The Crux | Page 7

ran out suddenly from a gate and seized
upon her.
"Aren't you coming in to see me ever?" she demanded.
Vivian stooped and kissed her. "Yes, dear, but not to-night. How's that
dear baby getting on?"
"She's better," said the little girl. "Mother said thank you lots of times.
Wait a minute"
The child fumbled in Vivian's coat pocket with a mischievous upward
glance, fished out a handful of peanuts, and ran up the path laughing
while the tall girl smiled down upon her lovingly.

A long-legged boy was lounging along the wet sidewalk. Vivian caught
up with liim and he joined her with eagerness.
"Good evening, Miss Lane. Say are you coming to the club to-morrow
night?"
She smiled cordially.
"Of course I am, Johnny. I wouldn't disappoint my boys for anything
nor myself, either."
They walked on together chatting until, at the minister's house, she
bade him a cheery "good-night."
Mrs. St. Cloud was at the window pensively watching the western sky.
She saw the girl coming and let her in with a tender, radiant smile a
lovely being in a most unlovely room.
There was a chill refinement above subdued confusion in that
Cambridge-Bainville parlor, where the higher culture of the second Mrs.
Williams, superimposed upon the lower culture of the first, as that upon
the varying tastes of a combined ancestry, made the place somehow
suggestive of excavations at Abydos.
It was much the kind of parlor Vivian had been accustomed to from
childhood, but Mrs. St. Cloud was of a type quite new to her. Clothed
in soft, clinging fabrics, always with a misty, veiled effect to them,
wearing pale amber, large, dull stones of uncertain shapes, and slender
chains that glittered here and there among her scarfs and laces, sinking
gracefully among deep cushions, even able to sink gracefully into a
comjmon Bainville chair this beautiful woman had captured the girl's
imagination from the first.
Clearly known, she was a sister of Mrs. Williams, visiting indefinitely.
Vaguely and very frequently hinted, her husband had "left her," and
"she did not believe in divorce." Against her background of dumb
patience, he shone darkly forth as A Brute of unknown cruelties.
Nothing against him would she ever say, and every young masculine

heart yearned to make life brighter to the Ideal Woman, so strangely
neglected; also some older ones. Her Young Men's Bible Class was the
pride of Mr. Williams' heart and joy of such young men as the town
possessed; most of Bainville's boys had gone.
"A wonderful uplifting influence," Mr. Williams called her, and refused
to say anything, even when directly approached, as to "the facts" of her
trouble. "It is an old story," he would say. "She bears up wonderfully.
She sacrifices her life rather than her principles."
To Vivian, sitting now on a hassock at the lady's feet and looking up at
her with adoring eyes, she was indeed a star, a saint, a cloud of
mystery.
She reached out a soft hand, white, slender, delicately kept, wearing
one thin gold ring, and stroked the girl's smooth hair. Vivian seized the
hand and kissed it, blushing as she did so.
"You foolish child! Don't waste your young affection on an old lady
like me."
"Old! You! You don't look as old as I do this minute!" said the girl with
hushed intensity.
"Life wears on you, I'm afraid, my dear. . . . Do you ever hear from
him?"
To no one else, not even to Susie, could Vivian speak of what now
seemed the tragedy of her lost youth.
"No," said she. "Never now. He did write once or twice at first."
"He writes to his aunt, of course?"
"Yes," said Vivian. "But not often. And he never says anything."
"I understand. Poor child! You must be true, and wait." And the lady
turned the thin ring on her finger. Vivian watched her in a passion of
admiring tenderness.

"Oh, you understand!" she exclaimed. "You understand!"
"I understand, my dear," said Mrs. St. Cloud.
When Vivian reached her own gate she leaned her arms upon it and
looked first one way and then the other, down the long, still street. The
country was in sight at both ends the low, monotonous, wooded hills
that shut them in. It was all familiar, wearingly familiar. She had
known it continu-V ously for such part of her lifetime as was sensitive
to landscape effects, and had at times a mad wish for an earthquake to
change the outlines a little.
The infrequent trolley car passed just then and Sue Elder joined her, to
take the short cut home through the Lane's yard.
"Here you are," she said cheerfully, "and here are the books."
Vivian thanked her.
"Oh, say come in after supper, canl: you? Aunt Rella's had