Winnie Childs by C. N. Williamson

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Win bore Lily no grudge for having "bagged" her customer and gained in
three minutes three dollars which should rightfully have found their
way to her purse. She listened without resentment to the description
of a hat which Lily intended to buy with the money--a "sticker" it had
proved in Hats, and was now marked down to half price. Lily had had an
eye on it for some time, and would, of course, get it "ten per." off.

"I bought me a sweet party dress last week--a bargain," Miss Leavitt
went on, seeing that Win had no intention of "slanging" her for what
she had just done. "It came outta commission on that green chiffon
evening cloak and that white yachtin' I snapped off Kit Vance when she
was daydreamin' and let me catch onto her customer like you done just
now. Things is down to no price this hot weather. It's an ill wind
blows no one good, and now is us guyls' time to get a bit of our own.
P.R. always manages to make his hay, rain or shine. And even with our
ten per. off, it's forty per. profit for him. When you think there's
two thousand folks forced to buy on the premises, you savvy what he
squeezes outta us! If we do pick up a bargain, it's a rare chance. I
wonder you don't hustle more'n you do and make enough com to buy
yourself sumpin' nice. Your sheryt waists are the wuyst in the dep, if
you don't mind my sayin' so, and the guyls speak of it. Now if you had
a party dress to doll up in, I could give you the time of your life
to-night."

"Could you?" echoed Win, more in the desire to turn Miss Leavitt's
attention from her "shirt waist" to something else than because she
wished to hear about the great opportunity.

Miss Leavitt had offered her numerous opportunities of alleged
entertainment, none of which, though glowingly described, had ever
tempted her to acceptance. At first she had been afraid of Lily's
fruit and chocolates and theatre tickets, which, like the
marshmallows, might have come from Mr. Logan. But for the last three
or four months, since the two girls migrated together into Mantles,
Logan had been conspicuously absent. Apparently he had not invented a
cloak as well as a toy! Win no longer connected Lily Leavitt's
occasional invitations with him. Her refusals were prompted merely by
a disinclination for Lily's society out of business hours and the
conviction that her friends would be no more congenial than herself.
Winifred now, however, particularly wished to show her companion that
she bore no animosity for the filched commission, therefore she became
loquacious.

"I don't need to spend my hard-earned dollars on a party dress, as it
happens," she said. "I can save all my pennies for the hire of my
typewriter, which is going to lead me from the Hands some day along
the road to fortune. I've got the most gorgeous gown you can possibly
imagine. I don't believe _Cinderella's_ godmother could give her
anything better. There's only one trouble. I shall never be invited to
a party good enough for it."

"I've invited you to as swell a party as there could be in little old
New York," boasted Miss Leavitt. "I ain't foolin'. That's straight.
Honour bright, cross my heart."

"Oh, but you didn't invite me. You said you would if I had a dress.
You've got only my word for that," Win reminded her.

"I meant to invite you all the same, dress or no dress," Lily
confessed, "I'd o' lent you one. Have you really got something swell?
If you have, now's your chance to show it off. It's an artist gives
this party. I sit to artists sometimes, Sundays, for my hair. I guess
you offen seen it on covers o' magazines. This artist friend o' mine's
the best o' the whole bunch."

"Man or woman?" Win wanted to know.

She expected the answer to be "man," but Lily did not seem to hear.
Her face looked dreamy.

"It's the loveliest house where the party'll be," she said. "'Tain't
the artist's own. It's some relation's that's lent it for the summer
while they're away at the seashore. I bin there. It's in the Fifties,
just off Fift' Av'noo. Tonight it'll be cool as snow, and
everything'll be iced for supper. Iced consummay, chicken salad cold
as the refrigerator, iced champagne cup flowin' like water; ice-cream
and strawb'ries, the big, sweet, red ones from up north, where they
keep on growin' all summer, and lilies and roses from the country to
give away to us when we go home."

Win forgot the question that had not been answered. She seemed to see
those strawberries and to smell the sweetness of roses and lilies in a
house "as cool as snow."

"Heavenly!" she sighed. "I didn't remember there were such things in
the world!"

"Well, come with me to-night and remind yourself," coaxed Miss
Leavitt. "You needn't be afraid, because I said it was artists, to
butt into some rowdy crowd. They'll be as quiet and refined as mice.
They're more your kind than mine, I guess."

"But who invites me?" Win made another bid for information.

