“Just a minute, Stephen,” Helen interrupted. There were bright spots in the center of Stephen’s cheeks, too. “Laurel, Dear,” she said, reaching for Laurel’s hand, drawing her down on the sofa again. “Listen. Let me explain. It is your mother’s wish. It’s all your mother’s planning. This—all this,” with a wave of her hand she included the whole house and all it stood for in way of happiness for Laurel, “is her gift to you.” (The truth was best, Helen concluded.) “She came and saw me about it last summer. We talked it all over in detail, together.”

“When last summer?” Laurel exclaimed.

“Last July.”

(Oh, then, it flashed across Laurel, her mother had heard! She hadn’t been asleep that night on the train! She hadn’t been to Milhampton the next day to see Effie McDavitt. She had been to New York to give her Mrs. Morrison!)

“Well, I shan’t take her gift,” said Laurel. (Her mother! Her wonderful mother! And they had called her “That woman!” “That awful creature!” “That dame!”)

Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1

“HOW FOOLISH OF you, mother,” four days later Laurel scolded Stella, as they stood side by side in front of the sink in the kitchen of the Boston apartment and washed and dried the three days’ collection of dishes Stella had allowed to accumulate. “How foolish to think you could work up any such scheme as that on me. You’d think I didn’t have any such thing as a will of my own.”

“Oh, I know,” sighed Stella. “I suppose we did it the wrong way. I ought to have told you, I guess.”

“Telling me wouldn’t have made any difference. I wouldn’t have listened.”

“But I don’t see why. He’s your own father, and you’ve always been crazy about him, and she—”

“I know, I know,” Laurel interrupted. “Oh, look here, Mother,” impatiently she broke off. “Listen to me. I’m never going to leave you as long as you live. Do get that through your head. Do try, and don’t talk about it any more.” Then, suddenly gentle, “Why, Mother,” she caressed, “don’t you remember you said that to me once, way back, when I was a mite of a child, ‘I’ll never leave you, and you’ll never leave me, will you, Lollie?’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

“Oh,” groaned Stella, “what a fool I was to have talked that way to a little kid!”

“No,” Laurel retorted. “Rather, what a fool you were to have worked and slaved for that little kid for seventeen years, and skimped and saved for her all that time, and given her everything under the sun you thought would make her happy—oh, that was an awfully foolish way to treat a child you hoped would trot off and leave you the first chance she got.”