ot_ going out in a car dressed in a lace-trimmed
negligee, with a boudoir cap on, whether you get what you want the
minute you want it or not, Molly Sommerville," she said with the
authoritative accent which had always quelled Arnold in his boyhood
(as long as he was within earshot). The method was effective now.
Molly laughed. Sylvia even made shift to laugh; and Helene was
summoned to put on the trim shirt-waist, the short cloth skirt and
close hat which Mrs. Marshall-Smith selected with care and the history
of which she detailed at length, so copiously that there was no
opportunity to speak of anything less innocuous. Her unusual interest
in the matter even caused her to accompany the girls to the head of
the stairs, still talking, and she called down to them finally as they
went out of the front door, "... it's the only way with Briggs--he's
simply incorrigible about delays--and yet nobody does skirts as he
does! You just have to tell him you _will not take it_, if he doesn't
get it done on time!"

Sylvia cast an understanding, grateful upward look at her aunt and
stepped into the car. So far it had gone better than she feared. But a
tete-a-tete with Molly, overflowing with the confidences of the newly
betrothed--she was not sure that she could get through with that with
credit.

Molly, however, seemed as little inclined to overflow as Sylvia to
have her. She talked of everything in the world except of Felix
Morrison; and it was not long before Sylvia's acuteness discovered
that she was not thinking of what she was saying. There passed through
her mind a wild, wretched notion that Molly might after all know--that
Felix might have been base enough to talk about her to Molly, that
Molly might be trying to "spare her." But this idea was instantly
rejected: Molly was not subtle enough to conceive of such a course,
and too headlong not to make a hundred blunders in carrying it out;
and besides, it would not explain her manner. She was abstracted
obviously for the simple reason that she had something on her mind,
something not altogether to her liking, judging from the uneasy color
which came and went in her face, by her rattling, senseless flow of
chatter, by her fidgeting, unnecessary adjustments of the mechanism of
the car.

Sylvia herself, in spite of her greater self-control, looked out upon
the world with nothing of her usual eager welcome. The personality of
the man they did not name hung between and around the