"My artist friend said I could bring any one I wanted to bring, and I
want to bring you. I don't just know who all'll be there, but I guess
not many, and it's a real swell house to see. You always refuse
everything I ask you to, but I do think you might say yes this one
time and show you're not proud and stuck up. It'd do you good!"

"I believe it would, and I'll go!" cried Win. She was in the mood to
say "yes" to anything.

"Hully gee! That's the best thing's happened to me since the measles!"
exclaimed Miss Leavitt jovially. "I'll call for you at your place
half-past nine this evening, so you can have a good rest before you
begin fixin' yourself up."

"It's an engagement," said Win, with a kind of self-defiance.

She had wished for a change, "anything for a change," and presto! her
wish had been suddenly granted by fate. Rather spitefully granted, it
would seem, because to go to a "party" with Lily Leavitt was the very
last thing she would have chosen. And spitefully, also, as if to
punish her own foolishness in wishing, she accepted such goods as the
gods had mischievously provided.

"You've said yes, and now you must stick to it," she told herself in
preparation for a wave of regret, but to her surprise the day wore on
and the expected tide of repentance did not set in.

The girl realized that she was looking forward, actually looking
forward to the evening. It would be like walking wide awake into the
Hall of Dreams to put on a dress beautiful enough for a princess, and
eat ice-cream and big red strawberries in a house "cool as snow"
instead of sitting in her hot bedroom practising on the hired
typewriter or panting on her bed, dead to everything in the world
except a palm-leaf fan.

When she had been a little girl, invited to children's parties, it had
not been of the slightest importance whether she liked the child or
not. The party was the thing. Now history was repeating itself in her
nature. The blank monotony of life and work had given back that
childish eagerness for fun, no matter whence it came. She did not care
whose ice-cream and strawberries she was going to eat, provided she
got them and they were good. Besides, it would be like finding an old
lost friend to look into her mirror (it was cracked and turned one's
complexion pale green, with iridescent spots; but that was a detail)
and see a bare-necked, white-armed girl in evening dress.

There was a new way of doing the hair which Win had noticed on a
smiling wax beauty in Peter Rolls's Window-World and had dimly wished
to try for herself. Only dimly, because if her hair were glossy and
trim it suited those plain, ninety-eight-cent shirt waists better than
the elaborate fashions affected by Lily Leavitt and one or two of the
more successful tigresses who cheaply copied expensive customers. Now
there was an incentive for the experiment and Win laughed at the
eagerness with which she looked forward to the moment of making it,
laughed patronizingly, as she might have laughed at a child's longing
for Christmas.

"Anyhow, it's something that I _can_ laugh," she thought, recalling,
as she often did, her boast to Peter Rolls, Jr. "And I haven't cried
yet!"

She had not guessed how vividly the sight of the Moon dress and
putting it on would bring Mr. Balm of Gilead to her mind. But as she
stood gazing into the greenish glass, with her hair very successfully
done in the new way and the Moon gown shimmering night-blue and
silver, it was as if Peter Rolls came and looked over her shoulder,
their eyes meeting in the mirror.

Yes, she saw him for an instant as clearly as that. He was there. He
was her friend, the nicest, most altogether delightful man she had
ever seen; the one she knew best and needed most, though their actual
acquaintanceship was but a few days old. The kind blue eyes were true
and brave, and said: "I dare you not to believe in me, as I believe in
you!"

Then the vision (it had almost amounted to that) was gone like a
broken bubble. Win felt physically sick, as if the one thing worth
having in the world had been shown her for a second, then suddenly
snatched away forever.

The silvery sheen and the faint, lingering perfume of that Nadine
model gown had woven a magic carpet of moonbeams and transported her
back to the mirrored room on the _Monarchic_ for an instant. But it
was only for an instant. Then the Columbus Avenue bedroom, with its
window open to the roar and rush of the "L," had her again, and made
the Moon dress and the Moon-dress dreams seem ridiculously unsuited to
life.

Win touched a switch which shut off light from the one unshaded
electric bulb hanging like a lambent pear over her head. Then,
palm-leaf fan in hand, she sat down in the blue summer darkness to
await the coming of Miss Leavitt.

