“Don’t say anything about it, Mrs. Winter. Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t have even been tired, and it doesn’t matter a bit. I’ll just go over home now.” She rose and smoothed down her dress.
“Aren’t you afraid to go alone? Let me go with you.” Lucy started after her friend but Mrs. Hamilton was already half down the stairs.
“Not a bit!” she called cheerily over her shoulder, waving Lucy away. “Shut the door after me.” Lucy descended to the kitchen and bolted the door, then she went back to the bedroom and undressed but she did not go to sleep.
It was a long time before John and Nannie arrived. They came in a taxicab, their voices betraying high spirits, and before ascending the stairs they talked and laughed in the dining room for a while.
Finally Nannie said warningly, “We might wake Lucy, John,” and the voices and laughter became more subdued.
At last they tiptoed upstairs, where John found Lucy yet awake. He called Nannie. As she came into the bedroom, Lucy reached for a dressing sacque and threw it around her shoulders. Nannie and John sat on the edge of the bed and described the supper.
“You don’t know what you missed, Lucy! We had a lobster à la Newburg, and the best wine! Sparkling Burgundy, wasn’t it, John? I didn’t know you could get wine now. I never ate so much in my life. But dear John has such perfect taste in ordering refreshments! We met Miss Powell again in the restaurant,” Nannie rattled on, “and she introduced her brother. That’s how the head waiter let us have the wine. I’m going to a theatre with them next week. He’s said to be worth two million dollars.”
“We missed the last train,” volunteered John.
“We had the best time,” declared Nannie ecstatically.
“Is your head better?” John inquired of Lucy.
“Yes, poor, dear Lucy! I was so sorry. But I suppose you had a good time too,” Nannie finished slyly.
“What do you mean, Mamma?”
Nannie laughed.
“Why, you and Mr. Sprague had a fine chance for a tête-à-tête.”
“Did Jim stay long?” John asked suddenly.
“No. He didn’t come in at all,” answered Lucy with forced naturalness.
“Well, I must go to sleep, or I’ll look a fright in the morning. Good night, Lucy.”
“Good night, Mamma.”
“Good night, Nannie,” said John.
“Good night, dear John,” returned Nannie. “Here, wait a minute. I’ve got to kiss you for giving me such a lovely evening,” and she suited the action to her words. Then, with a silvery, “I hope you rest well,” she tripped out of the bedroom and across the hall.
“You ought to have stayed, Lucy,” remarked John, as he was preparing for bed. “We had lots of fun.”
Lucy did not speak.
“I would have come home with you if Jim hadn’t offered,” he went on, in the tone of one combating an argument, “but seeing that he didn’t care for any supper either, I thought there was no need for spoiling Nannie’s enjoyment. Those Hamiltons are always bragging about liking us and this is the first time we’ve ever asked anything of them as far as I know.”
Lucy was still silent.
John completed his preparations for bed, whistling softly one of the airs they had heard at the play. When ready, before turning off the light, he came around to Lucy’s side of the bed and bent down to kiss her.
She buried her face in the pillow.
“Oh, very well. Just as you like,” he said, and switched off the light.
XVIII
The morning after John’s theatre party Nannie breakfasted in high spirits and when she had done with her meal she made her way into the living room to practice the accompaniments to the two songs she had admired in the Madcap Girl, the music of which John had purchased in the theatre entrance after the performance.
Dimmie was amusing himself in the hall.
“Don’t make so much noise, Jimmie,” she called from the piano.
He stopped running about and sat down on a rug. In a few minutes he began drumming on the floor with his heels.
“Jimmie! Did you hear me? I tell you to stop that noise!” Nannie’s tone was one to which Dimmie was a stranger.
“What can I do?” asked the child.
“Be still, like a good boy,” his grandmother answered.
“I am a good boy,” averred Dimmie, secure in his lifelong experience of the approval of himself expressed by his parents and “Uncle Jim.”
“You’re not. You’re a very bad little boy,” declared Nannie.
Dimmie’s lip quivered. Then his eyes flashed, and a look came into them which recalled Lucy.
“I ain’t a bad boy! You’re a bad woman to say I’m a bad boy!”
“Well, it’s true, or I wouldn’t say it.”
“It ain’t true, neither. You’re a story to say what ain’t true about me.”
“Do you mean to say that I lie, Jimmie? Don’t you know that it’s very rude and wicked to call anybody a liar?”
“Well, you are a liar!” shouted Dimmie in righteous wrath.
Lucy, entering from the kitchen, heard the indictment.
“Why, Dimmie! What in the world possessed you to say such an awful thing?” demanded his mother in astonishment.
Dimmie began to cry.
“She said I was a naughty boy,” he wailed.
“Well, you are, when you talk like that,” affirmed Lucy. “You can go upstairs to your room and stay till I tell you you can come out. I won’t have my little boy saying things like this!”
A few minutes later Mrs. Merwent peered into Dimmie’s room and saw him sitting on the floor in a corner, his mouth trembling and his eyes red and tearful.
“Come here, Jimmie,” she tempted.
“I won’t,” he refused vehemently, in all the exaltation of bursting pride that takes no heed of consequences.
“Come on, dear,” she pleaded.
“Go ’way!” he ordered gallantly. “I hate you!”
Nannie entered the room and went over to the child, kneeling down beside him. Dimmie turned his back, resolutely winking away the additional tears that flowed at the indignity of being spied on in his humiliation.
“Don’t hate Nannie,” she whispered. “Nannie loves
