. If she could have got
downstairs without being heard she would have slipped out into the garden.
But downstairs she could hear David pacing back and forth like some hurt,
caged thing. Steadily, dully, he walked from the front hall back into the
kitchen and back again. There was no possibility of escaping his notice.
Marcia felt as if she might breathe freer in the open air, so she leaned
far out of her window and looked up and down the street, and thought.
Finally,--her heart swelled to bursting, as young hearts with their first
little troubles will do,--she leaned down her dark head upon the window
seat and wept and wept, alone.

It was the next morning at breakfast that David told her of the
festivities that were planned in honor of their home coming. He spoke as
if they were a great trial through which they both must pass in order to
have any peace, and expressed his gratitude once more that she had been
willing to come here with him and pass through it. Marcia had the
impression, after he was done speaking and had gone away to the office,
that he felt that she had come here merely for these few days of ceremony
and after they were passed she was dismissed, her duty done, and she might
go home. A great lump arose in her throat and she suddenly wished very
much indeed that it were so. For if it were, how much, how very much she
would enjoy queening it for a few days--except for David's sadness. But
already, there had begun to be an element to her in that sadness which in
spite of herself she resented. It was a heavy burden which she began dimly
to see would be harder and harder to bear as the days went by. She had not
yet begun to think of the time before her in years.

They were to go to the aunts' to tea that evening, and after tea a company
of David's old friends--or rather the old friends of David's aunts--were
coming in to meet them. This the aunts had planned: but it seemed they had
not counted her worthy to be told of the plans, and had only divulged them
to David. Marcia had not thought that a little thing could annoy her so
much, but she found it vexed her more and more as she thought upon it
going about her work.

There was not so much to be done in the house that morning after the
breakfast things were cleared away. Dinners and suppers would not be much
of a problem for some days to come, for the house was well stocked with
good things.

The beds done and the rooms left in dainty order with the sweet s