of agony,
"can't you understand? She'd rather have me. It makes her nervous trying
to pretend to you that she's not suffering when she is. That's all,
Louis. You see, she's not ashamed to suffer before me. Why,
Louis--that's all. Why should I want to come between you and her? Isn't
she dearer to me than anything in the world and haven't you been the
best friend to me a girl could have? That's all--Louis."

He was placated and a little sorry and did not insist further upon going
into the room.

"Funny," he said. "Funny," and adjusting his spectacles, snapped open
his newspaper for a lonely evening.

The one thing that perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the
dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish
and more given to profanity, was where she obtained the drug.

The well-thumbed old doctor's prescription she had purloined even back
in the hotel days, and embargo and legislation were daily making more
and more furtive and prohibitive the traffic in narcotics.

Once Alma, mistakenly too, she thought later, had suspected a chauffeur
of collusion with her mother and abruptly dismissed him. To Louis' rage.

"What's the idea," he said out of Carrie's hearing, of course. "Who's
running this shebang anyway?"

Once 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 she slapped her quite roundly across the cheek.

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 to
somehow 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 probab