Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/52

42 ever caught a glimpse of through half-open doors, on her way to and from elevators.

After she had taken off her hat and coat and laid them on the bed next to the wall as directed (her bed, she would be sleeping in it to-night!) she opened the door, and went out into the upper hall. She stole noiselessly down the broad staircase—there was a tall, slender, light-mahogany grandfather's clock on the landing, and a high window with pink-and-white petunias making it bright in a window-box outside—and noiselessly approached the door of the big room where she had left her father.

There were others in the room now besides her father and Mrs. Morrison. She could tell from the voices. She stopped when she reached the threshold. Nobody saw her, nobody heard her, and she had a moment to gaze unobserved at the scene before her.

It was like a scene at the "movies," with all those books, and the piano, and the comfortable chairs, and the big portrait hanging over the fireplace, and the pretty lady behind the steaming tea-kettle, and the dog, and the boys (there were three boys in the room. One of them, the littlest one, was seated in her father's lap)—only it was real! There were real bindings on the books, real reading in them, there was real tea in the tea-pot. The people were real, and their feelings for each other were real, too. She, standing on the outside, was the only unreal thing in this home scene.

She looked at her father. Suddenly the room faded, disappeared, and a close-up of his face