Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/73



N the following night the house, as it appeared from the squalid level of Halsted street, took on in its setting of snow-covered pines and false cypresses the appearance to which the Town had been accustomed in the old days. The drawing-room windows glowed with warm light; wreaths were hung against the small diamond shaped panes, and those who passed the wrought iron gates heard during the occasional pauses in the uproar of the Mills the distant tinkling of a piano played with a wild exuberance by some one who chose the gayest of tunes, waltzes and polkas, which at the same hour were to be heard in a dozen Paris music halls.

Above the Flats in the Town, invitations were received during the course of the week to a dinner party, followed by a ball in the long drawing-room.

"Cypress Hill is becoming gay again," observed Miss Abercrombie.

"It must be the return of Lily," said Mrs. Julis Harrison. "Julia will never entertain again. She is too broken," she added with a kind of triumph.

A night or two after Lily's return: Mrs. Harrison again spoke to her son William of Lily's beauty and wealth, subtly to be sure and with carefully concealed purpose, for Willie, who was thirty-five now and still unmarried, grew daily more shy and more deprecatory of his own charms.

It was clear enough that the tradition of Cypress Hill was by no means dead, that it required but a little effort, the merest scribbling of a note, to restore all its slumbering prestige. The dinner and the ball became the event of the year. There was Peat curiosity concerning Lily. Those who had seen her reported that she looked well and handsome, that her clothes were far in advance of the local fashions. They talked once more of her beauty, her charm, her kindliness.