KAY never told Katherine about Clare, but gradually, little by little, she learned some of the details of those missing months. She saw the little ranch house, the struggle to live, and between the lines the attempts at adjustment. She saw the town on the Reservation: the loneliness, the dust and heat of summer, the work; but in none of these things did she find the reason for the tragedy which was written on Kay's face. She lay still and thought: "There is something else, something else she won't tell me. There is something else."
But she learned that Kay was staying indefinitely. It comforted her, while at the same time it worried her. She liked to have her coming in, to listen for the click of her high heels outside, and then see her enter in one of the dinner frocks from her trousseau.
"That's really a sweet dress, Kay. Do you remember how Louise fought to put pink on it? It's much better as it is."
That the dress hung looser than it was meant to she never mentioned.
She even went downstairs more often, sitting behind her tea table with a delicate pink flush on her face. People came and went, sedate well-bred people who greeted Kay as though she had never been away, and waited until the door of their limousines were closed before conjecturing. Although it was already almost winter on the high plateau Kay had left, it was only autumn in the East. A few leaves still clung tenaciously to the trees, there were days almost as warm as summer. Socially the city was taking its fall respite, between summer resorts and the opening of the season the first of December. The houses of the neighborhood were being gradually opened. One day their wooden
