Mary Minds Her Business Part 27

"A little while later I was speaking to one of our men and he said some rough actors were drifting in town and he didn't like the way they were talking. I asked him where these men were making their headquarters and he said, 'Repetti's Pool Room.'"

Mary thought that over.

"Mind you, I wouldn't swear it was Burdon's old car," said Archey, more troubled than before. "I can only tell you I'm sure of it--and I might be mistaken at that. And even if it was Burdon, he'd only say that he had gone there to try to keep the strike from spreading--yes, and he might be right at that," he added, desperately trying to be fair, "but--well, he worries me--that's all."

He was worrying Mary, too, although for a different reason.

With increasing frequency, Helen was coming home from the Country Club unconsciously scented with that combination of cigarette smoke and raspberry jam. Burdon had a new car, a swift, piratical craft which had been built to his order, and sometimes when he called at the house on the hill for Helen, Mary amused herself by thinking that he only needed a little flag-pole and a Jolly Roger--a skirted coat and a feathered hat--and he would be the typical younger son of romance, scouring the main in search of Spanish gold.

Occasionally when he rolled to the door, Wally's car was already there, for Wally--after an absence--was again coming around, pale and in need of sympathy, singing his tenor songs to Helen's accompaniment and with greater power of pathos than ever, especially when he sang the sad ones at Mary's head--

"There in the churchyard, crying, a grave I se-ee-ee Nina, that sweet dove flying was thee-ee-ee, was thee--"

"Ah, I have sighed for rest--"

"--And if she willeth to destroy me I can die.... I can die...."

After Wally had moved them all to a feeling of imminent tears, he would hover around Helen with a vague ambition of making her cousin jealous--a proceeding which didn't bother Mary at all.

But she did worry about the growing intimacy between Helen and Burdon and, one evening when Helen was driving her up to the house from the factory, Mary tried to talk to her.

"If I were you, Helen," she said, "I don't think I'd go around with Burdon Woodward quite so much--or come to the office to see him quite so often."

Helen blew the horn, once, twice and again.

"No, really, dear, I wouldn't," continued Mary. "Of course you know he's a terrible flirt. Why he can't even leave the girls at the office alone."

Quite unconsciously Helen adopted the immemorial formula.

"Burdon Woodward has always acted to me like a perfect gentleman," said she.

"Of course he has, dear. If he hadn't, I know you wouldn't have gone out with him last night, for instance. But he has such a reckless, headstrong way with him. Suppose last night, instead of coming home, he had turned the car toward Boston or New York, what would you have done then?"

"Don't worry. I could have stopped him."

"Stopped him? How could you, if he were driving very fast?"

"Oh, it's easy enough to stop a car," said Helen. "One of the girls at school showed me." Leaning over, she ran her free hand under the instrument board.

"Feel these wires back of the switch," she said. "All you have to do is to reach under quick and pull one loose--just a little tug like this--and you can stop the wildest man, and the wildest car on earth.... See?"

In the excitement of her demonstration she tugged the wire too hard. It came loose in her hand and the engine stopped as though by magic.

"It's a good thing we are up to the house," she laughed. "You needn't look worried. Robert can fix it in a minute."

It wasn't that, though, which troubled Mary.

"Think of her knowing such a thing!" she was saying to herself. "How her mind must run at times!"

But of course she couldn't voice a thought like that.

"All the same, Helen," she said aloud, "I wouldn't go out with him so much, if I were you. People will begin to notice it, and you know the way they talk."

Helen tossed her head, but in her heart she knew that her cousin was right--a knowledge which only made her the more defiant. Yes ...people were beginning to notice it....

The Sat.u.r.day afternoon before, when Burdon was taking her to the club in his gallant new car, they had stopped at the station to let a train pa.s.s.

A girl on the sidewalk had smiled at Burdon and stared at Helen with equal intensity and equal significance.

"Who was that?" asked Helen, when the train had pa.s.sed.

"Oh, one of the girls at the office. She's in my department--sort of a bookkeeper." Noticing Helen's silence he added more carelessly than before, "You know how some girls act if you are any way pleasant to them."

It was one of those trifling incidents which occasionally seem to have the deepest effect upon life. That very afternoon, when Mary had tried to warn her cousin, Helen had gone to the factory apparently to bring Mary home, but in reality to see Burdon. She had been in his private office, perched on the edge of his desk and swinging her foot, when the same girl came in--the girl who had smiled and stared near the station.

"All right, f.a.n.n.y," said Burdon without looking around. "Leave the checks. I'll attend to them."

It seemed to Helen that the girl went out slowly, a sudden spot of colour on each of her cheeks.

"You call her f.a.n.n.y!" Helen asked, when, the door shut again.

"Yes," he said, busy with the checks. "They do more for you, when you are decent with them."

"You think so?"

He caught the meaning in her voice and sighed a little as he sprawled his signature on the next check. "I often wish I was a sour, old crab," he said, half to Helen and half to himself. "I'd get through life a whole lot better than I do."

Mary had come to the door then, ready to start for home. When Helen pa.s.sed through the outer office she saw the girl again, her cheek on her palm, her head bent over her desk, dipping her pen in the red ink and then pushing the point through her blotter pad. None of this was lost on Helen, nor the girl's frown, nor the row of crimson blotches that stretched across the blotter.

"She'll go in now to get those checks," thought Helen, as the car started up the hill, and it was just then that Mary started to warn her about going out so much with Burdon.

Once in the night Helen awoke and lay for a long time looking at the silhouette of the windows. "...I wonder what they said to each other...."

she thought.

The next morning Mary was going through her mail at the office when she came to an envelope with a newspaper clipping in it. This had been cut from the society notes of the New Bethel _Herald_.

"Burdon Woodward has a specially designed new car which is attracting much attention."

The clipping had been pasted upon a sheet of paper, and underneath it, the following two questions were typewritten:

"How can a man buy $8,000 cars on a $10,000 salary?

"Why don't you audit his books and see who paid for that car?"

Mary's cheeks stung with the brutality of it.

"What a horrible thing to do!" she thought. "If any one paid attention to things like this--why, no one would be safe!"

She was on the point of tearing it to shreds when another thought struck her.