For the first time she repented her promise to go out. Monotony was
preferable to the party as she pictured it--a silly, giggling crowd of
crude young people among whom she, the stranger, would be like a muted
note on a cheap piano. Should she stay at home, after all, and tell
Lily that the heat had made her too limp to stir? It would be quite
true. But no. If she stayed she would not have the courage to undress
for a long, long time. She would just sit there in the dark by the
window in the Moon gown, its perfume surrounding her with the past,
shutting her up, as it were, in the mirror room with Mr. Balm of
Gilead who had never really existed.

Yet, had he not? What had the eyes in the cracked glass said just now?
Why shouldn't she believe them instead of Ena Rolls's dreadful hints?
Why might not a sister, even with the best intentions, be mistaken
about a brother?

These were exactly the sort of questions that were upsetting and
altogether useless to ask one's self, and Win jumped up to turn on the
electric light again. She _would_ go with Lily Leavitt!

Five minutes later a taxicab--a real, live, magnificent, unthinkably
expensive taxicab--stopped and chortled in front of the apartment
house in which Mrs. McFarrell's flat was one of many. Heads flew out
of windows, for the thing was unbelievable, and among other heads was
Win's.

Instinct cried that the chortling was for her. The balcony where the
rubber plants had died and mummied themselves, being scarcely more
than a foot wide, she was able to see a face, crowned with red hair
and white as a _Pierrette's_ in the lights of the street, looking
anxiously up from the cab window. Its expression implored the guest to
hurry down, because each heart-throb meant not a drop of red blood,
but several red cents. Win caught the message, and seizing the ancient
though still respectable evening cloak which had spent months in a
trunk with the "New Moon," she flew downstairs.

"What an extravagant creature!" she gasped, breathless when after a
wasted sixty seconds at most the taxi was _en route_.

"I had a present from a gentleman friend," said Lily in a
self-satisfied voice, adding hastily, in deference to Miss Child's
"stuck-up primness," "a filopena present, to choose myself anything I
liked with. I thought us bein' in party dress, and you sort o' tired
out, a taxi'd be just about the best thing goin'."

This reduced Win to the necessity for gratitude, and after months of
the "L," the subway, and the crosstown car, the girl could not help
revelling in a taxi. She refused to be depressed by the gloomy
spectacle of lower-class New York in the throes of a heat wave--pallid
people hanging out of windows or standing at corners to be eased of
their torture by the merciful spray from fire hydrants; barefooted
half-naked children staring thirstily at soda fountains in bright, hot
drug stores they could never hope to enter--every one limp, lethargic,
glistening unhealthily with horrid moisture, all loathing themselves
and indifferent to each other. Sometimes Win felt that these were her
true brothers and sisters, the only ones who could understand, because
they were the only ones who really suffered; but to-night she dared
not think of them. If she did, because of what they endured she could
not enjoy the ice-cream and strawberries in the snow coolness of the
artist's borrowed house.

New York not being her own city, its different divisions lacked for
her the meaning and importance they had for those at home; therefore
she was disappointingly calm when Lily made the taxi stop in front of
a house only three or four doors off Fifth Avenue. Miss Leavitt had
the fare ready, with a small tip for the driver, and the two were out
of the cab, standing in the street, before Win noticed a thing that
struck her sharply and quickly as being very strange.

"Why!" she exclaimed, "we must have come to the wrong place. All these
houses are shut. Their doors and windows are boarded up!"

CHAPTER XX

THE CLOSED HOUSE

"It's all right," said Lily. "Don't you remember I told you the house
was lent to my artist friend by the folks who own it and who've gone
away for the summer to the seashore? The front door and windows were
boarded up, I guess, like they always are, before the house was lent.
My friend lives in the back part, and the caretaker looks after
everything, but it's awful nice. You needn't be afraid you're goin' to
waste your grand dress. Say, it's some swell street, ain't it?"

Lily talked fast and slid an arm through Win's in the thin silk kimono
cloak, encouraging her to mount the steps. But Win objected to being
hustled. She paused to look up at the house front which--like all its
neighbours except a big, lighted building at the corner, that had the
air of being a club--had apparently been put to sleep for the summer
months.

The dark-brown facades were expressionless as the faces of mummies.
Smooth boards had been neatly fitted into the window frames and made
to cover front doors. There seemed at first glance to be no way in,
but as Winifred slowly ascended the steps of the fourth house from the
corner, she made out the lines of a little door cut in the boards
which protected the big one. There was no handle to break the smooth,
unpainted surface of wood--old, well-seasoned wood which had evidently
served the same purpose year after year--but there was a small,
inconspicuous keyhole, and into this Miss Leavitt deftly fixed a key
which she took from her hand bag.

