"A visitor? Well, that's good." He supposed it was one of Mrs. Hubbard's other "guests," though he knew that Laura Lou did not encourage their neighbourly advances, partly through shyness, partly, he suspected, through some fierce instinct of self-protection, the desire to keep him and their two lives absolutely to herself.

"Come along down… . Who was it?" he continued absently, passing his arm through hers.

She stood still. "It was Mrs. Tarrant."

He stopped short also, in astonishment. "Mrs. Tarrant? She came to see you?"

"Yes."

"Was the parlour empty? Could you see her there?" he questioned, evoking in a flash the strange unlikely scene, and the possibility of Mrs. Hubbard's other ladies watchfully clustered about the unknown visitor.

"I don't know. I sent word by the girl I was sick—and the first thing I knew she came up here."

"Here—Mrs. Tarrant did?" Vance stood gazing about him, as if brutally awakened to the sight of the room, its blistered faded paper with patches of a different design, their scanty possessions untidily tossed about, the slovenly intimacies of bed and washstand and night table.

"Well, why shouldn't she? I didn't ask her to."

"I only meant, I should have thought you'd rather have seen her downstairs."

Laura Lou's lips narrowed. "I'd rather not have seen her at all." When she spoke in that tone, between those level lips, the likeness to her mother, which had already peeped out at him now and again, suddenly took possession of her whole face. Vance looked at her attentively. It was no doubt because she had grown thinner in the last months, and lost her colour, that the resemblance affirmed itself in this startling way. Vance remembered what his grandmother had said about Mrs. Tracy's prettiness and her pink silk flounces, when, on her bridal tour, she had visited her western relatives at Advance. He was chilled by the sense of life perpetually slipping by, and leaving its stealthy disfigurement on spirit and flesh… . What was the use of anything, with this decrepitude at the core?

"I didn't ask her to come up," Laura Lou repeated querulously.

"Oh, well, no matter… . What did she come for?"

'To ask us to a party."

"A party—?"

"She wants to give you a party. She says lots of people are crazy to see you. She said I oughtn't to keep you so shut up… . She asked me to pick an evening… ." There was a curious ring of gratified pride under the affected indifference of Laura Lou's voice.

"Well, did you?" Vance asked ironically.

"I said she'd better see you. I said I didn't care about parties, but I'd never kept you from going." She paused, and added rigidly: "I told her there was no use coming here to see you because you were always out."