IN WHICH PROVIDENCE BEEPS FAITH
Two more years have gone by, limping in the summer and flying in the
winter, two more years of conquests. For our heroine appears to be one of
the daughters of Helen, born to make trouble for warriors and others
--and even for innocent bystanders like Peter Erwin. Peter was debarred
from entering those brilliant lists in which apparel played so great a
part. George Hanbury, Guy Rossiter, Algernon Cartwright, Eliphalet Hopper
Dwyer--familiarly known as "Hoppy"--and other young gentlemen whose names
are now but memories, each had his brief day of triumph. Arrayed like
Solomon in wonderful clothes from the mysterious and luxurious East, they
returned at Christmas-tide and Easter from college to break lances over
Honora. Let us say it boldly--she was like that: she had the world-old
knack of sowing discord and despair in the souls of young men. She
was--as those who had known that fascinating gentleman were not slow to
remark--Randolph Leffingwell over again.
During the festival seasons, Uncle Tom averred, they wore out the latch
on the front gate. If their families possessed horses to spare, they took
Honora driving in Forest Park; they escorted her to those anomalous
dances peculiar to their innocent age, which are neither children's
parties nor full-fledged balls; their presents, while of no intrinsic
value--as one young gentleman said in a presentation speech--had an
enormous, if shy, significance.
"What a beautiful ring you are wearing, Honora," Uncle Tom remarked slyly
one April morning at breakfast; "let me see it."
Honora blushed, and hid her hand under the table-cloth.
And the ring-suffice it to say that her little finger was exactly
insertable in a ten-cent piece from which everything had been removed but
the milling: removed with infinite loving patience by Mr. Rossiter, and
at the expense of much history and philosophy and other less important
things, in his college bedroom at New Haven. Honora wore it for a whole
week; a triumph indeed for Mr. Rossiter; when it was placed in a box in
Honora's bedroom, which contained other gifts--not all from him--and many
letters, in the writing of which learning had likewise suffered. The
immediate cause of the putting away of this ring was said to be the
renowned Clinton Howe, who was on the Harvard football eleven, and who
visited Mr. George Hanbury that Easter. Fortunate indeed the tailor who
was called upon to practise his art on an Adonis like Mr. Howe, and it
was remarked that he scarcely left Honora's side at the garden party and
dance which Mrs. Dwyer gave in honour of the returning heroes, on the
Monday of Easter week.
This festival, on which we should like to linger, but cannot, took place
at the new Dwyer residence. For six months the Victorian mansion opposite
Uncle Tom's house had been sightless, with blue blinds drawn down inside
the plate glass windows. And the yellow stone itself was not so yellow as
it once had been, but had now the appearance of soiled manilla wrapping
paper, with black streaks here and there where the soot had run. The new
Dwyer house was of grey stone, Georgian and palatial, with a
picture-gallery twice the size of the old one; a magnificent and fitting
pioneer in a new city of palaces.
Westward the star of Empire--away from the smoke. The Dwyer mansion, with
its lawns and gardens and heavily balustraded terrace, faced the park
that stretched away like a private estate to the south and west. That
same park with its huge trees and black forests that was Ultima Thule in
Honora's childhood; in the open places there had been real farms and
hayricks which she used to slide down with Peter while Uncle Tom looked
for wild flowers in the fields. It had been separated from the city in
those days by an endless country road, like a Via Claudia stretching
towards mysterious Germanian forests, and it was deemed a feat for Peter
to ride thither on his big-wheeled bicycle. Forest Park was the country,
and all that the country represented in Honora's childhood. For Uncle Tom
on a summer's day to hire a surrey at Braintree's Livery Stable and drive
thither was like--to what shall that bliss be compared in these days when
we go to Europe with indifference?
And now Lindell Road--the Via Claudia of long, ago--had become Lindell
Boulevard, with granitoid sidewalks. And the dreary fields through which
it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense Victorian,
and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the artistic.
The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared, and you
could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille that
surrounded the Dwyer grounds. Westward the star!
Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the
second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer. Soot had killed
the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away;
asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the
sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom's roses looked as though they might
advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in
Wonderland. Honora should have lived in the Dwyers' mansion-people who
are capable of judging said so. People who saw her at the garden party
said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more than
Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful. And Eliphalet
Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have welcomed her to
that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she deigned to give
him the least encouragement.
