into Aunt Kate's
motherly soft shoulder, and tightened her arms about her neck, and cried
a little, for sheer joy.

But Wolf said almost nothing, and when he went to wash his hands for
supper he went slowly, and found himself staring absently at the towel,
and stopping short in the hall, still staring. He seemed himself at
dinner, and his mother, at first watching him anxiously, could resume
her meal, and later, could fall asleep, in the confident hope that it
would all come right, after all. But Wolf slipped from the house after
awhile, and walked the streets until almost dawn.

It was almost dawn, too when the old mistress of the Melrose mansion
fell asleep. She had called Regina more than once, she had tried the
effect of reading, and of hot milk, and of a cold foot-bath. But still
the crowded, over-furnished room was filled with ghosts, and still she
watched them, pleaded with them, blamed them.

"I've done all I could!" she whispered at last, into the heavy dark
before the dawn. "It isn't my fault if they think she's Annie's child!
I've never said so--it was Alice and Chris who said so. Annie and Leslie
will never know anything more, and the girl herself need never know
anything at all. Perhaps, as Kate said yesterday, it will all work out
right, this way! At least it's all we can do now!"

CHAPTER X

So it came about quite naturally that the little unknown cousin of the
Melroses was made a familiar figure in their different family groups,
and friends of the house grew accustomed to finding pretty little Norma
Sheridan lunching with Leslie, reading beside Alice's couch in the late
summer afternoons, or amusing and delighting the old head of the family
in a hundred charming ways. Norma called Mrs. Melrose "Aunt Marianna"
now, as Chris and Acton did. She did not understand the miracle, it
remained a marvel still, but it was enough that it continued to deepen
and spread with every enchanted hour.

She had longed--what girl in Biretta's Bookstore did not?--to be rich,
and to move and have her being "in society." And now she had her wish, a
hundred times fulfilled, and of course she was utterly and absolutely
happy.

That is, except for the momentary embarrassments and jealousies and
uncertainties, and for sometimes being bored, she thought that she might
consider herself happy. And there were crumpled rose-leaves everywhere!
she reminded herself sternly. She--Norma Sheridan--could spend more
money upo