Something stirred me to quick questioning.
"Oh, is there a chance of your having her again?"
"I am always hoping for it," she answered quietly. "When her father married again, several years ago--that was before my marriage to Harry--I hoped against hope that he would give her to me. For he knew--the hound--knew better than anybody else that all his vile charges were false."
Her eyes blazed, her voice was strident, her hands clasped and unclasped. Then, as if a string had been loosened, she sank back in her chair again.
"But he would not give her to me," she went on dully, "and he could not even if he would. For his mother, who has the child, is old and devoted to her. It would kill her to take Marion away from her."
"You saw my pink room?" she demanded abruptly.
I nodded. The memory of that rose-colored nest and the look in my hostess's eyes when on my other visit she had said she had prepared the room for a young girl was yet vivid.
"I spent weeks preparing it for her when I heard of her father's remarriage," she said, "When I finally realized that I could not have her, I lay ill for weeks in it. On my recovery I vowed that no one else but she or I should ever sleep there. I have another bedroom where I sleep most of the time. But sometimes I go in there and spend the night, and pretend that I have her little body snuggled up close to me just as it used to be."
The crackling of the logs in the grate was the only sound to be heard for many minutes.
With her elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin cupped in her hand, her whole body leaning toward the warmth of the fire, she sat gazing into the leaping flames as if she were trying to read in them the riddle of the future.
I patiently waited on her mood. That she would open her heart to me further I knew, but I did not wish to disturb her with either word or movement.
"I might as well begin at the beginning." There was a note in her voice that all at once made me see the long years of suffering which had been hers. "Only the beginning is so commonplace that it lacks interest. It is the record of a very mediocre stenographer with aspirations."
That she was speaking of herself her tone told me, but I was genuinely surprised. Mrs. Underwood was the last woman in the world one would picture as holding down a stenographer's position.