"Grandma sends you her compliments, and is very sorry that she has rheumatism this morning, and can't come to-night to help you. She thinks, perhaps, you can get Mrs. Mosher."
"Your grandmother can't come, when I depended so much upon her; and she thinks I can get Mrs. Mosher, that termagant, who would raise a mutiny in the kitchen in an hour!" Mrs. Tracy said, so sharply that a flush mounted to the handsome face of the boy, who felt as if he were in some way a culprit and being reprimanded. "She must come, if she does nothing but sit in the kitchen and keep order," was Mrs. Tracy's next remark.
"She can't," Harold replied; "her foot and ankle is all swelled, and aches so she almost cries. She is awful sorry, and so am I, for I was coming with her to see the show."
This put a new idea into Mrs. Tracy's mind, and she said to the boy:
"How would you like to come any way, and stay in the upper hall, and tell the people where to go? The boy I engaged has disappointed me. You are rather small for the place, but I guess you'll do, and I will give you fifty cents."
"I'd like it first-rate," Harold said, his face brightening at the thought of earning fifty cents and seeing the show at the same time.
Half-dollars were not very plentiful with Harold, and he was trying to save enough to buy his grandmother a pair of spectacles, for he had heard her say that she could not thread her needle as readily as she once did, and must have glasses as soon as she had the money to spare. Harold had seen a pair at the drug-store for one dollar, and without knowing at all whether they would fit his grandmother's eyes or not, had asked the druggist to keep them until he had the required amount. Fifty cents would just make it, and he promised at once that he would come; but in an instant there fell a shadow upon his face as he thought of Tom, his tormenter, who worried him so much.
"What is it?" Mrs. Tracy asked, as she detected in him a disposition to reconsider.
"Will Tom be up in the hall?" Harold asked.
"Of course not," Mrs. Tracy replied. "He will be in the parlors until ten o'clock, and then he will go to bed. Why do you ask?"
"Because," Harold answered, fearlessly, "if he was to be there, I could not come; he chaffs me so and twits me with being poor and living in a house his uncle gave us."
"That is very naughty in him, and I will see that he behaves better in future," Mrs. Tracy said, rather amused than otherwise at the boy's frankness.
As the mention of the uncle reminded Harold of the telegram, he took it from his pocket and handed it to her.
"Mr. Tracy said I was to bring you this. It's from Mr. Arthur, and he is coming to-night. I'm so glad, and grandma will be, too!"
If Mrs. Tracy heard the last of Harold's speech she did not heed it, for she had caught the words that Arthur was coming that night, and, for a moment, she felt giddy and faint, and her hand shook so she could scarcely open the telegram.
Arthur had been gone so long and left them in undisputed possession of the park, that she had come to feel as if it belonged to them by right, and she had grown so accustomed to a life of ease and luxury, that to give it up now and go back to Langley seemed impossible to her.
It never occurred to Dolly that they might possibly remain at the park if Arthur did come home. She felt sure they could not, for Arthur would hardly approve of his brother's stewardship when he came to realize how much it had cost him. They would have to leave, and this party she was giving would be her first and last at Tracy Park. How she wished she had never thought of it, or, having thought of it, that she had omitted from the list those who, she knew, would be obnoxious to the foreign brother, and who had only been invited for the sake of their political influence, which might now be useless, for Frank Tracy as a nobody, with very little money to spend, would not run as well, even in his own party, as Frank Tracy of Tracy Park, with thousands at his command if he chose to take them.
"It is too bad, and I wish we could give up the party," she said aloud, forgetting that Harold was still standing there. "You here yet? I thought you had gone!" she continued, as she recovered herself and met the boy's wondering eyes.
"Yes'm; but you ain't going to give the party up?" he said, afraid of losing his half dollar.
"Of course not. How can I, with all the people invited?" she asked, questioningly, and a little less sharply.
"I don't know, unless I get a pony and go round and tell 'em not to come," Harold suggested, thinking he might earn his fifty cents as easily that way as any other.
But, much as Mrs. Tracy wished the party had never been thought of, she could not now abandon it, and declining the services of Harold and the pony, she again bade him go home, with a charge that he should be on time in the evening, adding, as she surveyed him critically:
"If you have no clothes suitable, you can wear some of Tom's. You are about his size."
"Thank you; I have my meetin' clothes, and do not want Tom's," was Harold's reply, as he walked away, thinking he would go in rags before he would wear anything which belonged to his enemy, Tom Tracy.
The rest of the morning was passed by Mrs. Frank in a most unhappy frame of mind, and she was glad when at an hour earlier than she had reason to expect him, her husband came home.
"Well, Dolly," he said, the moment they were alone, "this is awfully unlucky, the whole business. If Arthur must come home, why couldn't he have written in advance, and not take us by surprise? Looks as if he meant to spring a trap on us, don't it? And if he does, by Jove, he has caught us nicely. It will be somewhat like the prodigal son, who heard the sound of music and dancing, only I don't suppose Arthur has spent his substance in riotous living, with not over nice people; but there is no telling what he has been up to all these years that he has not written to us. Perhaps he is married. He said in his telegram, 'Send to meet us.' What does that mean, if not a wife?"
"A wife? Oh, Frank!" and with a great gasp Dolly sank down upon the lounge near where she was standing, and actually went into the hysterics her husband had prophesied.
In reading the telegram she had not noticed the little monosyllable "us," which was now affecting her so powerfully. Of course it meant a wife and possibly children, and her day was surely over at Tracy Park. It was in vain that her husband tried to comfort her, saying that they knew nothing positively, except that Arthur was coming home and somebody was coming with him; it might be a friend, or, what was more likely, it might be a valet; and at all events he was not going to cross Fox River till he reached it, when he might find a bridge across it.
But Frank's reasoning did not console his wife, whose hysterical fit was succeeded by a racking headache, which by night was almost unbearable. Strong coffee, aconite, brandy, and belladonna, were all tried without effect. Nothing helped her until she commenced her toilet, when in the excitement of dressing she partly forgot her disquietude, and the pain in her head grew less. Still she was conscious of a feeling of wretchedness and regret as she sat in her handsome boudoir and felt that on the morrow another might be mistress where she had reigned so long.
It was known in the house that Arthur was expected, and some one with him, but no hint had been