Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/52

44 with the poor Hathaways, who felt responsible for her safety, pledged to restore her to her mother's, to her sisters' hands, and showed herself in a light, they mention under their breath, that made their dear old hair stand on end. Do you know what, when they first got back, they said of her—at least it was his phrase—to two or three people?'

I thought a moment. 'That she had "tasted blood"?'

My visitor fairly admired me. 'How clever of you to guess! It's exactly what he did say. She appeared—she continues to appear, it seems—in a new character.'

I wondered a little. 'But that's exactly—don't you remember?—what Miss Maria reported to us from them; that we "wouldn't know her."'

My sister-in-law perfectly remembered. 'Oh, yes—she broke out from the first. But when they left her she was worse.'

'Worse?'

'Well, different—different from anything she ever had been, or—for that matter—had had a chance to be.' My interlocutress hung fire a moment, but presently faced me. 'Rather strange and free and obstreperous.'

'Obstreperous?' I wondered again.

'Peculiarly so, I inferred, on the question of not coming away. She wouldn't hear of it, and, when they spoke of her mother, said she had given her mother up. She had thought she should like Europe, but didn't know she should like it so much. They had been fools to bring her if they expected to take her away. She was going to see what she could—she hadn't yet seen half. The end of it was, at any rate, that they had to leave her alone.'

I seemed to see it all—to see even the scared Hathaways. 'So she is alone?'

'She told them, poor thing, it appears, and in a tone they'll never forget, that she was, at all events, quite old enough to be. She cried—she quite went on—over not having come