Family Pride

As it had been at Saratoga, so it was at Newport. Urged on by Mrs. Cameron and Bell, who greatly enjoyed her notoriety, Katy plunged into the mad excitement of dancing and driving and coquetting, until Wilford himself became uneasy, locking her once in her room, where she was sleeping after dinner, and conveniently forgetting to release her until after the departure at evening of some young men from Cambridge, whose attentions to the Ocean House belle had been more strongly marked than was altogether agreeable to him. Of course it was a mistake--the locking of the door--and a great oversight in him not to have remembered it sooner, he said to Katy, by way of apology; and Katy, with no suspicion of the truth, laughed merrily at the joke, repeating it downstairs to the old dowagers, who shrugged their shoulders meaningly and whispered to each other that it might be well if more young, handsome wives were locked into their rooms and thus kept out of mischief.

Though flattered, caressed and admired, Katy was not doing herself much credit at Newport, but after Wilford there was no one to raise a warning voice, until Mark Ray came down for a few days' respite from the heated city, where he spent the entire summer, taking charge of the business which belonged as much to Wilford as to himself. But Wilford had a wife; it was more necessary that he should leave, Mark had argued; his time would come by and by. And so he had remained at home until the last of August, when he appeared suddenly at the Ocean House one night when Katy, in her airy robes and childlike simplicity, was breaking hearts by the score. Like others, Mark was charmed, and not a little proud, for Katy's sake, to see her thus appreciated; but when one day's experience had shown him more and given him a look behind the scenes, he trembled for her, knowing how hard it would be for her to come out of that sea of dissipation as pure and spotless as she went in.

"If I were her brother I would warn her that her present career, though very delightful now, is not one upon which she will look back with pleasure when the excitement is over," he said to himself; "but if Wilford is satisfied it is not for me to interfere. It is surely nothing to me what Katy Cameron does," he kept repeating to himself; but as often as he said it there came up before him a pale, anxious face, shaded with Helen Lennox's bands of hair, and Helen Lennox's voice whispered to him: "Save Katy, for my sake;" and so next day, when Mark found himself alone with Katy, while most of the guests were at the beach, he questioned her of her life at Saratoga and Newport, and gradually, as he talked, there crept into Katy's heart a suspicion that he was not altogether pleased with her account, or with what he had seen of her since his arrival.