intimate friendliness of the big city and the spring night.

CHAPTER XXXVI

It was ten o'clock the next day, a silent gray day, when Aunt Kate let
herself into the apartment, and "let out," to use her own phrase, a
startled exclamation at finding her young daughter-in-law deeply asleep
in her bed. Norma, a vision of cloudy dark tumbled hair and beautiful
sleepy blue eyes, half-strangled the older woman in a rapturous embrace,
and explained that she had come home the night before, and eaten the
chicken stew, and perhaps overslept--at any rate would love some coffee.

Something faintly shadowed in her aunt's welcome, however, was
immediately apparent, and Norma asked, with a trace of anxiety, if
Rose's babies were well. For answer her aunt merely asked if Wolf had
telephoned.

"Wolf!" said Wolf's wife. "Is he home?"

"My dear," Mrs. Sheridan said. "He's going--he's gone!--to California!"

Norma did not move. But the colour went out of her face, and the
brightness from her eyes.

"Gone!" she whispered.

"Well--he goes to-day! At six o'clock----"

"At six o'clock!" Norma leaped from her bed, stood with clenched hands
and wild eyes, thinking, in the middle of the floor. "It's twenty-two
minutes past ten," she breathed. "Where does he leave?"

"Rose and I were to see him at the Grand Central at quarter past five,"
his mother began, catching the contagious excitement. "But, darling, I
don't know where you can get him before that!--Here, let me do that,"
she added, for Norma had dashed into the kitchen, and was measuring
coffee recklessly. A brown stream trickled to the floor.

"Oh, Lord--Lord--help me to get hold of him somewhere!" she heard Norma
breathe. "And you weren't going to let me know--but it's my fault," she
said, putting her hands over her face, and rocking to and fro in
desperate suspense. "Oh, how can I get him?--I must! Oh, Aunt
Kate--_help me_! Oh, I'm not even dressed--and that clock says half-past
ten! Aunt Kate, will you help me!"

"Norma, my darling," her aunt said, arresting the whirling little figure
with a big arm, and looking down at her with all the love and sadness of
her great heart in her face, "why do you want to see him, dear? He told
me--he had to tell his mother, poor boy, for his heart is broken--that
you were not going with him!"

"Oh, but Aunt Kate--he'll have to wait for me!" Norma said, stamping a
slippered foot, and beginning to cry with hurt and helplessness. "Oh,
w