Cinderella! This was what she facetiously called herself one July morning
of that summer she was eighteen.
Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed more
dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling. Winter and its
festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls. Surely Cinderella's
life had held no greater contrasts! To this day the odour of matting
brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south
wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and
placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and
the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the
alley--"Rags, bottles, old iron!" What memories of endless, burning,
lonely days come rushing back with those words!
When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding houses
in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he slowly
departed. If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the yard, she
was confronted with that hideous wooden sign "To Let" on the Dwyer's iron
fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and overgrown with
weeds. Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora's mind) morbid interest
in the future of that house.
"I suppose it will be a boarding-house," she would say, "it's much too
large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this
district now."
"Oh, Aunt Mary!"
"Well, my dear, why should we complain? We are poor, and it is
appropriate that we should live among the poor. Sometimes I think it is a
pity that you should have been thrown all your life with rich people, my
child. I am afraid it has made you discontented. It is no disgrace to be
poor. We ought to be thankful that we have everything we need."
Honora put down her sewing. For she had learned to sew--Aunt Mary had
insisted upon that, as well as French. She laid her hand upon her aunt's.
"I am thankful," she said, and her aunt little guessed the intensity of
the emotion she was seeking to control, or imagined the hidden fires.
"But sometimes--sometimes I try to forget that we are poor. Perhaps
--some day we shall not be."
It seemed to Honora that Aunt Mary derived a real pleasure from the
contradiction of this hope. She shook her head vigorously.
"We shall always be, my child. Your Uncle Tom is getting old, and he has
always been too honest to make a great deal of money. And besides," she
added, "he has not that kind of ability."
Uncle Tom might be getting old, but he seemed to Honora to be of the same
age as in her childhood. Some people never grow old, and Uncle Tom was
one of these. Fifteen years before he had been promoted to be the cashier
of the Prairie Bank, and he was the cashier to-day. He had the same quiet
smile, the same quiet humour, the same calm acceptance of life. He seemed
to bear no grudge even against that ever advancing enemy, the soot, which
made it increasingly difficult for him to raise his flowers. Those which
would still grow he washed tenderly night and morning with his
watering-pot. The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but
near us. It was to take many years for our heroine to realize this.
Strong faith alone could have withstood the continued contact with such a
determined fatalism as Aunt Mary's, and yet it is interesting to note
that Honora's belief in her providence never wavered. A prince was to
come who was to bear her away from the ragmen and the boarding-houses and
the soot: and incidentally and in spite of herself, Aunt Mary was to come
too, and Uncle Tom. And sometimes when she sat reading of an evening
under the maple, her book would fall to her lap and the advent of this
personage become so real a thing that she bounded when the gate slammed
--to find that it was only Peter.
It was preposterous, of course, that Peter should be a prince in
disguise. Peter who, despite her efforts to teach him distinction in
dress, insisted upon wearing the same kind of clothes. A mild kind of
providence, Peter, whose modest functions were not unlike those of the
third horse which used to be hitched on to the street car at the foot of
the Seventeenth-Street hill: it was Peter's task to help pull Honora
through the interminable summers. Uhrig's Cave was an old story now:
mysteries were no longer to be expected in St. Louis. There was a great
panorama--or something to that effect--in the wilderness at the end of
one of the new electric lines, where they sometimes went to behold the
White Squadron of the new United States Navy engaged in battle with mimic
forts on a mimic sea, on the very site where the country place of Madame
Clement had been. The mimic sea, surrounded by wooden stands filled with
common people eating peanuts and popcorn, was none other than Madame
Clement's pond, which Honora remembered as a spot of enchantment. And
they went out in the open cars with these same people, who stared at
Honora as though she had got in by mistake, but always politely gave her
a seat. And Peter thanked them. Sometimes he fell into conversations with
them, and it was noticeable that they nearly always shook hands with him
at parting. Honora did not approve of this familiarity.
"But they may be clients some day," he argued--a frivolous answer to
which she never deigned to reply.
Just as one used to take for granted that third horse which pulled the
car uphill, so Peter was taken for granted. He might have been on the
highroad to a renown like that of Chief Justice Marshall, and Honora had
been none the wiser.
