"I don't have to tell you that, Alice," he said. "No, of course you don't--of course you don't!" she echoed with a nervous laugh. "I'll tell you what I think, Chris--what has been almost driving me mad--and you can probably tell me a thousand reasons why it can't be so! You see, I've never understood Mama's feverish distress these last weeks. She's been to see me, she's done what had to be done about Leslie's engagement, but she's not herself--you can see that! Yesterday she began to cry, almost for nothing, and when I happened to mention--or rather when I mentioned very deliberately--that Miss Sheridan was coming here, she almost shrieked. Well, I didn't know what to make of it, and even then I rather wondered---- "Even then," Alice began again, after a painful pause, and with her own voice rising uncontrollably, "I suspected something. But not this! Oh, Chris, if I'm wrong about this, I shall be on my knees for gratitude for the rest of my life; I would die, I would die to have it just--just my wretched imagination!--A thing like this--to us--the Melroses--who have always been so straight--so respected!" "Now, Alice--now, Alice!" "Yes, I know!" she said, quickly. "I know!" And for a moment she lay back quietly, stroking his hand. "Chris," she resumed, composedly, after a moment, "you know the tragedy of Annie's life?" Chris, taken by surprise, frowned. "Why, yes, I suppose so," he admitted, unwillingly. "Chris, did it ever occur to you that she might have had a child--by that fiend?" Chris looked at his wife a moment, and his eyes widened, and his mouth twitched humorously. "Oh, come now, Alice--come now!" "You think it's folly!" she asked, eagerly. "Worse!" he answered, briefly, his eyes smiling reproach. Alice's whole tense body relaxed, and she stared at him with light dawning in her eyes. "Well, probably it is," she said, very simply. "Of course it is," Chris said. "Now, you are dead tired, dear, and you have let the thing mill about in your head until you can't see anything normally. I confess that I don't understand your mother's mysterious nervousness, but then I am free to say that I don't by any means always understand your mother! You remember the pearl episode, and the time that she had Annie and Hendrick cabling from Italy--because Hendrick Junior had a rash! And then there was Porter--a boy nineteen years old, and she actually had everyone guessing exactly what she felt toward him----" "Oh, Chris, no, she didn't! She simply felt that he was a genius, and he hadn't a penny," Alice protested, reproachful and hurt. "Well, she had him there at the house until his mother came after him, and then, when he finally was sent abroad, she asked me seriously if I thought two hundred dollars a month was enough for his musical education!" "Yes, I know!" Alice said, ruefully, shaking her head.