with a comprehending look. And in lowered
tones they began to talk of Leslie's possible engagement.

CHAPTER V

Norma Sheridan saw the engagement announced in a morning paper two weeks
later, and carried the picture of pretty Miss Melrose home, to entertain
the dinner table. The news had been made known at a dinner given to
forty young persons, in the home of the debutante's aunt, Mrs. Hendrick
von Behrens. Miss Melrose, said the paper, was the daughter and heiress
of the late Theodore Melrose, and made her home with her grandmother.
Mr. Liggett was the brother of Christopher Liggett, whose marriage to
Miss Alice Melrose was a social event some years ago. A number of
dinners and dances were already planned in honour of the young pair.

Norma looked at the pictured face with a little stir of feelings so
confused that she could not define them, at her heart. But she passed
the paper to her aunt with no comment.

"You might send them two dozen kitchen towels, Mother," Wolf suggested,
drily, and Rose laughed joyously. Her own engagement present from her
mother had been this extremely practical one, and Rose loved to open her
lower bureau drawer, and gloat over the incredible richness of
possessing twenty-four smooth, red-striped, well-hemmed glass-towels,
all her own. Norma had brought her two thick, dull gray Dedham bowls,
with ducks waddling around them, and these were in the drawer, too,
wrapped in tissue paper. And beside these were the length of
lemon-coloured silk that Rose had had for a year, without making up, and
six of her mother's fine sheets of Irish linen, and two glass
candlesticks that Rose had won at a Five-hundred party. Altogether, Rose
felt that she was making great strides toward home-making, especially as
she and Harry must wait for months, perhaps a year. Norma had promised
her two towels a month, until there were a whole dozen, and Wolf,
prompted by the same generous little heart, told her not to give the
gas-stove a thought, for she was to have the handsomest one that money
could buy, with a stand-up oven and a water-heater, from her brother.
Rose walked upon air.

But Norma was in a mood that she herself seemed unable to understand or
to combat. She felt a constant inclination toward tears. She didn't hate
the Melroses--no, they had been most friendly and kind. But--but it was
a funny world in which one girl had everything, like Leslie, and another
girl had no brighter prospect than to