ding
tour. Mary looked once, and she saw there was something wrong with Wally.
A shadow of depression hung over him--a shadow which he tried to hide
with bursts of cheerfulness. But his old air of eagerness was gone--that
air with which he had once looked at the future as a child might stare
with delighted eyes at a conjurer drawing rabbits and roses out of old
hats and empty vases.

In a word, he looked disenchanted, as though he had seen how the illusion
was produced, how the trick was done, and was simultaneously abating his
applause for the performer and his interest in the show.

"He's found her out," thought Mary, and with that terrible frankness
which sometimes comes unbidden to our minds she added with a sigh, "I was
always afraid he would."

Wally had taken a house near the country club--one of those brick
mansions surrounded by trees and lawns which are somehow reminiscent of
titled society and fox hunters in buckskin and scarlet. There Helen was
soon working her way to the leadership of the younger set.

She seldom called at the house on the hill.

"I'm generally dated up for the evening, and you're never there in the
daytime. So I have to drop in and see you here," she said one afternoon,
giving Mary a surprise visit at the office. "Do you, know you're getting
to be fashionable?" she continued.

"Who? Me?"

"Yes. You. Nearly everywhere we went, they began quizzing us as soon as
they found Miss Spencer was a cousin of mine."

Mary noted Helen's self-promotion to the head of the cousinship, but she
kept her usual tranquil expression.

"It's because she's Mrs. Cabot now," she thought. "Perhaps she wouldn't
have called at all if these people hadn't mentioned me!"

But when Helen arose to go, Mary revised her opinion of the reason for
her cousin's call.

"Well, I must be going," said Helen, rising. "I'll drop in and see Burdon
for a few minutes on my way out."

"That's it," thought Mary, and her reflections again taking upon
themselves that terrible frankness which can seldom be put in words, she
added to herself, "Poor Wally.... I was always afraid of it...."

She was still looking out of the window in troubled meditation when the
arrival of the afternoon mail turned her thoughts into another track. As
Helen had said, the New Bethel experiment had become fashionable. Taking
it as their text, the women's clubs throughout the country were giving
much of their time to a discussion of the changed ind