When Betsy and George had gone to bed, Roger put down his paper.

“Look here, Edith,” he proposed, “how’d you like me to read aloud while you sew?” She looked up with a smile of pleased surprise.

“Why, father dear, I’d love it.”  At once, she bent over her needle again, so that if there were any awkwardness attending this small change in their lives it did not reveal itself in her pretty countenance.  “What shall we read?” she affably asked.

“I’ve got a capital book,” he replied.  “It’s about travel in Japan.”

“I’d like nothing better,” Edith replied.  And with a slight glow of pride in himself Roger took his book in hand.  The experiment was a decided success.  He read again the next night and the next, while Edith sat at her sewing.  And so this hour’s companionship, from nine to ten in the evening, became a regular custom—­just one hour and no more, which Roger spent with his daughter, intimately and pleasantly.  Yes, life was certainly smoothing out.

Edith’s three older children had been reinstated in school.  And although at first, when deprived of their aid, she had found it nearly impossible to keep her two small boys amused and give them besides the four hours a day of fresh air they required, she had soon met this trouble by the same simple process as before.  Of her few possessions still unsold, she had disposed of nearly all, and with a small fund thus secured she had sent for Hannah to return.  The house was running beautifully.

Christmas, too, was drawing near.  And though Roger knew that in Edith’s heart was a cold dread of this season, she bravely kept it to herself; and she set about so determinedly to make a merry holiday, that her father admiring her pluck drew closer still to his daughter.  He entered into her Christmas plans and into all the conspiracies which were whispered about the house.  Great secrets, anxious consultations, found in him a ready listener.

So passed three blessed quiet weeks, and he had high hopes for the winter.

CHAPTER XXXI

If there were any cloud upon his horizon, it was the thought of Laura.  She had barely been to the house since Edith had come back to town; and at times, especially in the days when things had looked dark for Roger, he had caught himself reproaching this giddy-gaddy youngest child, so engrossed in her small “menage” that apparently she could not spare a thought for her widowed sister.  Laura on her return from abroad had brought as a gift for Edith a mourning gown from Paris, a most alluring creation—­so much so, in fact, that Edith had felt it simply indecent, insulting, and had returned it to her sister with a stilted note of thanks.  But Roger did not know of this.  There were so many ways, he thought, in which Laura might have been nice to Edith.  She had a gorgeous limousine in which she might so easily have come and taken her sister off on little trips uptown.  But no, she kept her car to herself.  And from her small apartment, where a maid whom she had brought from Rome dressed her several times each day, that limousine rushed her noiselessly forth, gay and wild as ever, immaculate and elegant, radiant and very rich.  To what places did she go?  What new friends was she making?  What was Laura up to?