nervously. “I wouldn’t wonder if Miss Halo came down herself tomorrow,” she added in an anxious tone.
“Oh, no, she won’t—not in this heat.”
“You always say that too, Upton; and then when you least expect it, she does come, or Mrs. Spear does, and you’re not there when they arrive. And of course they want to know where you are, and if we mean to keep on with the job or not; and I get all the blame. And I don’t see how I can get to the Willows myself tomorrow, with all the ironing still to do. …”
“Well, you needn’t, Mother. Laura Lou’ll have to go with me; that’s all.”
“Oh, will I?” murmured Laura Lou. She spoke under her breath, but loud enough for Vance to hear, as she sat in the summer darkness close to the hammock to which he had returned.
“Yes, Laura Lou’ll have to. You will, darling?” Mrs. Tracy, without waiting for the answer, which she perhaps feared would be negative, picked up a candlestick from the sideboard and slowly mounted the stairs.
Left alone, the young people relapsed into silence. Upton was evidently tired by his day’s work, and Vance was embarrassed by the presence of an inarticulate schoolgirl whose replies to his remarks took the form of a nervous giggle. “I wish her mother’d made her go to bed too,” he thought. He offered a cigarette to Upton, and then held out the packet to Laura Lou, who shook her head with another giggle.
“She’s tried, but they made her sick,” said Upton cruelly.
“Oh, Upton—”
“Well, they do.” Her face wrinkled up as if she were about to cry. To change the subject, Vance questioned: “What did your mother mean by tomorrow being the afternoon for the Willows? What are the Willows?”
Upton answered indifferently: “It’s old Miss Lorburn’s place, out the other side of Paul’s Landing. Nobody’s lived there since she died, ages ago, and she left a funny will, and we have to go out once a fortnight and see to the house being aired and the knickknacks dusted. There’s a sort of hired man lives on the place, but he isn’t allowed into Miss Lorburn’s rooms, and Mother and I have to see that they’re kept clean, and just the way she left them.”
“Was this Miss Lorburn a relative of your father’s?”
“Oh, very distant, I guess. She left the place to one of her nephews, an old bachelor who never comes there; and it’s he who arranged for Mother to keep an eye on things.”
Vance meditated, his interest beginning to stir. “What sort of a place is it?”
“I don’t know, nothing particular. Just an old house.”
An old house!
Upton spoke the words indifferently, almost contemptuously: they seemed to signify nothing to him. But they stirred Vance’s blood. An old house! It occurred to him that he had never seen a really old house in his life. But Upton was young—a good deal younger than himself. What did he mean by the epithet? His perspectives were probably even shorter than Vance’s.
“How old? As old as this house?” Vance questioned.
“Oh, ages older. My father used to go there when he was a little boy. It was an old house then. He could just remember seeing old Miss Lorburn, Mother says. She lived to be very old. She was a friend of my grandfather’s, I believe. It’s a dreary place anyhow. Laura Lou hates it. She says the rooms are full of ghosts, and she’s scared of it. But I say it’s because she hates missing her Saturday afternoon at the movies.”
“Upton—” Laura Lou again protested.
“Well, you do. And Mother don’t like you to go to the Willows because you break things. But you’ll have to, tomorrow.”
Laura Lou made no answer, and Vance pursued his interrogatory. “And who are those ladies your mother spoke about, who come in and raise a row?”
“Oh, Mrs. Spear and her daughter. Mrs. Spear was a Lorburn. They won’t come tomorrow—not in this heat. If they’re here—and I’m not sure they are anyhow—”
“Here? At Paul’s Landing?”
“Well, they live up at Eaglewood, another Lorburn place, a couple of miles from here, up the mountain. There’s a grand view of the river from there. It’s in the guidebooks. And they’re supposed to come down to the Willows now and then, and keep an eye on us, the way we do on the hired
