town, in her own comfortable suite. She liked her second nurse
immensely, and Miss Slater was really running the house now, the third
nurse coming only at night.

"But Aunt Alice never had a nurse at night," Norma was going to say. But
she caught the stricken and apprehensive look on the old lady's face,
and substituted generously: "Well, I remember Aunt Alice told me she had
one of these wretched times several years ago."

"Yes, indeed she did--frightened us almost to death," Mrs. Melrose
agreed, thankfully.

"And how is--how is Chris?" Norma felt proud of the natural tone in
which she could ask the question.

"Chris is fine," Leslie answered. She rarely varied the phrase in this
relation. "He's hunting in Canada. He had a wire from some man there,
and he went off about a week ago. They're going after moose, I believe;
Chris didn't expect to get back for a month. Aunt Alice was delighted,
because she hates to keep him in town all summer, but Acton told me that
he thought Chris was sick--that he and Judge Lee just made him go."

Well, her heart would flutter, she could not stop it or ignore it. Norma
found no answer ready, and though she lifted her cup to her lips, to
hide her confusion, she could not taste it. The strangeness of Chris's
sudden departure was no mystery to her; he had been shocked and stunned
by her marriage, and he had run away from the eyes that might have
pierced his discomfiture.

Still, her hands were trembling, and she felt oddly shaken and confused.
Leslie carried the conversation away to safer fields, and shortly
afterward Norma could say her good-byes. Everybody, Leslie said, walking
with her to the corner, wanted to know what the bride wanted for a
wedding-present. Norma told Wolf, over their candle-lighted supper
table, an hour or two later, that he and she would be bankrupted for
life returning them.

Yet she loved the excitement of receiving the gifts; naturally enough,
loved Rose's ecstasies over the rugs and silver and mahogany that made
the little New Jersey house a jewel among its kind. It was what Norma
had unhesitatingly pronounced an "adorable" house, a copy of the true
colonial green-and-white, quaint and prim enough to please even Leslie,
when Leslie duly came to call. It stood at the end of a tree-shaded
street, with the rising woods behind it, and Norma recklessly invested
in brick walks and a latticed green fence, hydrangeas in wooden tubs and
sunflowers and hollyhocks,