The guest pleaded some excuse. Then as he saw the other's aimless
distress, "Why don't you come out with me?"
"My mission class."
"Cut it for once," advised the other calmly.
"Since the class was formed, I've never--"
"But the more reason now. We'll drop in on our way down and get some one
to take it."
"Starlight--" the professor began protestingly.
"He'll need exercise _now_."
That little word, and the emphasis on it, the thought of what it meant,
decided him. "I'll just tell Susan," he declared briskly, as he went
down the hall.
"Tell her you'll spend the night!"
The professor paused, his hand on the knob of the kitchen door. "I
will," he declared, "I will." And he went off as gayly as a boy. He too
was a runaway.
But there was a stay-at-home who, as the day wore on and he passed the
empty house and repassed it, and went across the quadrangle for a long
look at the windows and found them blank, was strangely perturbed. He
saw the professor and the young man he had seen with him once or twice
before come home from church, no bright young woman jealously guarded
between them. He saw them go out alone. But for some tingling memories
and some vague fears, he would have gone boldly across and asked for
Frances then. But the house looked prim and silent. The curtains of her
windows were drawn with exactness, and no white hand stirred them. At
evening, going that way purposely, he saw no gleam through the library
window or through the transom of the wide hall door. The house was
utterly given over to the silence and the dark. This, when he was fierce
with heart-hunger to see her, to say a hundred wild things, to touch
perhaps the height of the joy of yesterday. By the afternoon of the next
day it had grown an impossibility not to know the meaning of this
silence.
He got up from his Morris chair, in his room where he had been vainly
trying to study, when he came at last to this moment of decision, picked
up his cap and went with firm ringing step down the corridor to the
professor's house.
A scant five minutes before Susan in the kitchen had been startled by
the ringing of the telephone. She climbed up on the stool, placed there
for her short, spare self, and put the receiver to her ear.
"Susan?" came over the wire, interrogatively.
"Miss Frances," delightedly, "dat you?"
"Yes, how's everything getting along?"
"So--so!"
"How is father?"
"Ain't seen him but a minute, he went out to Marse Edward Montague's."
Frances, far off in the rear of a store on the mountain-side, made a
little exclamation that carried to Susan as she stood with pendant lip
and wrinkled forehead, the receiver at her ear.
"What did he do that for?" Susan could catch the impatient note.
"Dunno! Marse Edward come to dinnah an' he 'low as how he's gwine back
wid him."
"How did you get along by yourself?"
"All right!"
"All right! Susan," with sudden brisk energy, "my small trunk is packed,
I want you to send it to me."
"Fo' de Lawd," groaned Susan, but her lips were away from the tube.
"I need the dresses; I thought I might, and put them in there, so that
if I did--and Susan, wrap my riding-habit up, fold it carefully, and
slip the bundle under the trunk-straps."
"Lawd a'mighty!"
"Send it down this evening."
"Miss Frances, you ain't gwine ride none o' Marse Tom's horses?" Tom had
a stock-farm, some beauties, some beasts, all of them fiery.
"There's the prettiest colt here, just broken!"
"I's gwine to tell yo' pa!"
"Don't you dare; send my things. You hear?"
"Yes."
"And Susan," after a little wait, "has anybody been to see me?"
"Not a soul!" emphatically.
"Don't you tell anybody where I am, _anybody_, you hear. Good-by!"
suddenly.
"Dat I won't."
Susan hung up the receiver. As she stepped off the stool the door-bell
rang. She went to answer it nimbly, though she was bent with rheumatism.
A young man stood on the single broad step above the pavement of the
corridor.
He doffed his cap, but Susan stood stiffly in the middle of the
doorway. "Marse Robert is not at home," she said coldly.
The young man flushed, looked half embarrassed and started to pass her.
"I would like to see Miss Frances!"