tle startled at this direct reference
to the veiled storm-center of the day, but not at all displeased. "Oh,
your mother told him? Was he so very angry?" she asked with a slight
smile.

"Oh, dreadfully!" returned Sylvia. "I didn't _mean_ to listen, but I
couldn't help it. Buddy wouldn't go to sleep and Father's voice was so
loud--and he got madder and madder at her." She went on with another
question, "Auntie, who was Ephraim Smith?"

Aunt Victoria turned upon her in astonishment, and did not, for a
moment, answer; then: "Why, that was the name of my husband, Sylvia.
What has that to do with anything?"

"Why didn't Pauline like him?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith replied with a vivacity of surprise which carried
her out of her usual delicate leisure in speech. "_Pauline?_ Why, she
never saw him in her life! _What_ are you talking about, child?"

"But, Father said--I thought--he seemed to mean--" Sylvia halted, not
able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had
said. In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite
impression of what she had heard. Evidently, as so often happened, she
had grown-ups' affairs all twisted up in her mind. Aunt Victoria was
touched with kindly amusement at the little girl's face of perplexity,
and told her, dismissing the subject: "Never mind, dear, you evidently
misunderstood something. But I wonder what your father could have said
to give you such a funny idea."

Sylvia gave it up, shaking her head. They turned into the main street
of La Chance, and Aunt Victoria directed the coachman to drive them to
"the" drug store of town, and offered Sylvia her choice of any soda
water confection she might select. This completed the "about-face" of
the mobile little mind. After several moments of blissful anguish of
indecision, Sylvia decided on a peach ice-cream soda, and thereafter
was nothing but sense of taste as she ecstatically drew through a
straw the syrupy, foamy draught of nectar. She took small sips at a
time and held them in the back of her mouth till every minute bubble
of gas had rendered up its delicious prickle to her tongue. Her
consciousness was filled to its uttermost limits with a voluptuous
sense of present physical delight.

And yet it was precisely at this moment that from her subconscious
mind, retracing with unaided travail a half-forgotten clue, there
sprang into her memory a complete phrase of what her father had said.
She