BILLY TRIES HER HAND AT ``MANAGING''
Bertram did not engage six Mary Ellens the next morning, nor even one, as it happened; for that evening, Eliza--who had not been unaware of conditions at the Strata--telephoned to say that her mother was so much better now she believed she could be spared to come to the Strata for several hours each day, if Mrs. Henshaw would like to have her begin in that way.
Billy agreed promptly, and declared herself as more than willing to put up with such an arrangement. Bertram, it is true, when he heard of the plan, rebelled, and asserted that what Billy needed was a rest, an entire rest from care and labor. In fact, what he wanted her to do, he said, was to gallivant--to gallivant all day long.
``Nonsense!'' Billy had laughed, coloring to the tips of her ears. ``Besides, as for the work, Bertram, with just you and me here, and with all my vast experience now, and Eliza here for several hours every day, it'll be nothing but play for this little time before we go away. You'll see!''
``All right, I'll _see_, then,'' Bertram had nodded meaningly. ``But just make sure that it _is_ play for you!''
``I will,'' laughed Billy; and there the matter had ended.
Eliza began work the next day, and Billy did indeed soon find herself ``playing'' under Bertram's watchful insistence. She resumed her music, and brought out of exile the unfinished song. With Bertram she took drives and walks;and every two or three days she went to see Aunt Hannah and Marie. She was pleasantly busy, too, with plans for her coming trip; and it was not long before even the remorseful Bertram had to admit that Billy was looking and appearing quite like her old self.
At the Annex Billy found Calderwell and Arkwright, one day. They greeted her as if she had just returned from a far country.
``Well, if you aren't the stranger lady,'' began Calderwell, looking frankly pleased to see her.
``We'd thought of advertising in the daily press somewhat after this fashion: `Lost, strayed, or stolen, one Billy; comrade, good friend, and kind cheerer-up of lonely hearts. Any information thankfully received by her bereft, sorrowing friends.' ''
Billy joined in the laugh that greeted this sally, but Arkwright noticed that she tried to change the subject from her own affairs to a discussion of the new song on Alice Greggory's piano.
Calderwell, however, was not to be silenced.
``The last I heard of this elusive Billy,'' he resumed, with teasing cheerfulness, ``she was running down a certain lost calory that had slipped away from her husband's breakfast, and--''
Billy wheeled sharply.
``Where did you get hold of that?'' she demanded.
``Oh, I didn't,'' returned the man, defensively.
``I never got hold of it at all. I never even saw the calory--though, for that matter, I don't think I should know one if I did see it! What we feared was, that, in hunting the lost calory, you had lost yourself, and--'' But Billy would hear no more. With her disdainful nose in the air she walked to the piano.
``Come, Mr. Arkwright,'' she said with dignity.
``Let's try this song.''
Arkwright rose at once and accompanied her to the piano.
They had sung the song through twice when Billy became uneasily aware that, on the other side of the room, Calderwell and Alice Greggory were softly chuckling over something they had found in a magazine. Billy frowned, and twitched the corners of a pile of music, with restless fingers.
``I wonder if Alice hasn't got some quartets here somewhere,'' she murmured, her disapproving eyes still bent on the absorbed couple across the room.
Arkwright was silent. Billy, throwing a hurried glance into his face, thought she detected a somber shadow in his eyes. She thought, too, she knew why it was there. So possessed had Billy been, during the early winter, of the idea that her special mission in life was to inaugurate and foster a love affair between disappointed Mr.
Arkwright and lonely Alice Greggory, that now she forgot, for a moment, that Arkwright himself was quite unaware of her efforts. She thought only that the present shadow on his face must be caused by the same thing that brought worry to her own heart--the manifest devotion of Calderwell to Alice Greggory just now across the room. Instinctively, therefore, as to a coworker in a common cause, she turned a disturbed face to the man at her side.
``It is, indeed, high time that I looked after something besides lost calories,'' she said significantly. Then, at the evident uncomprehension in Arkwright's face, she added: ``Has it been going on like this--very long?''
Arkwright still, apparently, did not understand.
``Has--what been going on?'' he questioned.
``That--over there,'' answered Billy, impatiently, scarcely knowing whether to be more irritated at the threatened miscarriage of her cherished plans, or at Arkwright's (to her)wilfully blind insistence on her making her meaning more plain. ``Has it been going on long--such utter devotion?''
As she asked the question Billy turned and looked squarely into Arkwright's face. She saw, therefore, the great change that came to it, as her meaning became clear to him. Her first feeling was one of shocked realization that Arkwright had, indeed, been really blind. Her second--she turned away her eyes hurriedly from what she thought she saw in the man's countenance.
With an assumedly gay little cry she sprang to her feet.
``Come, come, what are you two children chuckling over?'' she demanded, crossing the room abruptly. ``Didn't you hear me say Iwanted you to come and sing a quartet?''
Billy blamed herself very much for what she called her stupidity in so baldly summoning Arkwright's attention to Calderwell's devotion to Alice Greggory. She declared that she ought to have known better, and she asked herself if this were the way she was ``furthering matters''
between Alice Greggory and Arkwright.
