had been allowed to run wild. Her face
was heavily lined with wrinkles and was not too clean. And her eyes
were tired. The house dress that she wore open at the neck and held
together by a bleak-looking cameo pin might have been destined for
dust rags in some families, and not extravagantly, either.

She gazed at her daughter with open admiration.

"Thank you so much, Mr. Hooper," said the latter, and as she spoke she
barred the entrance through the wooden gate with a dainty arm in a
long, white-silk glove. But she smiled at him archly. "Call me up
sometime."

And then she turned and, gently pushing the drab creature before her,
went up the walk and into the house.

Joe looked back over his shoulder at them as he drove away.

CHAPTER XI

The rest of that troublous day passed hazily for Mary Louise. She
avoided Maida, who in her turn seemed disposed to avoid her. She made
a hasty escape after the tea-serving hour and hurried home.

The sun was setting as she entered her room; the tall spire of the
First Church was all ruddy with the glow of it as she threw open the
window, and as she paused for a moment with palms on the sill, she
looked down into the deepening shadows of back passages and alleys,
nooks and recesses, where lurked ash and garbage cans and heaps of
rubbish. A black cat came slinking around the corner of an old
gray-brick stable, disappeared for a moment in a passage, and a moment
later she saw him spring to the top of a rotting board fence, pause,
and then lightly let himself down into the shadow of the other side.
And just a hundred feet to the left--she could barely see past the
front cornice of the four-story dwelling below her--Broadway was
thronged with its sleek, pleasure-loving, home-going crowd. You could
never tell the back from the front.

She withdrew from the window, walked slowly across the room, and sank
into a chair. She felt curiously ill at ease and sat staring blankly
before her at the wall.

For the difficulty, which in some ways was trivial enough, no solution
presented itself. Maida Jones, her companion and business associate,
had developed a side that had never been taken into account. Or
perhaps she had merely presented it for the first time. So much the
worse. If so, then her judgment had been all the more faulty.

She had thought she had known Maida, known her well enough to count on
her. She had known she was lazy, known she was a bit slipshod and
indifferent.