"My friend sent me this," she explained, "to save us waiting, 'cause
there's only one servant, and he might be busy. Say, this is real fun,
ain't it?"

"It's--it's quite like a sort of adventure," Win answered "I had no
idea the house would be shut up, or---"

"It'll make it all the cooler," said Lily. She had got the little door
open, and the space between it and the house door it protected could
be seen in the street lights, like a miniature vestibule. "Squeeze in
and feel around till you find the electric bell," she went on. "Some
one'll open the real door, and I can lock up behind us."

"Why lock up?" argued Win, hesitating. "Aren't there others coming?"

"My, yes, unless they're all here. But it wouldn't do to leave a
cover-up door like this standing open. If the police happened along
and saw, they'd think there was something wrong and make my friend a
whole lot of bother."

Win saw the force of this explanation, and stooping to pass through
the low aperture, found herself close to a pretentiously carved
portal. The electric bell revealed itself to groping fingers, and to
her surprise a few seconds after she had touched it, without hearing a
sound, the door opened.

In the dimness of a hall or large vestibule the figure of a man
loomed black against dark gray. Win could see of him only that he was
tall and straight and prim, like a well-trained servant, and his voice
was a servant's voice as he said: "Please be a little careful, miss,
not to trip. We have to keep it rather dark here, but there's plenty
of light inside Let me show you through the hall."

Win thanked him, but turned inside the door to ask: "Aren't you
coming, Miss Leavitt?" (They had never been upon Christian name
terms.)

"Yes, I'm just turning the key," replied Lily. "Go along. I'll
follow."

Win went on through the dusk, dimly seeing panelled walls. She heard
the door shut sharply behind her and supposed that Lily had come in,
but at the same instant another door opened ahead and a soft wave of
rosy light flowed out.

"Walk in, if you please, miss," requested the tall servant standing
attentive, and mechanically Win obeyed.

Lily Leavitt had not exaggerated--this was a "swell house," and "cool
as snow." The room into which she had been ushered was a dining-room,
and at first glance was all one rosy glow--walls, drawn curtains,
thick, mossy carpet, brocade-upholstered furniture, lamps and candle
shades. The table was a shining bunch of lilies in a garden of
deep-red roses seen at sunset, and the glitter of silver and gleam of
glass was a bright sprinkle of dewdrops catching the red western
light.

It was so long since Win had been in a pretty room or had seen a
charmingly decorated table that for a few seconds she lost herself in
the sheer joy of beauty. The sunset-garden simile flashed into her
mind and pleased her. She was glad that she had come. The guests might
be uninteresting, of the Lily Leavitt sort, and the artists might be
so called only by themselves. The room might be over-gorgeous by
daylight, but it was beautiful thus lighted, with a rosy radiance from
above, bringing out the whiteness of damask, the snow purity of
camellias crowding a crystal bowl, and the ruby splendour of
strawberries piled on their own leaves.

What a wonderful sight after months of the Hands restaurant and free
lunches with five-cent chocolate in busy drug stores! Oh, yes, she was
glad she had come, and she must look, look, look at this beautiful
picture, so that she might remember its details and hold it before her
eyes, like a delicately painted transparency, in front of future
realities.

But it was in carrying out this intention, in taking in the details,
that Win's heart suddenly bounded and then missed a beat. The table
had two chairs drawn up to it. It was small and round, and on it only
two places were laid.

Win turned her head and looked for Lily Leavitt. Lily was not there,
neither was the tall, respectable servant. But a smiling man in
evening dress was just coming into the room with the ingratiating air
of one who is a little late for an appointment.

"How do you do, Miss Child?" Jim Logan cordially inquired, holding out
his hand. "This is mighty good of you!"

A thousand thoughts whirled after each other through the girl's head,
like the mechanical horses on a circular toy race course, such as she
had often sold at Peter Rolls's. Round and round they wildly turned
for an instant, then began to slow down.

This house was closed for the summer. The front was boarded up, and
perhaps the back windows also. No lights could be seen, and probably
no sounds heard. Two places only were laid for supper. Lily, then, had
gone--had always meant to go and leave her here, had been bribed to
bring her and go. Oh, but it must have been a big bribe this time, for
surely Lily Leavitt would never dare look her in the face again! One
of them would have to disappear from the mantle department of the
Hands. Was Logan giving Lily enough money to make up for a sacrifice
of all those commissions, or did Lily think that after to-night
she--Winifred Child--would never come back to Peter Rolls's?

