Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/88

 from making a call, the father of Elise Fortier, her class-mate at school. He had his broad, fat back turned to her and was stooping to kiss Maman's hand. There was nothing surprising in this; everybody knew that gentlemen who kept on with the old ways of doing things, always kissed ladies' hands. She had seen the father of one of the girls kiss the bony hand of Mile. Ballot, the head teacher at school. What was registered indelibly on Marise's mind was the expression on Maman's face. Maman was looking—oh, it was horrid to think such a thing, to say such a thing, to have looked at her and seen such a thing. . . . Maman was looking sort of. . . Marise could never, try as she might, shut down on this moment quickly enough to shut out the ugly thought she hated so. . . . Maman was looking sort of foolish and silly, as though, as though. . . But here Marise was always able to snap the shutter shut and put it all out of her mind, except the dull heaviness it left.

But the worst, the very worst and most awful of all those remembered parts of the past, was what happened about the gray cat. No, that wasn't the way to put it, because you couldn't say that anything had happened. . . and yet how sick it had made Marise, and did every time something reminded her of it!

One day when Marise came home from school, Jeanne gave her a big, pretty, gray, yellow-eyed cat and said she thought it might be company for her. Marise was awfully pleased, took the cat in her arms, bending her cheek down to rest it against the soft fur, and carried her off to her room to try to get acquainted with her.

But there seemed to be something the matter. She didn't act like Cousin Hetty's Tommy, up in Ashley, nice and cuddlesome; she seemed to have something on her mind. She wouldn't sit still on Marise's lap and be petted, she wouldn't play with a string nor drink the milk Marise put in a saucer for her, nor lie down and go to sleep the cozy way cats usually do. She tramped around and around the room, and every