“I don’t care about the talk,” she said listlessly. “I don’t even mind seeing him, after all these years. I do mind dreadfully about Bill, Pat. That’s all over.”

I was too indignant that day to say much. I drove slowly back up the hill, still boiling with rage; but even then if anyone had told me that Don Morgan and Maud and Bessie and even what had happened to Evans would be eventually tied up together, I dare say I would have laughed.

Chapter Nine

THAT WAS ON MY birthday, the twelfth of September, and on the fourteenth Donald Morgan came home. Got off the train like a sick man, shook hands with Lydia, and at the house turned on the magic of his charm and took Audrey to his arms.

“My baby,” he said. “My little girl.”

Yes, he went over big with Audrey. That is a part of the story.

The valley and the Hill alike fairly shook with gossip. There were two camps: the majority party thinking Lydia a spineless idiot; the minority—mostly the young—siding with Audrey. Very little of this reached us. As I have said, since Bessie’s arrival both the Hill and the valley had not so much ignored us as stayed away from us.

“As though we had a slight touch of leprosy,” was Maud’s dry comment.

I imagine much the same thing, only worse, was happening to Lydia. The situation there was too anomalous for comfort. Everyone knew that Bill Sterling had not been in the house since Don entered it, and that Lydia had had to call in a doctor for Don from a neighboring borough. I myself was still smoldering with indignation, and it was two or three days before I called her on the telephone.

“Well, how’s the old-home week going?” I said.

“Is that you, Pat? I thought you had deserted me, along with the rest.”

“You’ve put everybody in an impossible position, Lydia. You can’t blame them. Do you want to see me?”

“I’d love it,” she said simply.

I got there that afternoon, but I was startled at the change in her. She not only looked ill, she looked older, as though all the life had been drained out of her.

“It’s nice of you to come, Pat.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Why wouldn’t I come? How is—how is the invalid?”

I thought she looked at me queerly.

“He seems better. Of course, with angina—”

“Who says he has angina?” I could not keep my resentment out of my voice. “I wouldn’t believe him on oath.”

Then that little fool, Audrey, had to come down the stairs, carrying a tray and with her eyes like stars.

“He ate it all, Mother,” she said. “He seemed to like it.”

“I’ll bet he did,” I said savagely. “Ate it and asked for more. Don’t look at me like that, Audrey. I give you a week to be good and fed up with it.”

She gave me a nasty look and went back to the kitchen. Lydia sighed and changed the subject, asking me rather abruptly about Bessie.