Free Two Flights Up by Mary Roberts Rinehart

room in her mind for a great thankfulness. The suitcase and all it contained was gone, and downtown that portion of her trouble at least was being straightened out. True, she dreaded the moment when Mrs. Bayne would go to the attic again and find out what had happened. Not that there would be a scene. The very facts precluded that. But there would be a shock.
    She tried to think of some way to avoid that shock, but without success.
    The morning wore on. She worked hard; but then, she was accustomed to that. Now and then the relation of the new situation to her marriage obtruded itself, but she drove it away. Time for that when they came to it. But in the back of her mind she was puzzling over it. How could she go away and leave those two there together? A sick man and an ailing, helpless woman?
    For Mrs. Bayne was not well. Holly could not leave her, even to go to Margaret’s. At half-past eleven, there being no telephone in the house, she went to Simmons’s grocery store and called her up, but the Cox apartment did not answer, and she went back again, vaguely uneasy.
    At noon she carried up another tray. Mrs. Bayne was up in a chair by that time; she looked really ill, but she would not have a doctor.
    “Have you heard from Furness yet?”
    “No. Of course he’s busy, and with no telephone—”
    “Just the same, he might have sent you some word. He must know we are anxious.”
    “I’m not anxious, Mother. If he would let a thing like this keep him away, a thing he always knew had to happen sometime, then it’s better to learn it now rather than later on.”
    At one o’clock, however, there came a box of roses and his card. “ Always thine ,” it read, in his affected manner. She carried the flowers to her mother’s room and was completely routed by the relief in Mrs. Bayne’s face.
    “Then it’s all right!” she said. “I really have been terrified, Holly. If anything goes wrong now, I really think it will finish me.”
    She put her handkerchief to her eyes, that soft bit of fresh linen with her initials in the corner, A. H. B. , which was always in her hand. Holly could not remember her mother without a handkerchief; and when, later on, one of them played its small part in her story, the mere sight of it was to bring up not only every crisis of her life, it was to bring up that life itself, day by day and hour by hour.
    “Nothing will go wrong, Mother,” Holly told her.
    It was about two o’clock when the bell rang. Mrs. Bayne slept quietly on her couch, a lavender slumber robe drawn over her, and the scent of the roses heavy in the room. Downstairs, Holly had dusted the drawing room and laid out the tea table—if her mother wakened and came down, it would never do for her to find it unready—and was standing in front of an old photograph of her father which she had brought from the disused library across the hall, where like her father himself it had been shelved for many years.
    He must not, she reasoned, ever guess that it had been hidden away.
    It was out of date now. Mr. Bayne had been taken in his dress clothes, after the fashion of twenty years ago. Over a broad and high expanse of snowy white shirt bosom and collar he looked into his daughter’s eyes, handsome and debonair.
    “Poor Father!” said Holly, and dusting the glass, placed the photograph on a table.
    She had not seen him for many years, and she had never known him well, but acting on impulse she went across the hall into the closed library, and wrote a telegram.
    “ So glad you are coming. Welcome home and much love. ”
    After a little hesitation, she signed both her mother’s name and her own.
    The library had been his room, as the drawing room had been her mother’s. It was hardly ever opened now; the matter of heating it had been a factor, but Holly knew too that as definitely as her mother had shut her husband out of her life, she had closed and sheeted the room which had been his.
    The anger Holly had felt the night