Across the Years | Page 9

selection of a gown or a ribbon, this
was a new experience.
At first the question of expense did not enter into consideration.
Accustomed all their lives to luxury, they unhesitatingly demanded it
now; and doctors, nurses, wines, fruits, flowers, and delicacies were
summoned as a matter of course.
Then came the crash. The estate of the supposedly rich James

Whitmore was found to be deeply involved, and in the end there was
only a pittance for the widow and her two daughters.
Mrs. Whitmore was not told of this at once. She was so ill and helpless
that a more convenient season was awaited. That was nearly ten years
ago--and she had not been told yet.
Concealment had not been difficult at first. The girls had, indeed,
drifted into the deception almost unconsciously, as it certainly was not
necessary to burden the ears of the already sorely afflicted woman with
the petty details of the economy and retrenchment on the other side of
her door.
If her own luxuries grew fewer, the change was so gradual that the
invalid did not notice it, and always her blindness made easy the
deception of those about her.
Even the move to another home was accomplished without her
realizing it --she was taken to the hospital for a month's treatment, and
when the month was ended she was tenderly carried home and laid on
her own bed; and she did not know that "home" now was a cheap little
flat in Harlem instead of the luxurious house on the avenue where her
children were born.
She was too ill to receive visitors, and was therefore all the more
dependent on her daughters for entertainment.
She pitied them openly for the grief and care she had brought upon
them, and in the next breath congratulated them and herself that at least
they had all that money could do to smooth the difficult way. In the
face of this, it naturally did not grow any easier for the girls to tell the
truth--and they kept silent.
For six years Mrs. Whitmore did not step; then her limbs and back
grew stronger, and she began to sit up, and to stand for a moment on
her feet. Her daughters now bought the strip of Axminster carpet and
laid a path across the bedroom, and another one from the bedroom door
to the great chair in the sitting-room, so that her feet might not note the
straw matting on the floor and question its being there.
In her own sitting-room at home--which had opened, like this, out of
her bedroom--the rugs were soft and the chairs sumptuous with springs
and satin damask. One such chair had been saved from the wreck--the
one at the end of the strip of carpet.
Day by day and month by month the years passed. The frail little

woman walked the Axminster path and sat in the tufted chair. For her
there were a china cup and plate, and a cook and maids below to serve.
For her the endless sewing over which Katherine and Margaret bent
their backs to eke out their scanty income was a picture or a bit of
embriodery, designed to while away the time.
As Margaret thought of it it seemed incredible--this tissue of
fabrications that enmeshed them; but even as she wondered she knew
that the very years that marked its gradual growth made now its
strength.
And in a little while would come the end--a very little while, the doctor
said.
Margaret tightened her lips and echoed her sister's words: "We mustn't
give up--we mustn't!"
Two days later the doctor called. He was a bit out of the old life.
His home, too, had been--and was now, for that matter--on the avenue.
He lived with his aunt, whose heir he was, and he was the only one
outside of the Whitmore family that knew the house of illusions in
which Mrs. Whitmore lived.
His visits to the little Harlem flat had long ceased to have more than a
semblance of being professional, and it was an open secret that he
wished to make Margaret his wife. Margaret said no, though with a
heightened color and a quickened breath--which told at least herself
how easily the "no" might have been a "yes."
Dr. Littlejohn was young and poor, and he had only his profession, for
all he was heir to one of the richest women on the avenue; and
Margaret refused to burden him with what she knew it would mean to
marry her. In spite of argument, therefore, and a pair of earnest brown
eyes that pleaded even more powerfully, she held to her convictions
and continued to say no.
All this, however, did not prevent Dr. Littlejohn from making frequent
visits to the Whitmore home,