“Oh, the furniture’s all outside--and the pictures too,” Anne said, pointing to the great window. “What--Brooklyn Bridge? Lord!--Oh, but I see: you’ve kept the place clear for dancing. Good girl, Anne! Can I bring in some of my little boys sometimes? Is that a pianola?” she added, with a pounce toward the grand piano in a shadowy corner. “I like this kindergarten,” she pronounced. Nollie Tresselton laughed. “If you come, Anne won’t let you dance. You’ll all have to sit for her--for hours and hours.” “Well, we’ll sit between the dances then. Ain’t I going to have a latch-key, Anne?” She stood leaning against the piano, sipping the cock-tail some one had handed her, her head thrown back, and the light from a shaded lamp striking up at her columnar throat and the green glitter of her earrings, which suggested to Kate Clephane the poisonous antennæ of some giant insect. Anne stood close to her, slender, erect, her small head clasped in close braids, her hands hanging at her sides, dead-white against the straight dark folds of her dress. There was something distinctly unpleasant to Kate Clephane in the proximity of the two, and she rose and moved toward the piano. As she sat down before it, letting her hands drift into the opening bars of a half-remembered melody, she saw Lilla, in her vague lounging way, draw nearer to Anne, who held out a hand for the empty cock-tail glass. The gesture brought them so close that Lilla, slightly drooping her head, could let fall, hardly above her breath, but audibly to Kate: “He’s back again. He bothered the life out of me to bring him here today.” Again Kate saw that quick drop of her daughter’s lids; this time it was accompanied by a just-perceptible tremor of the hand that received the glass. “Nonsense, Lilla!” “Well, what on earth am I to do about it? I can’t get the police to run him in, can I?” Anne laughed--the faintest half-pleased laugh of impatience and dismissal. “You may have to,” she said. Nollie Tresselton, in the interval, had glided up and slipped an arm through Lilla’s. “Come along, my dear. There’s to be no dancing here today.” Her little brown face had the worn sharp look it often took on when she was mothering Lilla. But Lilla’s feet were firmly planted. “I don’t budge till I get another cock-tail.” One of the young men hastened to supply her, and Anne turned to her other guests. A few minutes later the Tresseltons and Lilla went away, and one by one the remaining visitors followed, leaving mother and daughter alone in the recovered serenity of the empty room. But there was no serenity in Kate. That half-whispered exchange between Lilla Gates and Anne had stirred all her old apprehensions and awakened new ones. The idea that her daughter was one of Lilla’s confidants was inexpressibly disturbing. Yet the more she considered, the less she knew how to convey her anxiety to her daughter. “If I only knew how intimate they really are--what she really thinks of Lilla!”