Page:A daughter of the rich, by M. E. Waller.djvu/45

Rh "Are you going to be at home for luncheon to-day, papa?"

"No, dear, I've promised to go out to Tuxedo with the Masons, but I shall be at home before dinner, just to look in upon you. I dine with the Pearsells afterwards. Good-bye." A kiss,—two, three of them; and the merry, handsome young father, still but thirty-seven, had gone, and with him much of the brightness of Hazel's day.

But she was used to this. Ever since she could remember anything, she had been petted and kissed and—left with her nurse, her governess, or a French maid.

Her young mother, a Southern belle, lived more out of her home than in it, with the round of gayeties in the winter months interrupted and continued by winter house-parties at Lenox, a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean, an early spring-flitting to the mountains of North Carolina, and the later household moving to Newport.

In all these migrations Hazel accompanied her parents; in fact, was moved about as so much goods and chattels, from New York to the Berkshires, from the Berkshires to Malta, from Malta to the Great Smokies, from the mountains to the sea; her appurtenances, the governess and French maid, went with her; and the routine of her home in New York, the study, the promenade, the all-alone breakfasts and dinners went on with the regularity of clockwork, whether on the yacht, in the mountains, or in the villa on the Cliff.

So now, although she wished her father would stay and entertain her, it never occurred to her to tell him so; and