ng, of course. "Who's
running this shebang, anyway?"

Again, after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her
side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter's face, her eyes
as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll's.

"I get it! But wouldn't you like to know where? Yah!" And to Alma's
horror slapped her quite roundly across the cheek so that for an hour
the sting, the shape of the red print of fingers, lay on her face.

One night in what had become the horrible sanctity of that
bedchamber--But let this sum it up. When Alma was nineteen years old a
little colony of gray hairs was creeping in on each temple.

And then one day, after a long period of quiet, when Carrie had lavished
her really great wealth of contrite love upon her daughter and husband,
spending on Alma and loading her with gifts of jewelry and finery,
somehow to express her grateful adoration of her, paying her husband the
secret penance of twofold fidelity to his well-being and every whim,
Alma, returning from a trip taken reluctantly and at her mother's
bidding down to the basement trunk room, found her gone, a modish
black-lace hat and the sable coat missing from the closet.

It was early afternoon, sunlit and pleasantly cold.

The first rush of panic and the impulse to dash after stayed, she forced
herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty for
coherence of procedure.

Where in the half hour of her absence had her mother gone? Matinee?
Impossible! Walking? Hardly possible. Upon inquiry in the kitchen,
neither of the maids had seen nor heard her depart. Motoring? With a
hand that trembled in spite of itself Alma telephoned the garage. Car
and chauffeur were there. Incredible as it seemed, Alma, upon more than
one occasion, had lately been obliged to remind her mother that she
was becoming careless of the old pointedly rosy hands. Manicurist? She
telephoned the Bon Ton Beauty Parlors. No. Where? O God! Where? Which
way to begin? That was what troubled her most. To start right so as not
to lose a precious second.

Suddenly, and for no particular reason, Alma began a hurried search
through her mother's dresser drawers of lovely personal appointments.
Turning over whole mounds of fresh white gloves, delving into nests of
sheer handkerchiefs and stacks of webby lingerie. Then for a while she
stood quite helplessly, looking into the mirror, her hands closed about
her throat.

"Please, God, where?"