The boy retired, and Norma went slowly upstairs, and slowly made her preparations for sleep. But the blazing summer dawn, smiting the city at four o'clock, found her still sitting at the window, twirling a tassel of the old-fashioned shade in her cold fingers, and staring with haggard eyes into space. CHAPTER XX More than a week later Annie gave a luncheon to a dozen women, and telephoned Norma beforehand, with a request that the girl come early enough to help her with name cards. "These damnable engagement luncheons," said Aunt Annie, limping about the long table, and grumbling at everything as she went. Annie had wrenched her ankle in alighting from her car, and was cross with nagging pain. "Here, put Natalie next to Leslie, Norma; no, that puts the Gunnings together. I'll give you Miss Blanchard--but you don't speak French! Here, give me your pencil--and confound these things anyway----Fowler," she said to the butler, "I don't like to see a thing like that on the table--carry that away, please; and here, get somebody to help you change this, that won't do! That's all right--only I want this as you had it day before yesterday--and don't use those, get the glass ones----" And so fussing and changing and criticizing, Annie went away, and Norma followed her up to her bedroom. "I'm wondering when we're going to give _you_ an engagement luncheon, Norma," said the hostess, in a whirl of rapid dressing. "Who's ahead now?" "Oh--nobody!" Norma answered, with a mirthless laugh. She had been listless and pale for several days, and did not seem herself at all. "Forrest Duer, is it?" "Oh, good heavens--Aunt Annie! He's twenty-one!" "Is that all--he's such a big whale!----Don't touch my hair, Phoebe, it'll do very well!" said Annie to the maid. "Well, don't be in too much of a hurry, Norma," she went on kindly. "Nothing like being sure! That"--Annie glanced at the retiring maid--"that's what makes me nervous about Leslie," she confessed. "I'm afraid we hurried the child into it just a little bit. It was an understood thing since they were nothing but kiddies." "Leslie is outrageously spoiled," Norma said, not unkindly. "Leslie? Oh, horribly. Mama always spoils everyone and poor Theodore spoiled her, too," Annie conceded. "She told me herself yesterday," Norma went on, with a trace of her old animation, "that they've overdrawn again. Now, Aunt Annie, I do think that's outrageous! Chris straightened them all out last--when was it?--June, after the baby came, and they have an enormous income--thousands every month, and yet they are deep in again!" "The wretched thing is that they quarrel about that!" Annie agreed. "Well, exactly! That was what it was about day before yesterday, and Leslie told me she cried all night. And you know the other day she took Patricia and came home to Aunt Marianna, and it was terrible!" "How much do you suppose the servants know of that?" Annie asked, frowning. "Oh, they _must_ know!" Norma replied.