There was something of the same pristine beauty about Laurel at thirteen as about her own child’s crystallized innocence. There were areas in Laurel’s soul, big white expanses, untouched by experience, unsullied by life. It was almost as if those parts of Laurel had disappeared into a picture also, when she, too, was just learning to walk alone.

Laurel was nearly the same age as Carol. She was dark like Carol. Graver than gay, like Carol. She wore the same sort of clothes Carol would have worn. She had slept at night, it occurred to Helen with a little twinge, in the same bed where Carol would have slept, sometimes, now her father was gone. Even her name was something like Carol’s.

After Helen Morrison said good-bye to Laurel at the end of her first visit, wrapped her own coat about her, tucked her in beside her father in the automobile, and laughingly, playfully kissed her good-bye, she hurried away quickly to her own room and closed the door. Taking the miniature close to the light, she gazed at it till the slow tears ran down her cheeks.

Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

AT THE SAME moment that Laurel, high up above the rumbling traffic of New York, was packing her trunk on the last day of her never-to-be-forgotten visit to her father (never to be forgotten because of the wonderful Mrs. Morrison), Stella, several hundred miles away, was also packing a trunk.

There was no sound of traffic outside Stella’s window, only the distant pound of the surf and a distant glimpse of a deserted board-walk. By the end of September there were only three or four people left at the boarding-house at Belcher’s Beach. By the middle of September at least half of the amusement booths on the board-walk had been closed for the season.

Stella had remained until the literal eve of Laurel’s return, because she had been very lucky this year, and had found a tenant for her rooms at the King Arthur for the month of September. Laurel could have her fur coat and wrist-watch, too, now! My, though, but Stella was glad her job was over! She did hate horrid places so, and horrid people, and run-down, second-rate boarding-house styles and customs—loud talk and loud laughter and loud women, and flies and dirt, and bathing-suits hanging out all the front windows to dry (that is, when the season was still on), and bathing-corsets, and bathing-garters. (“Honest, Effie, you’d think some people had had no bringing-up.”) And all sorts of queer questionable things going on at night—doors opening softly and closing—whispers—giggles. The walls were like paper. Lord, she’d be glad to get away from Belcher’s Beach! Thank heaven, the four weeks were at an end.