Night after night Laurel cried softly into her pillow after her mother had fallen safely to sleep. Day after day she struggled with tears that seemed always to be just beneath the thin surface of her smiles.

She tried to reason with herself. She had been away from Milhampton before. Why, almost every summer since she could remember, she had been lonely in some unfamiliar place. But it had been bearable, she supposed, because it had been only for limited periods. And, besides, there had always been bellboys to speak to, elevator-men, and chambermaids. There had always been a game of billiards to watch, or an auction-table of women to listen to.

Once, on the sidewalk outside the apartment, waiting for her mother to return from a shopping-tour, Laurel fell into shy conversation with a dark little girl, a few years younger than herself who lived in the apartment below. The possibility of a friendship with this gentle child filled Laurel with timid happiness for a whole afternoon.

But when she told her mother about the conversation, Stella had exclaimed, “Heavens, we can’t know those people, Laurel, They’re foreigners! So is the family above us. I’ve discovered this place is riddled with them. Mr. Hinckly couldn’t have known what he was talking about! We’ve simply got to get out sooner or later.”

Until Stella moved to Boston, Laurel had preferred a tramp in the country, or a call on Jake, or Tony, or peg-legged Eddy, to the movies; or a stolen pilgrimage to the little house that used to be red, where the mysterious old man she must never tell was her grandfather live, to a vaudeville or a play. But in her new solitude, where there was no place to go and nowhere to call, Laurel looked with interest upon the diverting interior of any amusement place.

She went to the movies with her mother three times a week regularly. They climbed to gallery seats at Keith’s every time the bill was changed. On Saturday nights Stella and Laurel usually dressed up in their best clothes, and dined at a fashionable hotel, ordering the lowest-priced entrée on the bill, dawdling over their bread and butter, as they observed the gay parties about them, and watched the waiters bear in marvelous planked steaks and Peach Melbas.

It was a bleak and forlorn sort of an existence for both mother and child, and terribly shorn of human contacts. But it needn’t have been quite so bleak and forlorn and shorn, Stella said, if Laurel hadn’t taken such a dislike to Alfred Munn. Ed tried to be awfully kind. He called at the apartment before they had been in it a week. He tried to be awfully kind to Laurel especially. But the child wouldn’t let him.

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