Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/380

354 his astonishment will keep him silent for a perceptible space of time. The Prince will not instantly cry out. Augustine vociferates at once in his astonishment. That is a false note. Unless the Prince is silent—while he is taking it in, so to speak—he has not been unconscious that he had been treacherous. Do you see?"

"How do you know so much about crimes?" Henry Austin said, frivolously. "Are you an unconscious pickpocket, dear lady?"

"If I were not unconscious I would declaim when you found me out," she said, laughing, "as Augustine does."

A week later, when Henry Austin saw Ware again in this part, it was obvious that he had come to agree with his mother-in-law, for in the Prince's silent second of horrified self-revelation, Augustine's creator's hand was obvious.

"It's just what Jane Strong said," Mr. Austin reflected; "she makes the part for him. Yes; that silence is great art!"

Austin, with a grin at his own absurdity, did actually begin that winter the long-delayed book; and consequently he saw very much of the Ware household. The intimacy began in his going often out to Augustine's house to ask Mrs. Wharton's advice about his writing; but twice she went off "on the road," as she expressed it, gayly, to see her son-in-law in one or another part, so that, finally, the author had to plod along by himself. But the habit of going out to Linden Hill had been started, and he kept it up, even when his critic was not there. By February he went almost daily to see Dora and Amy, and considering that the distance was such as to make a cab too expensive and reduce him to the detested cable-cars, this implied devotion. Dora had not gone with her husband on his tour, for Amy could not be pulled about the country in zero weather. And when Augustine, in a fever of anxiety for criticism, summoned Mrs. Wharton, she had to go alone.

"So behold me!" Adèle Wharton said, with one archly lifted eyebrow, and drawing down the corner of her lip: "I am to be a grandmotherly first-nighter! Isn't it absurd? I start to-night."

"Mamma is so good to Augustine and me," Dora said, the next day, when Henry Austin found her on the hearthrug, alone, playing with the baby.

"I see by the morning paper that he is going to bring out one of the old comedies in St. Louis," Austin said. "Which one?"

"Oh," Dora said, "dear me! how stupid I am; I meant to ask mamma, but she went off in such a hurry she forgot to tell me, and I forgot to ask her. I really am ashamed. She just said he had written 'about the old comedy scheme.' I must remind him to tell me."

"And she has actually gone to St. Louis?" Austin said; "she is as energetic as she was twenty years ago. My dear, I doubt if you will ever be as young as your mother."

Dora pulled Amy's frock straight, and put her cheek against the little yellow head. "I guess not," she said. "I'm not clever, you know."

"You are better than clever," he told her, smiling: "you are good."

At that she raised her head and said, sharply, but laughing, "Well, but mamma is good and clever; I don't see why I couldn't have combined them both, too!"

Then she pulled herself up from the floor, a little wearily, and sitting down in her low chair, began to make tea for her visitor; then she noticed that he looked tired, and when he confessed to a cold, her maternal anxiety was delicious. Austin laughed, but he liked it. All men like it; they like to be coddled—and they despise the man who is coddled. Dora shook her head, anxiously, and went upstairs and brought back a small bottle, and counted out into the pink palm of her young hand four two-grain quinine pills.

"You will take one now, and three when you go to bed. And—well, I think I'll give you three for to-morrow, too; one at breakfast, one at noon, one at night."

"Oh, I guess I'll just take a drink of whiskey when I go to bed—" he began, meekly.

"Quinine is much better for you," she told him, sternly. "And telephone me in the morning, so I can see whether you ought to go out. Now, you will be careful, won't you, Mr. Austin?"

When he went away she insisted upon calling a carriage, and wanted to bundle him up in one of Augustine's overcoats. But there he drew the line. He went