Coming Through the Rye (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill

I’ve gone out to see if I can’t get a friend of mine to speak a word for Papa."

      "I will," promised Wilanna willingly, "but why don’t you want her to know all about that man and his secret room and everything? I think it’s a lovely idea."

      "Well, I wantta surprise her, Baby. Now, you lie still. I’m going downstairs. I think I hear someone at the door. Maybe it’s Larry. He don’t like to be kept waiting. You won’t mind my going before Mamma comes, will you?"

      "No, I’ll just lie still and hold God’s hand like Miss Ransom said today to do. She said when I felt pain in my back to do that—it would help—and I tried it once, and I think it did. Oh, I wish you liked her! I think she’s so sweet!"

      "Oh, sure, I liked her. She’s kind of high and mighty, but she’s all right. Now I’m going, good night."

      Frances slipped down the stairs breezily and opened the front door, but it was not the young man she expected who stood on the front steps. Instead it was three very-much-excited girls. They crowded into the room without noticing the lack of cordiality on Frances’s part, and all began talking in loud tones at once.

      "Oh, Fran! Have you heard?"

      "Say, Juddie, when did you hear from Larry?"

      "We’re up against it, old girl! Larry’s arrested!"

      "Whaddya mean, arrested?" shouted Frances excitedly. "What for? Who gave you a line like that?"

      "It’s true, Frannie. Larry’s arrested. It’s all over our crowd. I’m not giving you any line. It’s the straight truth. They got him."

      "I always knew that Lawrence Ransom was too soft for our crowd! He didn’t know the ropes," said a bold girl with black eyes and hair that looked as if it were cut with a bowl. She was chewing gum vigorously.

      "Ransom!" said Francis suddenly. "Was that his name? I always thought you called him Rawson."

      "No, it was Ransom. Lawrence Ransom. He lives up on Clinton Avenue with the swells. Don’t you know who he is? His father’s thick with Judge Freeman, and our ‘Towney’ who gives us the suppers. What’s eating you, Fran? You look as if you’d seen a ghost."

      "Oh, nothing. I was just thinking. Wilanna has a Sunday school teacher by that name. She was here this afternoon to see her. But it can’t be any relation of his, of course."

      "He’s got a sister," put in the girl they called Vivian. "I saw her once. She’s real stuck up. Doesn’t run with our crowd. She’s in with the Worrells and Freemans. Thinks nothing is good enough for her but the millionaires. I guess she don’t know how speedy her brother is. That’s the trouble with him—he’s soft. But I guess he’ll get his now."

      Frances’s face blanched. Two arrests in a day was almost too much for her small nerves.

      "Why’ncha explain, Viv? I don’t think that’s smart. How’d he get arrested?"

      "Oh, that Sherwood bunch is around again, hot trail fer trouble. They rounded up Merty, and she had to run all the girls off in taxis quick. They say there’s nothing going on tonight. Even the roadhouse is quiet. Got pink candles on the tables and advertising a family dinner, with wholesome movies afterward."

      "But Larry," faltered Frances, "why should they get Larry?’

      "I’m sure I don’t know," said Sybil crossly. "What difference does it make? We lose our fun anyhow, and that’s enough. I’m sick a this town. I’m going to N’York, where you c’n have a real time! These folks here are run by a bunch of old maids and Sunday school teachers. You girls all better come with me. We’ll rent a house fer ourselves and do the town. Say, Fran, your father and mother ain’t here? D’ya mind if I smoke? I’m near dead fer a smoke. It’s ridiculous they let the boys smoke in the street and won’t let us."

      "Oh, I wouldn’t, Syb," said Frances in a panic. "Mamma might come in any minute, and besides, Wilanna’s upstairs. She’ll smell it and tell."

      "I should worry," said Sybil, taking a box of cigarettes out of her pocket, lighting one, and throwing the match down on the carpet carelessly.

      Frances stooped and picked it up nervously.

      "I wish you wouldn’t, Syb. Mamma don’t like it. She’ll stop my going out nights if she sees you smoking. She don’t know I smoke. You haven’t any right to spoil all my good times. Go outside if you wantta smoke."

      "Rats!" said Sybil inelegantly. "If you’ve got a backward number like that fer a mother, you better clear out. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll take you along if you won’t be a sissy. But you’ve got to get some money together first. It’ll be fifty-fifty if you go with me. I mean to live!"

      "Hush!" said Frances suddenly. "Mamma’s coming!" She threw up the window quickly and, snatching Sybil’s cigarette, flung it out on the sidewalk as Mrs. Judson opened the front door and came in.

      She was a heavy woman with a strong tread, and creases of habitual anxiety on her broad, sagging face. She had a dreary sorrow in her eyes as she looked around on the girls with their gaudy little frocks, her own daughter in their midst. Her sad, keen eyes searched her daughter’s face.

      Frances had snatched off the little silver hat with its nasturtium facing and was swinging it nervously in her hand.

      "I was just coming out to hunt you, Mamma," she explained, looking apologetically down at her bright dress.

      "H’m! I don’t know as you had any call to go out in a rig like that to hunt fer me!" said her mother witheringly.

      She sat down heavily in the nearest chair, however, as though she was too weary to pursue the subject further. She drew out two long black-headed hatpins and removed her rusty black hat, smoothing her graying hair with a work-roughened hand. Frances hoped the girls had not noticed how old-fashioned her mother was. She cast a furtive glance at Sybil chewing away at her gum indifferently. She half-expected Sybil to be angry about the cigarette. Sybil was considered a sort of leader in their set. She wondered tremulously what her mother would do in case Sybil broke forth into one of her tirades.

      But Mrs. Judson did not seem to have noticed any of the girls, or to realize which girls they were. She looked about on them drearily, or rather over them, and continued to talk to her daughter.

      "Well, I’ve been to see the lawyer," she said in that same sort of hopeless voice. "He says there ain’t much hope ‘ithout yer father is willing t’turn state’s evidence an’ help the Sherwood bunch. He says they’ve got things in their own hands fer a while now, till the whiskey folks can get organized. He says they’ve got to lay low, and the Sherwood gang has some men who are helping them that’ll do a good turn fer your father if he’ll just say where he got the liquor."

      She paused and looked impersonally around on the gum-chewing group.

      "I ben to see your father, too," she went on, "an’ he says he’ll do it. He ain’t got no compunctions about tellin’ where he got it—they weren’t no friends of his’n. He seems real sorry—yer father!"

      She sat stolidly a moment, gazing off at nothing, her loose, sorrowful cheeks sagging more than usual, the little pouch of flesh under her chin quivering. Then two large slow tears most unexpectedly rolled out and down her face. They looked as out of place as a steamroller going down a church aisle. She was not the kind of woman who cried. One didn’t know that she had tears. She seemed unaware that she was weeping. She sat a moment longer, looking into space across the little tawdry room with its golden oak furniture and its portraits, and then she rose heavily, gathered her two old-fashioned hatpins and her rusty hat, and trod wearily out of the room and up the stairs.

      The four girls sat still for a moment, even their jaws arrested in their regular rhythm, in a strange new embarrassment. Was it possible there had been a kind of dignity in that fat, homely, stolid woman? Had she ever been a pretty girl with bright frocks, going out with the boys? And it had come to this!

      Would it ever end in something like