"Well, Peter," said Uncle Tom at dinner one evening of that memorable
summer, when Aunt Mary was helping the blackberries, and incidentally
deploring that she did not live in the country, because of the cream one
got there, "I saw Judge Brice in the bank to-day, and he tells me you
covered yourself with glory in that iron foundry suit."
"The Judge must have his little joke, Mr. Leffingwell," replied Peter,
but he reddened nevertheless.
Honora thought winning an iron foundry suit a strange way to cover one's
self with glory. It was not, at any rate, her idea of glory. What were
lawyers for, if not to win suits? And Peter was a lawyer.
"In five years," said Uncle Tom, "the firm will be 'Brice and Erwin'. You
mark my words. And by that time," he added, with a twinkle in his eye,
"you'll be ready to marry Honora."
"Tom," reproved Aunt Mary, gently, "you oughtn't to say such things."
This time there was no doubt about Peter's blush. He fairly burned.
Honora looked at him and laughed.
"Peter is meant for an old bachelor," she said.
"If he remains a bachelor," said Uncle Tom, "he'll be the greatest waste
of good material I know of. And if you succeed in getting him, Honora,
you'll be the luckiest young woman of my acquaintance."
"Tom," said Aunt Mary, "it was all very well to talk that way when Honora
was a child. But now--she may not wish to marry Peter. And Peter may not
wish to marry her."
Even Peter joined in the laughter at this literal and characteristic
statement of the case.
"It's more than likely," said Honora, wickedly. "He hasn't kissed me for
two years."
"Why, Peter," said Uncle Tom, "you act as though it were warm to-night.
It was only seventy when we came in to dinner."
"Take me out to the park," commanded Honora.
"Tom," said Aunt Mary, as she stood on the step and watched them cross
the street, "I wish the child would marry him. Not now, of course," she
added hastily,--a little frightened by her own admission, "but later.
Sometimes I worry over her future. She needs a strong and sensible man. I
don't understand Honora. I never did. I always told you so. Sometimes I
think she may be capable of doing something foolish like--like
Randolph."
Uncle Tom patted his wife on the shoulder.
"Don't borrow trouble, Mary," he said, smiling a little. "The child is
only full of spirits. But she has a good heart. It is only human that she
should want things that we cannot give her."
"I wish," said Aunt Mary, "that she were not quite so good-looking."
Uncle Tom laughed. "You needn't tell me you're not proud of it," he
declared.
"And I have given her," she continued, "a taste for dress."
"I think, my dear," said her husband, "that there were others who
contributed to that."
"It was my own vanity. I should have combated the tendency in her," said
Aunt Mary.
"If you had dressed Honora in calico, you could not have changed her,"
replied Uncle Tom, with conviction.
In the meantime Honora and Peter had mounted the electric car, and were
speeding westward. They had a seat to themselves, the very first one on
the "grip"--that survival of the days of cable cars. Honora's eyes
brightened as she held on to her hat, and the stray wisps of hair about
her neck stirred in the breeze.
"Oh, I wish we would never stop, until we came to the Pacific Ocean!" she
exclaimed.
"Would you be content to stop then?" he asked. He had a trick of looking
downward with a quizzical expression in his dark grey eyes.
"No," said Honora. "I should want to go on and see everything in the
world worth seeing. Sometimes I feel positively as though I should die if
I had to stay here in St. Louis."
"You probably would die--eventually," said Peter.
Honora was justifiably irritated.
"I could shake you, Peter!"
He laughed.
"I'm afraid it wouldn't do any good," he answered.
"If I were a man," she proclaimed, "I shouldn't stay here. I'd go to New
York--I'd be somebody--I'd make a national reputation for myself."
"I believe you would," said Peter sadly, but with a glance of admiration.
"That's the worst of being a woman--we have to sit still until something
happens to us."
"What would you like to happen?" he asked, curiously. And there was a
note in his voice which she, intent upon her thoughts, did not remark.
"Oh, I don't know," she said; "anything--anything to get out of this rut
and be something in the world. It's dreadful to feel that one has power
and not be able to use it."
The car stopped at the terminal. Thanks to the early hour of Aunt Mary's
dinner, the western sky was still aglow with the sunset over the forests
as they walked past the closed grille of the Dwyer mansion into the park.
Children rolled on the grass, while mothers and fathers, tired out from
the heat and labour of a city day, sat on the benches. Peter stooped down
and lifted a small boy, painfully thin, who had fallen, weeping, on the
gravel walk. He took his handkerchief and wiped the scratch on the
child's forehead.
