Part 19 (1/2)

”Oh! I forgot! I want to show you something.” From her purse she drew a slender ring of plain gold and pa.s.sed it around. ”My mother's wedding ring. I've worn it around my neck always, like a locket. I cried for it so in the orphan asylum that the matron gave it back for me to wear. And now, just to think, after next Tuesday I'll be wearing it on my finger.

Look, Billy, see the engraving on the inside.”

”C to D, 1879,” he read.

”Carlton to Daisy--Carlton was my father's first name. And now, Billy, you've got to get it engraved for you and me.”

Mary was all eagerness and delight.

”Oh, it's fine,” she cried. ”W to S, 1907.”

Billy considered a moment.

”No, that wouldn't be right, because I'm not giving it to Saxon.”

”I'll tell you what,” Saxon said. ”W and S.”

”Nope.” Billy shook his head. ”S and W, because you come first with me.”

”If I come first with you, you come first with us. Billy, dear, I insist on W and S.”

”You see,” Mary said to Bert. ”Having her own way and leading him by the nose already.”

Saxon acknowledged the sting.

”Anyway you want, Billy,” she surrendered. His arms tightened about her.

”We'll talk it over first, I guess.”

CHAPTER XIV

Sarah was conservative. Worse, she had crystallized at the end of her love-time with the coming of her first child. After that she was as set in her ways as plaster in a mold. Her mold was the prejudices and notions of her girlhood and the house she lived in. So habitual was she that any change in the customary round a.s.sumed the proportions of a revolution. Tom had gone through many of these revolutions, three of them when he moved house. Then his stamina broke, and he never moved house again.

So it was that Saxon had held back the announcement of her approaching marriage until it was unavoidable. She expected a scene, and she got it.

”A prizefighter, a hoodlum, a plug-ugly,” Sarah sneered, after she had exhausted herself of all calamitous forecasts of her own future and the future of her children in the absence of Saxon's weekly four dollars and a half. ”I don't know what your mother'd thought if she lived to see the day when you took up with a tough like Bill Roberts. Bill! Why, your mother was too refined to a.s.sociate with a man that was called Bill. And all I can say is you can say good-bye to silk stockings and your three pair of shoes. It won't be long before you'll think yourself lucky to go sloppin' around in Congress gaiters and cotton stockin's two pair for a quarter.”

”Oh, I'm not afraid of Billy not being able to keep me in all kinds of shoes,” Saxon retorted with a proud toss of her head.

”You don't know what you're talkin' about.” Sarah paused to laugh in mirthless discordance. ”Watch for the babies to come. They come faster than wages raise these days.”

”But we're not going to have any babies... that is, at first. Not until after the furniture is all paid for anyway.”

”Wise in your generation, eh? In my days girls were more modest than to know anything about disgraceful subjects.”

”As babies?” Saxon queried, with a touch of gentle malice.

”Yes, as babies.”

”The first I knew that babies were disgraceful. Why, Sarah, you, with your five, how disgraceful you have been. Billy and I have decided not to be half as disgraceful. We're only going to have two--a boy and a girl.”

Tom chuckled, but held the peace by hiding his face in his coffee cup.