Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/74

 They spoke nothing but good of her, just as they mocked Irene and jeered at her work among the foreigners in the Flats. It was Lily who succeeded to her mother's place as chatelaine of the beautiful gloomy old house at Cypress Hill.

It was also Lily who, some two weeks before Christmas, received Mrs. Julis Harrison and Judge Weissman on the mission which brought them together in a social way for the only time in their lives. The strange pair arrived at Shane's Castle in Mrs. Harrison's victoria, the Jew wrapped in a great fur coat, his face a deep red from too much whiskey; and the dowager, in an imperial purple dress with a dangling gold chain, sitting well away to her side of the carriage as if contact with her companion might in some horrid way contaminate her. Lily, receiving them in the big hall, was unable to control her amazement at their sudden appearance. As the Judge bowed, rather too obsequiously, and Mrs. Harrison fastened her face into a semblance of cordiality, a look of intense mirth spread over Lily's face like water released suddenly from a broken dam. There was something inexpressibly comic in Mrs. Harrison's obvious determination to admit nothing unusual in a call made with Judge Weissman at ten in the morning.

"We have come to see your mother," announced the purple clad Amazon. "Is she able to see us?"

Lily led the pair into the library. "Wait," she replied, "I'll see. She always stays in bed until noon. You know she grows tired easily nowadays."

"I know . . . I know," said Mrs. Harrison. "Will you tell her it is important? A matter of life and death?"

While Lily was gone the pair in the library waited beneath the mocking gaze of John Shane's portrait. They maintained a tomb-like silence, broken only by the faint rustling of Mrs. Harrison's taffeta petticoats and the cat-like step of the Judge on the Aubusson carpet as he prowled from table to table examining the bits of jade or crystal or silver which caught his Oriental fancy. Mrs. Harrison sat bolt upright, a little like a pouter pigeon, with her coat thrown back to permit her to breathe. She drummed the arm of her chair with her fat fingers and followed with her small blue eyes the movements