much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.

"Won't you be late for dinner, darling?" she said.

Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.

All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother's would make it sound childish
and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother's
were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in
condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made
Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
guiltiest of secrets.

As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
once the sentence she had determined on:

"I don't think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
this afternoon."

Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
picture-dealer's window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.

"How perfect his things are," murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
added to her daughter: "Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don't you? It's
immensely to your credit, darling," she went on, her tone taking on a
flattering sweetness, "to care so much about any one who has such funny,
stubby little hands--most unattractive hands," she added almost dreamily.

There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
Mathilde. She found that it di