Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/190

 in a peignoir of black silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with the yellow backed French novels "skimmed" and cast away by her mother. These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she sought to pass the time by writing letters—addressed always to one of three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon's cousin, the Baron. Wrapped in her mother's old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.

She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy. Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their families.

She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls hooting among the branches of the dead trees.

The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the "old fogy" lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bear-