"There, there!" he said, smiling, "it's all right now. We must expect a
few tumbles."
The child looked at him, and suddenly smiled through his tears.
The father appeared, a red-headed Irishman.
"Thank you, Mr. Erwin; I'm sure it's very kind of you, sir, to bother
with him," he said gratefully. "It's that thin he is with the heat, I
take him out for a bit of country air."
"Why, Tim, it's you, is it?" said Peter. "He's the janitor of our
building down town," he explained to Honora, who had remained a silent
witness to this simple scene. She had been, in spite of herself,
impressed by it, and by the mingled respect and affection in the
janitor's manner towards Peter. It was so with every one to whom he
spoke. They walked on in silence for a few moments, into a path leading
to a lake, which had stolen the flaming green-gold of the sky.
"I suppose," said Honora, slowly, "it would be better for me to wish to
be contented where I am, as you are. But it's no use trying, I can't."
Peter was not a preacher.
"Oh," he said, "there are lots of things I want."
"What?" demanded Honora, interested. For she had never conceived of him
as having any desires whatever.
"I want a house like Mr. Dwyer's," he declared, pointing at the distant
imposing roof line against the fading eastern sky.
Honora laughed. The idea of Peter wishing such a house was indeed
ridiculous. Then she became grave again.
"There are times when you seem to forget that I have at last grown up,
Peter. You never will talk over serious things with me."
"What are serious things?" asked Peter.
"Well," said Honora vaguely, "ambitions, and what one is going to make of
themselves in life. And then you make fun of me by saying you want Mr.
Dwyer's house." She laughed again. "I can't imagine you in that house!"
"Why not?" he asked, stopping beside the pond and thrusting his hands in
his pockets. He looked very solemn, but she knew he was smiling inwardly.
"Why--because I can't," she said, and hesitated. The question had forced
her to think about Peter. "I can't imagine you living all alone in all
that luxury. It isn't like you."
"Why I all alone?" asked Peter.
"Don't--Don't be ridiculous," she said; "you wouldn't build a house like
that, even if you were twice as rich as Mr. Dwyer. You know you wouldn't.
And you're not the marrying kind," she added, with the superior knowledge
of eighteen.
"I'm waiting for you, Honora," he announced.
"You know I love you, Peter,"--so she tempered her reply, for Honora's
feelings were tender. What man, even Peter, would not have married her if
he could? Of course he was in earnest, despite his bantering tone, "but I
never could--marry you."
"Not even if I were to offer you a house like Mr. Dwyer's?" he said. A
remark which betrayed--although not to her--his knowledge of certain
earthly strains in his goddess.
The colours faded from the water, and it blackened.
As they walked on side by side in the twilight, a consciousness of
repressed masculine force, of reserve power, which she had never before
felt about Peter Erwin, invaded her; and she was seized with a strange
uneasiness. Ridiculous was the thought (which she lost no time in
rejecting) that pointed out the true road to happiness in marrying such a
man as he. In the gathering darkness she slipped her hand through his
arm.
"I wish I could marry you, Peter," she said.
He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of
good-will. If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would
have liked him to be. A little reflection on his part ought to have shown
him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time,
and in ready-made clothes. And he, too, may have had dreams. We are not
concerned with them.
............................
If we listen to the still, small voice of realism, intense longing is
always followed by disappointment. Nothing should have happened that
summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman. It
was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was
comparatively cool--a blue day, with occasional great drops of rain
spattering on the brick walk. And Honora was reclining on the hall sofa,
reading about Mr. Ibbetson and his duchess, when she perceived the
postman's grey uniform and smiling face on the far side of the screen
door. He greeted her cordially, and gave her a single letter for Aunt
Mary, and she carried it unsuspectingly upstairs.
"It's from Cousin Eleanor," Honora volunteered.
Aunt Mary laid down her sewing, smoothed the ruffles of her sacque,
adjusted her spectacles, opened the envelope, and began to read.
Presently the letter fell to her lap, and she wiped her glasses and
glanced at Honora, who was deep in her book once more. And in Honora's
brain, as she read, was ringing the refrain of the prisoner:
"Orleans, Beaugency!
Notre Dame de Clery!
Vendome! Vendome!
