Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/163

 'Oh, no.'

'Will you journey to Amherst?'

'I don't know.'

Her mother was dead in Italy. What good to travel to Amherst? What good that she and Horace Bardeen shut themselves up together and talk of...what?

Mamma, who always could hurt her, now pierced her through with love and regret.

'I was such a child, Pauline, when I left home. I did not understand things very well. I thought I could judge Mamma, but...'

Pauline, seemingly intent on giving cause for her hoard of handkerchiefs, said bluntly, 'How can one judge such mischievous conduct but in one way? What was evil two years ago still is evil.'

'But now I don't know good from bad.'

'Lanice! To think you can say such a thing at such a moment! Your mother is dead!'

Stifled love turned in the girl's heart like a knife. The mocking, pretty face that age could not dim, the alluring mouth, the small, dimpled hands, so unlike Lanice's scholarly ones, the pretty graces. Her thousand distracting tricks that hurt if you loved her more than they gratified. All this treasury of loveliness was cast into the oblivion of earth. She could not bear that Mamma should lie so far from home.

'I am going over, Pauline. I'm going to bring her back, poor, darling Hitty. Oh, how pretty she was!'

'I imagine her...this Mr. Cuncliffe has attended to everything.'

'I am going over.'