died late in the evening. An account of the accident was in the headlines of the morning papers. Unfortunately for Lydia, he was a conspicuous local figure. He had had the early popularity of a good-looking, dissipated boy, and then he had been one of the men who had not waited for the draft but had volunteered and gone into the Regular Army, and had come home from France unwounded, with a heroic record. Moreover, there had been a long boy-and-girl love affair between him and Alma Wooley, the daughter of the hardware merchant. Mr. Wooley, who was a native Long Islander, hard and wise, had been opposed to the engagement until, after the war, the return of Drummond as a hero made opposition impossible. It was at this point that O'Bannon had come to the rescue, securing the position of traffic policeman for the young man. The marriage was to have taken place in June.
Before Drummond died he recovered consciousness long enough to recognize the pale girl at his beside and to make an ante-mortem statement as to the circumstances of the accident.
Eleanor heard of the accident in the evening, but did not know of Drummond's death until early the following morning. She called up O'Bannon, but he had already left his house. At the office she was asked if Mr. Foster would do. Mr. Foster would not do. With her clear mind and recently acquired knowledge of criminal law, she knew the situation was serious. She called up Fanny Piers and found she was spending the day in town. Noel came to the telephone. He was very casual.
"Yes, poor Lydia," he said; "uncomfortable sort of thing to have happened to you."
"Rather more than uncomfortable," answered Eleanor. "Do you know if she's been arrested?"
Piers laughed over the telephone. Of course she hadn't been. Really, his tone seemed to say, Eleanor allowed her socialistic ideas to run away with her judgment. Poor Lydia hadn't meant any harm—it was the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. Oh, they might try her—as a matter of form. But what could they do to her?
"Well," said Eleanor, "people have been known to go to prison for killing someone on the highway."
Piers agreed as if her point was irrelevant.
"Oh, yes, some of those careless chauffeurs. But a thing like this is always arranged. You'll see. You couldn't get a grand jury to indict a girl like Lydia. It will be arranged."
"Arranged," thought Eleanor as she hung up the receiver, "only at the expense of Dan O'Bannon's honor or career."
She did not want that, and yet she did want to help Lydia. She felt deeply concerned for the girl, more aware than usual of her warm, honest affection for her. She often thought of Lydia as she had appeared on her first day at school. The head mistress had brought her into the study and introduced her to the teacher in charge. All the girls had looked up and stared at the small, black-eyed new pupil with the bobbed hair and slim legs in black silk stockings, one of which she was cleverly twisting about the other. She was shy and monosyllabic, utterly unused to children of her own age; and yet even then she had shown a certain capacity for comradeship, for under the elbows of the two tall teachers she had directed a slow, shy smile at the girls as much as to say, "Wait till we get together! We'll fix them!"
She was very well turned out, for Miss Bennett had just taken charge, but not so well equipped mentally, the long succession of her governesses having each spent more time in destroying the teachings of her predecessors than in making progress on her own account. Much to Lydia's chagrin, she was put in a class of children younger than she.
This was shortly before Christmas. Before the second term she had managed to get herself transferred into a class of her contemporaries. She had never studied before, because in old times it had seemed to her the highest achievement lay in thwarting her governesses. But the instant it became desirable to attain knowledge she found no difficulty in attaining it. It had amused her studying late into the night when Miss Bennett thought she was asleep.
In the same way she had decided to make a friend of Eleanor, who was a class above her and prominent in school life. There had been nothing sentimental about the friendship. She had admired Eleanor's clear mind and moral courage then, just as she admired them now.
It was of that little girl twisting one leg about the other that Eleanor thought now with a warm affection that the later Lydia had not destroyed. She ordered her car and drove into town to the Thorne house. At the door Morson betrayed just the proper solemnity—the proper additional solemnity—for he was never gay.