Quel chagrin, quel ennui
De compter toute la nuit
Les heures, les heures!".
The verse appealed to Honora strangely; just as it had appealed to
Ibbetson. Was she not, too, a prisoner. And how often, during the summer
days and nights, had she listened to the chimes of the Pilgrim Church
near by?
"One, two, three, four!
One, two, three, four!"
After Uncle Tom had watered his flowers that evening, Aunt Mary followed
him upstairs and locked the door of their room behind her. Silently she
put the letter in his hand. Here is one paragraph of it:
"I have never asked to take the child from you in the summer,
because she has always been in perfect health, and I know how lonely
you would have been without her, my dear Mary. But it seems to me
that a winter at Sutcliffe, with my, girls, would do her a world of
good just now. I need not point out to you that Honora is, to say
the least, remarkably good looking, and that she has developed very
rapidly. And she has, in spite of the strict training you have
given her, certain ideas and ambitions which seem to me, I am sorry
to say, more or less prevalent among young American women these
days. You know it is only because I love her that I am so frank.
Miss Turner's influence will, in my opinion, do much to counteract
these tendencies."
Uncle Tom folded the letter, and handed it back to his wife.
"I feel that we ought not to refuse, Tom. And I am afraid Eleanor is
right."
"Well, Mary, we've had her for seventeen years. We ought to be willing to
spare her for--how many months?"
"Nine," said Aunt Mary, promptly. She had counted them. "And Eleanor says
she will be home for two weeks at Christmas. Seventeen years! It seems
only yesterday when we brought her home, Tom. It was just about this time
of day, and she was asleep in your arms, and Bridget opened the door for
us." Aunt Mary looked out of the window. "And do you remember how she
used to play under the maple there, with her dolls?"
Uncle Tom produced a very large handkerchief, and blew his nose.
"There, there, Mary," he said, "nine months, and two weeks out at
Christmas. Nine months in eighteen years."
"I suppose we ought to be very thankful," said Aunt Mary. "But, Tom, the
time is coming soon--"
"Tut tut," exclaimed Uncle Tom. He turned, and his eyes beheld a work of
art. Nothing less than a porcelain plate, hung in brackets on the wall,
decorated by Honora at the age of ten with wild roses, and presented with
much ceremony on an anniversary morning. He pretended not to notice it,
but Aunt Mary's eyes were too quick. She seized a photograph on her
bureau, a photograph of Honora in a little white frock with a red sash.
"It was the year that was taken, Tom."
He nodded. The scene at the breakfast table came back to him, and the
sight of Catherine standing respectfully in the hall, and of Honora, in
the red sash, making the courtesy the old woman had taught her.
Honora recalled afterwards that Uncle Tom joked even more than usual that
evening at dinner. But it was Aunt Mary who asked her, at length, how she
would like to go to boarding-school. Such was the matter-of-fact manner
in which the portentous news was announced.
"To boarding-school, Aunt Mary?"
Her aunt poured out her uncle's after-dinner coffee.
"I've spilled some, my dear. Get another saucer for your uncle."
Honora went mechanically to the china closet, her heart thumping. She did
not stop to reflect that it was the rarest of occurrences for Aunt Mary
to spill the coffee.
"Your Cousin Eleanor has invited you to go this winter with Edith and
Mary to Sutcliffe."
Sutcliffe! No need to tell Honora what Sutcliffe was--her cousins had
talked of little else during the past winter; and shown, if the truth be
told, just a little commiseration for Honora. Sutcliffe was not only a
famous girls' school, Sutcliffe was the world--that world which, since
her earliest remembrances, she had been longing to see and know. In a
desperate attempt to realize what had happened to her, she found herself
staring hard at the open china closet, at Aunt Mary's best gold dinner
set resting on the pink lace paper that had been changed only last week.
That dinner set, somehow, was always an augury of festival--when, on the
rare occasions Aunt Mary entertained, the little dining room was
transformed by it and the Leffingwell silver into a glorified and
altogether unrecognizable state, in which any miracle seemed possible.
Honora pushed back her chair.
Her lips were parted.
"Oh, Aunt Mary, is it really true that I am going?" she said.
"Why," said Uncle Tom, "what zeal for learning!"
"My dear," said Aunt Mary, who, you may be sure, knew all about that
school before Cousin Eleanor's letter came, "Miss Turner insists upon
hard work, and the discipline is very strict."