As that question asked itself loud bells jangled in Win's head. She
felt as if she were losing her senses. But no, she must not--must not
do that. Never in her life had she so much need to keep them all as
now, in this locked house, where she had no help to hope for save what
her own wits might give, and no one could hear or see what happened to
her except this smiling man and his well-trained servant. For all
outside this was an empty house.

She steadied herself, the more readily because something in the narrow
eyes twinkling into hers said that Jim Logan had expected her to
scream and make a scene. Never until now had she imagined it possible
to be afraid of him. In the park, when he had stopped his car to
follow and speak to her, she had been a little startled, a good deal
annoyed. Then, when Ursus had opportunely arrived to frighten him
away as easily as the _Spider_ frightened _Miss Muffet_, she had been
impishly amused.

In Toys at Peter Rolls's she had been vexed, irritated, but never
hotly angry. The young man's persistence had not seemed serious enough
to call "persecution." She had rather enjoyed "shunting" him off upon
Lily Leavitt, and thwarting him through Cupid and Earl Usher. It had
never occurred to her that behind the unfailing smile and the
twinkling gray eyes the brutal ferocity of the animal might lurk.

She had thought that he had forgotten her long ago and turned his
attentions elsewhere. What girl, unless silly and Victorian, would be
afraid of a dude who lived for the sleekness of his hair and the
spick-and-spanness of his clothes? Yet now Win was afraid, and she did
not think it was because she had suddenly become silly or Victorian.
This aquiline-faced young man with the prominent jaw was looking at
her as the primitive brute looks at the prey under his paws, and if he
smiled and twinkled, it was but as the primitive brute might purr.

Winifred thought of this, and she thought, too, that when the prey had
presence of mind to feign sleep or death the brute was said not to
kill, after all.

She did not put her hand into the hand that Logan held out, but
neither did she turn to run from him. "This is quite a surprise," she
remarked quietly.

"A pleasant surprise, I hope," he suggested.

"A sort of practical joke, I suppose," the girl said.

"Well, yes, that's just what it is," Logan smiled, evidently wondering
at her calmness and not sure whether to take it as a good or bad omen.
"It seemed to be the only way I could get you to accept any
invitation of mine."

"Rather a high-handed way!" said Win, shrugging her shoulders.
"Still--here I am. This seems to be a nice house. Is it yours?"

"It's my father's. We're all supposed to be somewhere else for the
summer. But I run in sometimes. My servant looks after me. He's as
devoted as the servants in books. I pay him to be. There's nothing I
want done that he wouldn't do."

"He appears to have made you a very nice supper." Win's eyes rested on
the table.

"Nothing could be too good for you. If I've got you here--well, sort
of under false pretences--there'll be no false pretences about
anything else now I _have_ got you. There's a little surprise in those
flowers by your plate. I hope you'll like it."

"A peace offering?" suggested Win lightly.

"Yes. And a love token. You know I've been in love with you, you
bewitching thing, just madly in love, since that night in the park. I
never rested till I saw you again at Peter Rolls's. And then I knew I
couldn't rest until---"

"Wait!" exclaimed Win, putting out both hands to hold him off as he
came close. "Wait--_please!_" She still spoke lightly. "I'm your
guest. I quite understand that 'might makes right!' But there's
another law--the law of hospitality, isn't there? This is--a great
adventure. Let me get into the spirit of it before you say or do any
more. Give me time--to breathe. Where may I put my cloak? Perhaps
you've a long mirror somewhere? I want to see if I'm beautiful enough
for my background."

Logan yielded to the hands which pushed him away. It charmed him that
this tall, spirited creature was taking things in a debonair way. He
thought it splendid that she should talk of an adventure and of
entering into the spirit of it. If she had made a fuss and tried to
escape and refused to eat supper with him, there would have been some
pleasure in conquering, but not the same pleasure there would be in a
jolly little supper with a pretty girl who gayly acknowledged that the
"joke was on her," and then making love to her afterward.

Not that he quite trusted the strange creature yet. She might be like
a kitten that submits to be petted while lying in wait for its chance
to spring. But this kitten might lie in wait as long as it liked. The
chance to spring wouldn't come. By and by the kitten would discover
that fact if the hope were in its mind, for he meant business this
time.

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