“Oh!” said Mrs. Richards for a third time, and in this instance her voice was warm with gratification.

Claire directed her attention to her plate of buttered toast and her cup of coffee.  She was chagrined to think that she had fallen so easily into Mrs. Richards’s very obvious traps.  Not that it mattered.  She was quite sure that the truth could not harm Stillman, and she was equally sure that her position in life was too obscure to stand out conspicuously against the darts of Mrs. Richards’s vindictive tongue.  But she had the pride of her reticences and she did not like to surrender these privileges at the point of insolent curiosity.  The two continued to eat in silence.

It was Mrs. Richards who finished first, and she dipped her fingers hurriedly into the battered metal finger-bowl which the Japanese bus-boy thrust before her.

“Do you mind if I go along?” she inquired of Claire, with an air of polite triumph.  “I think I’ll go forward where I can get a quick start ... before the crowd gets too thick.  I’ve got a million errands to do before nine o’clock.  And I do want to run into the office before Gertie settles down to work.  I haven’t seen her for a week and I’ve got more things to tell her!”

CHAPTER VIII

“Why, Miss Claire, how could you!  Where have you been?  And your mother in such a bad way!” Mrs. Finnegan broke into sudden tears.

Claire, fumbling in her bag for the front-door key, looked up.  Mrs. Finnegan had swung open the door to the Robson flat and she stood like a vision of disaster upon the threshold.

“What has happened?” Claire’s voice rose with a note of swift apprehension.

“Your mother ... she’s paralyzed!  She was taken last night.  The doctor says it would have happened, anyway.  But I say it was worry, that’s what it was.  With you away all night and never a word!”

Claire climbed the stairs in silence, aware that Mrs. Finnegan was following at a discreet distance.  Already the house seemed permeated with an atmosphere of tragedy and gloom in spite of the morning light pouring in unscreened at every window.  Mrs. Robson’s room was the only exception to this unusual excess of cold radiance—­unusual, because it was one of Mrs. Robson’s prides to keep her window-shades lowered to a uniform and genteel distance.

Until Claire came face to face with her mother she almost had fancied that her neighbor was indulging in a crude and terrible joke, but one look sufficed.  Mrs. Robson lay staring vacantly at the ceiling; she could not move, she could not speak, and her spirit showed through the veiled light in her eyes like a mysterious spot of sunshine in a shaded well.  Above a swooning sense of calamity Claire felt the strength of a tender pretense struggling to communicate its vague hope to the stricken form.  She raised the window-shade slightly and sat down upon the bed.