"No young men," added Uncle Tom.
"That," declared Aunt Mary, "is certainly an advantage."
"And no chocolate cake, and bed at ten o'clock," said Uncle Tom.
Honora, dazed, only half heard them. She laughed at Uncle Tom because she
always had, but tears were shining in her eyes. Young men and chocolate
cake! What were these privations compared to that magic word Change?
Suddenly she rose, and flung her arms about Uncle Tom's neck and kissed
his rough cheek, and then embraced Aunt Mary. They would be lonely.
"Aunt Mary, I can't bear to leave you--but I do so want to go! And it
won't be for long--will it? Only until next spring."
"Until next summer, I believe," replied Aunt Mary, gently; "June is a
summer month-isn't it, Tom?"
"It will be a summer month without question next year," answered Uncle
Tom, enigmatically.
It has been remarked that that day was sultry, and a fine rain was now
washing Uncle Tom's flowers for him. It was he who had applied that term
"washing" since the era of ultra-soot. Incredible as it may seem, life
proceeded as on any other of a thousand rainy nights. The lamps were
lighted in the sitting-room, Uncle Tom unfolded his gardening periodical,
and Aunt Mary her embroidery. The gate slammed, with its more subdued,
rainy-weather sound.
"It's Peter," said Honora, flying downstairs. And she caught him,
astonished, as he was folding his umbrella on the step. "Oh, Peter, if
you tried until to-morrow morning, you never could guess what has
happened."
He stood for a moment, motionless, staring at her, a tall figure,
careless of the rain.
"You are going away," he said.
"How did you guess it?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Yes--to
boarding-school. To Sutcliffe, on the Hudson, with Edith and Mary. Aren't
you glad? You look as though you had seen a ghost."
"Do I?" said Peter.
"Don't stand there in the rain," commanded Honora; "come into the
parlour, and I'll tell you all about it."
He came in. She took the umbrella from him, and put it in the rack.
"Why don't you congratulate me?" she demanded.
"You'll never come back," said Peter.
"What a horrid thing to say! Of course I shall come back. I shall come
back next June, and you'll be at the station to meet me."
And--what will Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary do--without you?"
"Oh," said Honora, "I shall miss them dreadfully. And I shall miss you,
Peter."
"Very much?" he asked, looking down at her with such a queer expression.
And his voice, too, sounded queer. He was trying to smile.
Suddenly Honora realized that he was suffering, and she felt the pangs of
contrition. She could not remember the time when she had been away from
Peter, and it was natural that he should be stricken at the news. Peter,
who was the complement of all who loved and served her, of Aunt Mary and
Uncle Tom and Catherine, and who somehow embodied them all. Peter, the
eternally dependable.
She found it natural that the light should be temporarily removed from
his firmament while she should be at boarding-school, and yet in the
tenderness of her heart she pitied him. She put her hands impulsively
upon his shoulders as he stood looking at her with that queer expression
which he believed to be a smile.
"Peter, you dear old thing, indeed I shall miss you! I don't know what I
shall do without you, and I'll write to you every single week."
Gently he disengaged her arms. They were standing under that which, for
courtesy's sake, had always been called the chandelier. It was in the
centre of the parlour, and Uncle Tom always covered it with holly and
mistletoe at Christmas.
"Why do you say I'll never come back?" asked Honora. "Of course I shall
come back, and live here all the rest of my life."
Peter shook his head slowly. He had recovered something of his customary
quizzical manner.
"The East is a strange country," he said. "The first thing we know you'll
be marrying one of those people we read about, with more millions than
there are cars on the Olive Street line."
Honora was a little indignant.
"I wish you wouldn't talk so, Peter," she said. "In the first place, I
shan't see any but girls at Sutcliffe. I could only see you for a few
minutes once a week if you were there. And in the second place, it isn't
exactly--Well--dignified to compare the East and the West the way you do,
and speak about people who are very rich and live there as though they
were different from the people we know here. Comparisons, as Shakespeare
said, are odorous."
"Honora," he declared, still shaking his head, "you're a fraud, but I
can't help loving you."
For a long time that night Honora lay in bed staring into the darkness,
and trying to realize what had happened. She heard the whistling and the
puffing of the trains in the cinder-covered valley to the southward, but
the quality of these sounds had changed. They were music now.