Children of the Whirlwind | Page 9

fact that she had never
lived with him. Ever since she remembered he had boarded her out,
here and there, as he was now boarding her at the Duchess's--and had
only come to visit her at intervals, sometimes intervals that stretched
into months.
"Barney is rather sweet on you," remarked Hunt after the two were
gone.
"I know he is," conceded Maggie in a matter-of-fact way.
"And he seems jealous of Larry--both regarding you, and regarding the
bunch."
"He thinks he can run the bunch just as well as Larry. Barney's clever
all right, and has plenty of nerve--but he's not in Larry's class. Not by a
million miles!"
Hunt perceived that this daring, world-defying, embryonically beautiful
model of his had idealized the homecoming nephew of the Duchess
into her especial hero. Hunt said no more, but painted rapidly. Night
had fallen outside, and long since he had switched on the electric lights.
He seemed not at all finicky in this matter of light; he had no
supposedly indispensable north light, and midday or midnight were
almost equally apt to find him slashing with brush or scratching with
crayon.
Presently the Duchess entered. No word was spoken. The Duchess,
noteworthy for her mastery of silence, sank into a chair, a bent and
shrunken image, nothing seemingly alive about her but her faintly

gleaming, deep-set eyes. Several minutes passed, then Hunt lifted the
canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall.
"That's all for to-day, Maggie," he announced, pushing the easel to one
side. "Duchess, you and this wild young thing spread the banquet- table
while I wash up."
He disappeared into a corner shut off by burlap curtains. From within
there issued the sound of splashing water and the sputtering roar of
snatches of the Toreador's song in a very big and very bad baritone.
Maggie put out a hand, and kept the Duchess from rising. "Sit still-- I'll
fix the table."
Silently the Duchess acquiesced. Maggie had never felt any tenderness
toward this strange, silent woman with whom she had lived for three
years, but it was perhaps an indication of qualities within Maggie,
whose existence she herself never even guessed, that she instinctively
pushed the old woman aside from tasks which involved any physical
effort. Maggie now swung the back of a laundry bench up to form a
table-top, and upon it proceeded to spread a cloth and arrange a medley
of chipped dishes. As she moved swiftly and deftly about, the Duchess
watching her with immobile features, these two made a strangely
contrasting pair: one seemingly spent and at life's grayest end, the other
electric with vitality and giving off the essence of life's unknown
adventures.
Hunt stepped out between the curtains, pulling on his coat. "You'll find
that chow in my fireless cooker will beat the Ritz," he boasted. "The
tenderest, fattest kind of a fatted calf for the returned prodigal."
Maggie started. "The prodigal! You mean--Larry is coming?"
"Sure," grinned Hunt. "That's why we celebrate."
Maggie wheeled upon the Duchess. "Is Larry really coming?"
"Yes," said the old woman.

"But--but why the uncertainty about when he was coming back? Father
and Barney thought he was due to get out yesterday."
"Just a mistake we all made about his release. His time was up this
afternoon."
"But you told Barney and my father you hadn't heard from him."
"I had heard," said the Duchess in her flat tone. "If they want to see him
they can see him to-morrow."
"When--when will he be here?"
"Any minute," said the Duchess.
Without a word Maggie whirled about and the next moment she was in
her room on the floor below. She did not know what prompted her, but
she had a frantic desire to get out of this plain shirt-waist and skirt and
into something that would be striking. She considered her scanty
wardrobe; her father had recently spoken of handsome gowns and
furnishings, but as yet these existed only in his words, and the
pseudo-evening gowns which she had worn to restaurant dances with
Barney she knew to be cheap and uneffective.
Suddenly she remembered the things Hunt had given her, or had loaned
her, the evening four months earlier when he had taken her to an artists'
masquerade ball--though to her it had been a bitter disappointment
when Hunt had carried her away before the unmasking at twelve
o'clock. She tore off the offending waist and skirt, pulled from beneath
the bed the pasteboard box containing her costume; and in five minutes
of flying hands the transformation was completed. Her thick hair of
burnished black was piled on top of her head in gracious disorder, and
from it swayed a scarlet paper flower. About her lithe body, over a
black satin skirt, swathing her in its