Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/369



Kate stood before a teetering knobless bureau reflecting upon the singular coincidence which should place her in the same room for her second social affair in the Prouty House as that to which she had been assigned upon her first. The bureau had been new then and, to her inexperienced eyes, had looked the acme of luxurious mag- nificence. She recalled as vividly as though the lapse of time consisted of days, not years, the round eager face, that had looked out of the glass.

She had been only seventeen — that other girl — and every emotion that she felt was to be read in her expressive face and in her candid eyes. It was different — the face of this woman of twenty-eight who calmly regarded Kate.

She turned her head and took in the room with a sweeping glance.

It was there, in the middle of the floor, that she had torn off and flung her wreath; it was in the corner over there that she had thrown her bunting dress. On the spot where the rug with the pink child and the red-eyed dog used to be, she had stood with the tears streaming down her cheeks — tears of humiliation, of fierce outraged pride, feeling that the most colossal, crushing tragedy that possibly could come into any life had fallen upon her.

It came back to the last detail, that evening of torture — the audible innuendos and the whispering behind