Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/115

 ing she would not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken. She knew exactly what she would say.

"Didn't you know at once when you met Father?"

And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia. "Yes, I knew."

She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her plate.

When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a fierce secrecy for so long.

"Why don't you take up riding again, Mother?" she asked. "I'd love to have you go with me. We would go with O'Hara in the mornings, and then Aunt Cassie couldn't have anything to say about my getting involved with him." She looked up. "You'd like him. You couldn't help it."

She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and drive away the unhappiness.

"I like him already," said Olivia, "very much."

Then she rose, saying, "I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her to-day. We're leaving in twenty minutes."

She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the freshness of youth which has all life before it.

Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that Sybil thought of O'Hara as middle-aged—almost an old man, for whom there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was she to find that man? And when she found