Mrs. Marshall put out a large, strong hand and took his slack, big-knuckled fingers into a tight clasp.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently thought a light tone best now, as always, to take.  “I tell you, Barbara”—­she suggested laughingly, “we’ll exchange.  You give me Sylvia, and take Arnold.”

Mrs. Marshall ignored this as pure facetiousness, and said seriously:  “Why really, Victoria, it might not be a bad thing for Arnold to come to us.  I know Elliott would be glad to have him, and so would I.”

For an instant Arnold’s life hung in the balance.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith, gleaming gold and ivory in her evening-dress of amber satin, sat silent, startled by the suddenness with which the whole astonishing question had come up.  There was in her face more than one hint that the proposition opened a welcome door of escape to her....

And then Arnold himself, with the tragic haste of youth, sent one end of the scales down, weighted so heavily that the sight of his stepmother’s eyes and mouth told him it could never rise again.  In the little, pregnant pause, he cried out joyfully, “Oh, Mother!  Mother!” and flung his arms around Mrs. Marshall’s neck.  It was the only time he had shown the slightest emotion over anything.  It burst from him with surprising effect.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith was, as she had said, only human, and at this she rose, her delicate face quiet and impassive, and shook out the shimmering folds of her beautiful dress.  She said casually, picking up her fan and evidently preparing for some sort of adjournment:  “Oh, Arnold, don’t be so absurd.  Of course you can’t foist yourself off on a family that’s no relation to you, that way.  And in any case, it wouldn’t do for you to graduate from a co-educational State University.  Not a person you know would have heard of it.  You know you’re due at Harvard next fall.”  With adroit fingers, she plucked the string sure to vibrate in Arnold’s nature.  “Do go and order a table for us in the Rose-Room, there’s a good boy.  And be sure to have the waiter give you one where we can see the dancing.”

The matter was settled.

CHAPTER XII

ONE MAN’S MEAT ...

That night after the Marshalls had gone back to their somewhat shabby boarding-house, “things” happened to the two people they had left in the great hotel.  Sylvia and Judith never knew the details, but it was apparent that something portentous had occurred, from the number of telegrams Aunt Victoria had managed to receive and send between the hour when they left her in the evening, and eleven o’clock the next morning, when they found her, hatted and veiled, with an array of strapped baggage around her.