"Poor little girl!" said Laura gently, with what seemed to her brother an indefensibly misplaced compassion. "Usually they have her live in an institution for people afflicted as she is, but they brought her home for a visit last week, I believe. Of course you didn't understand, but I think you should have been more thoughtful. Really, you shouldn't have flirted with her."
Hedrick stopped short.
"`FLIRTED'!" His voice was beginning to show symptoms of changing, this year; it rose to a falsetto wail, flickered and went out.
With the departure of Lolita in safety, what had seemed bizarre and piteous became obscured, and another aspect of the adventure was presented to Laura. The sufferings of the arrogant are not wholly depressing to the spectator; and of arrogance Hedrick had ever been a master. She began to shake; a convulsion took her, and suddenly she sat upon the curbstone without dignity, and laughed as he had never seen her.
A horrid distrust of her rose within him: he began to realize in what plight he stood, what terrors o'erhung.
"Look here," he said miserably, "are you--you aren't--you don't have to go and--and TALK about this, do you?"
"No, Hedrick," she responded, rising and controlling herself somewhat. "Not so long as you're good."
This was no reassuring answer.
"And politer to Cora," she added.
Seemingly he heard the lash of a slave-whip crack in the air.
The future grew dark.
"I know you'll try"--she said; and the unhappy lad felt that her assurance was justified; but she had not concluded the sentence--"darling little boy," she capped it, choking slightly.
"No other little girl ever fell in love with you, did there, Hedrick?" she asked, and, receiving an incoherent but furious reply, she was again overcome, so that she must lean against the fence to recover. "It seems--so--so CURIOUS," she explained, gasping, "that the first one--the--the only one--should be an--a--an----" She was unable to continue.
Hedrick's distrust became painfully increased: he began to feel that he disliked Laura.
She was still wiping her eyes and subject to recurrent outbursts when they reached their own abode; and as he bitterly flung himself into a chair upon the vacant front porch, he heard her stifling an attack as she mounted the stairs to her own room.
He swung the chair about, with its back to the street, and sat facing the wall. He saw nothing. There are profundities in the abyss which reveal no glimpse of the sky.
Presently he heard his father coughing near by; and the sound was hateful, because it seemed secure and unshamed. It was a cough of moral superiority; and just then the son would have liked to believe that his parent's boyhood had been one of degradation as complete as his own; but no one with this comfortable cough could ever have plumbed such depths: his imagination refused the picture he was bitterly certain that Mr. Madison had never kissed an idiot.
Hedrick had a dread that his father might speak to him; he was in no condition for light conversation. But Mr. Madison was unaware of his son's near presence, and continued upon his purposeless way. He was smoking his one nightly cigar and en-joying the moonlight. He drifted out toward the sidewalk and was accosted by a passing acquaintance, a comfortable burgess of sixty, leading a child of six or seven, by the hand.
"Out taking the air, are you, Mr. Madison? said the pedestrian, pausing.
"Yes; just trying to cool off," returned the other. "How are you, Pryor, anyway? I haven't seen you for a long time."
"Not since last summer," said Pryor. "I only get here once or twice a year, to see my married daughter. I always try to spend August with her if I can. She's still living in that little house, over on the next street, I bought for her through your real-estate company. I suppose you're still in the same business?"
"Yes. Pretty slack, these days."
"I suppose so, I suppose so," responded Mr. Pryor, nodding.
"Summer, I suppose it usually is. Well, I don't know when I'll be going out on the road again myself. Business is pretty slack all over the country this year."
"Let's see--I've forgotten," said Madison ruminatively. "You travel, don't you?"
"For a New York house," affirmed Mr. Pryor. He did not, however, mention his "line." "Yes-sir," he added, merely as a decoration, and then said briskly: "I see you have a fine family, Mr. Madison; yes-sir, a fine family; I've passed here several times lately and I've noticed 'em: fine family. Let's see, you've got four, haven't you?"
"Three," said Madison. "Two girls and a boy."
