Mrs. Mason looked up suddenly. As she was about to lift a cup of coffee, she screamed:
"Oh! my God, don't do that!" and, to Mona's consternation, her mother rushed at her almost savagely to pull down her wrists from the accidental position. "Who did you make that, sign? Who taught you to do it? You will drive me mad if you ever do it again!"
"Why, mother? I meant nothing? I was only resting my head on my hands. What do you mean? What did I do that was wrong?"
The mother was shaken with a paroxysm of sobs as she held the girl's hands in a viselike grip. Her passionate vehementness shocked Mona.
Before she could finish another query, her mother interrupted:
"Don't put up your thumbs by your checks that way, Mona. Your father used to do that in his sleep: it is the sign of the devil worshipers!"
The girl laughed merrily—albeit with a note of nervousness in her mirth.
"Oh! mother, dear, you're absurd! What a joke! You mean like this?" and again she repented the posture, with thumbs held vertically on either side of the dimpling cheeks.
"Mona, Mona, you are breaking my heart!" and before the girl could speak again, Mrs. Mason had covered her eyes with her shaking fingers to run from the room.
"How silly! I can't understand mother. I never saw her so upset." murmured Mona, distressed and yet amused at the inexplicable outburst.
She sprang to her feet to follow her mother just as Willis  Mr. Arthur Yarney is calling. Miss Mona," he announced. The girl's face lit happily as she nodded. Here was a welcome friend who would not be morbid. She could ask him for a solution of the riddle. 