In the weeks that followed she received from him two post cards, one a colored picture of lower New York photographed from Brooklyn Bridge against the sunset and the other a view of the Reservoir at Forty-Second street which, he wrote, had been demolished a little while before. On them he recalled her promise to let him know when she came to New York. May, however, received a dozen post cards and a half-dozen letters, so his correspondence with Ellen must have signified nothing at all. Certainly it did not excite her deeply.
"Clarence writes me," said May one day, "that you are going to New York. Why didn't you tell me? . . . I should think you'd tell your best friend a thing like that."
And Ellen slipped into a cloud of evasions. "I may have told him that," she replied airily. "I don't know how he could have found out. . . . It was a secret, I haven't mentioned it to any-one." And she made a number of vague excuses, which seemed neither logical nor founded upon fact. It was as if she considered May too stupid to understand such things or thought her too unimportant to consider at all.
"It's funny," said May, "that you'd tell such a thing to a stranger like Clarence. . . ." For a moment the suspicions planted in her complacent mind by an aspiring mother stirred with life and raised their heads. But she succumbed again quickly to the domination of her companion and thrust an arm about Ellen's waist.
"It's only because I'm interested," she said. "I know that you're going to be great and famous some day. . . . We're all going to be proud of you."
At which Ellen sniffed, not without an air of scorn, as if she cared not a fig whether the Town was proud of her or not.
At home, however, May received another warning from her mother. "Mr. Murdock," said the plump Mrs. Seaton, "is not a young man to be passed up lightly. . . . There aren't many like him. . . . He suits your father to a T, and he
