they all did!" Chris admitted,
indifferently.

"When you think of the upbringing she had, Chris, a little nameless
nobody," Alice pursued. "When you think that until last year she had
actually never seen a finger-bowl, or spoken to a servant!"

"Exactly!" Chris said, briefly. Alice, who was facing the fire, did not
see him wince. She was far from suspecting that he had at that moment a
luncheon engagement for the next day with Norma, and that during the
weeks that followed they met by appointment almost every day, and
frequently by chance more often than that.

CHAPTER XXII

In the beginning, these were times brimful of happiness for Norma. She
would meet Chris far down town, among the big, cold, snowbound
office-buildings, and they would loiter for two hours at some
inconspicuous table in a restaurant, and come wandering out into the
cold streets still talking, absorbed and content. Or she would rise
before him from a chair in one of the foyers of the big hotels, at tea
time, and they would find an unobserved corner for the murmur that rose
and fell, rose and fell inexhaustibly. Tea and toast unobserved before
them, music drifting unheard about them, furred and fragrant women
coming and going; all this was but the vague setting for their own
thrilling drama of love and confidence. They would come out into the
darkness, Norma tucking herself beside him in the roadster, last
promises and last arrangements made, until to-morrow.

Sometimes the girl even accompanied him to Alice's room, to sit at the
invalid's knee, and chatter with a tact and responsiveness that Alice
found an improvement upon her old amusing manner. So free was Norma in
these days from any sense of guilt that she felt herself nothing but
generous toward Alice, in sparing the older woman some of the excess of
joy and companionship in which she was so rich.

But very swiftly the first complete satisfaction in the discovery of
their mutual love began to wane, or rather to be overset with the
difficulties by which Norma, and many another more brilliant and older
woman, must inevitably be worsted. Her meetings with Chris, innocent and
open as they seemed, were immediately threatened by the sordid danger of
scandal. To meet him once, twice, half-a-dozen times, even, was safe
enough. But when each day of separation became for them both only an
agony of waiting until the next day that should unite them, and when all
Norma's self-control was not en