once, and she had been quite mad about him. What was his name? Anyhow, he had had a black mustache, and she had gone to all the matinées, and felt faint with jealousy when he kissed the leading woman.
On the first of November the Dowlings closed their country house and went back into town. The station wagon took the servants, happy at the end of their summer exile, and now once more to be within reach of the movies and the shops. The upholsterer's men had taken down the hangings and covered the furniture, men were stringing the doors and windows with fine wire, any tampering with which would warn a watchful individual at a switchboard in the city that something was wrong, and Henry's depleted summer store of liquors and wines had made a perilous but safe journey back to the great vault in the cellar of the town house.
Kay moved through all these activities quite normally. She talked and even laughed; if she ate rather less than ever, and if in the mornings sometimes her eyes looked a bit sunken, nobody mentioned it.
"Best thing that could have happened to her," was Henry's comment. "She's had her lesson, if she ever needed it. The fellow's a bad actor, from start to finish."
Katherine was not so certain, but whatever she suspected she kept to herself. And there had been no scandal, thank Heaven. A little talk, of course; that couldn't be helped. But the roping down the road had not come out, and mercifully the fellow had disappeared just after it. If there was any change in Kay, it was only that she seemed subdued. She was almost too acquiescent.
"I think the pink is better after all. It gives you a little color. What do you think?"
And Kay would turn herself, not before the mirror, but before Katherine instead.
"If you think so, mother."
It was during the packing that Katherine happened on the book of poetry she had brought home from the ranch, and reread the lines again:
