o on?" Christopher asked.

"Oh, weeks! Well, and then one hot day, just before Easter vacation it
was, I remember, I came home early from school with a headache, and when
I reached the upper hall I could hear Mama crying, and Annie shouting
out loud, and this Kate--this very same Kate Sheridan!--trying to quiet
Mama, and everything in an uproar! Finally I heard Annie sobbing--I was
frightened to death of course, and I sat down on the stairs that go up
to the nursery--and I heard Annie say something about being
eighteen--and she was eighteen the very day before; and she ran by me,
in her riding clothes, with the derby hat that girls used to wear then,
and her hair clubbed on her neck, and she ran downstairs, and I could
hear her crying, and saying to herself: 'I'll show them; I'll show
them!' And that was the last I saw of her," Alice finished sadly, "for
almost two years."

"She went out?" Christopher asked.

"Yes; she slammed the door. Mama fainted."

"Of course!"

"Oh, Chris," said his wife, half crying, "wasn't that enough to make any
one faint?--let alone Mama. Anyway, she was dreadfully ill, and they
rather shut me up about it, and told everyone that Annie had gone
abroad. We had been living very quietly, you know, and nobody cared much
what Annie did, then. And she really had gone abroad, she wrote Mama
from Montreal, and she had been married to Emil Mueller in Albany. They
had taken a train there, and were married that same afternoon. They went
to London, and they were in Germany, and then--then it all broke up, you
know about that!"

"How much later was that?"

Alice considered.

"It was about Christmas time. Don't you remember that I went to your
mother, and Acton and I got measles? Mama was abroad then."

"And this Kate went with her?"

"Yes. That was--that was one of the things I was--just thinking about!
Annie wrote Mama that she was very ill, in Munich, and poor Mama just
flew. Mueller had left her; indeed there was a woman and two quite big
girls that had a claim on him, and if Mama hadn't been so anxious to
shut it all up, she might have proved that he was a bigamist--but I
don't know that she was ever sure. Judge Lee put the divorce through for
Annie, and Mama took her to the Riviera and petted her, and pulled her
through. But all her hair came out, and for weeks they didn't think she
would live. She had brain fever. You see, Annie had had some money
waiting for her on her eighteenth birthda