CHAPTER X
The only persons at the Farm who did not go to the station to see Arethusa off for her Trip were Miss Asenath and Nathan. Even Mandy went, on the front seat of the surrey with Blish.
Nathan was Mandy's better half, a darkey of a deeply religious nature. He considered a town, everything in it, and everything connected with it, snares of the Evil One to lead men astray. Although in his youth, and up almost until early middle age, he had been the terror of the county seat the Saturday nights he had been paid off, he had "gotten religion" along about the time of his marriage to Mandy, and now nothing on earth could take him anywhere near any of his former haunts. He had even refused to drive Miss Eliza to town when on one or two occasions his services had been required. And he was the only human being on record who had ever opposed her thus successfully.
But it happened most fortunately in this case, this feeling of his about town, for he could remain with Miss Asenath and Mandy could go to the station with Arethusa. Otherwise, she might have had to stay at home, and this would almost have broken her heart.
Timothy and Timothy's mother and his aunt, who made her home with them, also drove the six miles 'cross country to the little town of Vandalia where Arethusa was to take the train, to bid her good-bye. They were already present when the Farm delegation arrived, as early as it was when they came, for Timothy wanted as many as possible of these last moments with Arethusa. His mother had been sure it was far too soon to start when Timothy called her, but she suffered from a chronic inability to oppose any of his wishes, even by suggestion, so she had left her housewifely counting of preserves and pickles without a word of complaint to go with him.
Miss Letitia became a little tearful in her leave-taking.
"Letting the dear child go off all alone by herself this way for the very first time!"
For in spite of Miss Eliza's decided and oft loudly expressed disinclination to have her do so, to Arethusa's unbounded delight, she was actually going alone.
Thanks to that flight of Elinor and Ross to the seashore, the State Fair had been only a memory for more than a month. But diligent search by Miss Eliza, in the way of inquiries at church and when in town, had discovered a friend who was going to Lewisburg later in the Fall to shop, and who would be more than glad to take the girl under her wing. Then almost at the very last moment this promised company was forced to abandon her trip and Arethusa was left high and dry. The fate of her Visit trembled in the balance for a few days. Miss Eliza was strongly inclined to postpone the whole affair until she could arrange things to go with her niece herself, but she finally gave in to the pleading that Arethusa was entirely ready. Why should she wear the first freshness off her outfit before she made this Visit?
But if she was going alone, she was going fully-equipped so far as advice was concerned. Miss Eliza had spent several conscientious hours of instruction and counsel. Arethusa had been told a dozen times over just what she was to do, and that she was to leave the train only when it stopped for the very last time to stay, without going on. The terminus of the line was Lewisburg.
"And if you sit there a half an hour, you make sure," said Miss Eliza, firmly.
A great many people, added she, especially young people, get lost by leaving trains at wrong stations.
Miss Letitia contributed her quota also, though it was more in actual preparation for contingencies that might arise than advice. Arethusa's name and address had been sewed in everything she had on, "in case of accident." Miss Letitia had had a dream one night of an unidentified body lying by a railroad track after a wreck. She dreamed the body to be Arethusa's. Then she had read, very often, of folks whose sense of their own identity had been taken from them most completely by a blow on the head; this also had happened in wrecks. Should there be a wreck and the dream come true, or the other horrible thing happen, in either case they would never know what became of Arethusa. The thought harrowed Miss Letitia. Fortunately, she had only dreamed the dream the one time, so there was not quite so much danger of it being fulfilled. Had she dreamed it three nights, Arethusa should never have gone a step on this trip. But even had the other dreadful thing occurred, it would have been the most careless searcher who would have failed to discover just who Arethusa was and where she belonged, after Miss Letitia had finished her labeling, in slanting, old-fashioned letters on neatly bound-down squares of white linen.
The traveller carried a small packet of baking-soda, tucked into a corner of her satchel by the long-sighted Miss Letitia, "in case of car-sickness." There was nothing so good for nausea as soda.
Arethusa wore the dark blue suit Miss Letitia had made her, with its plain, full gathered skirt, all lined for better warmth, and its double-breasted coat, trimmed with the buttons from one of her great-grandfather's broadcloth suits. Her traveling waist was pongee.
"Pongee is the best material to travel in that I know of," said Miss Eliza. "It never shows the least bit of soil."
It was buttoned modestly to her throat, ending in a straight line, neither high nor low which would have been most trying to nearly everyone, but above which Arethusa's flower face rose as lovely as ever. Her hat was a plain round felt trimmed with two really beautiful turkey feathers that Miss Eliza had been saving carefully since the winter previous. Arethusa had never had a feather on a hat before (only ribbons, the year round), and she considered these feathers the height of elegance. Her hair was fixed on the top of her head for the very first time in her life, a graduation from the long red plait just for this glorious Visit. Her feeling about that heavy, unbecomingly arranged roll, and the hairpins which held it in place, was an indescribable mixture of pride and elation and satisfaction.
Clutched tightly in one white, cotton-gloved hand was Mandy's contribution, a small, neatly tied-up box of lunch. Her extra money was in a little bag on a string around her neck, where Miss Eliza had also deposited the trunk check. There was only the tiniest possible amount of change in her purse. She carried a hand-satchel so ancient in appearance that it might have been the forerunner of all hand-satchels, and her trunk was a wee round-topped affair of red leather with a canvas cover. It was a trunk which had been last viewed by the public when Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia attended the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Miss Eliza was not one to expend money for anything, when what she already had was still perfectly good, albeit a trifle out of date.
Miss Eliza scorned to show her feelings as did Miss Letitia when she told Arethusa good-bye. Consequently, she was even gruffer than usual as she adjured the departing one not to make a fool of herself.
Mandy wept openly. Putting her head into a lion's mouth held no more unknown terrors for Mandy than the making of a journey.
And Timothy prepared to wring Arethusa's hand almost off when it was his turn to say farewell; he thought it was the most expression of his affectionate unhappiness at seeing her leave them that would be permitted him. But she held her face up to him in the most natural manner to be kissed, just as she had held it up to Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia and his mother; so Timothy, after a brief moment of hesitation and remembrance of what Arethusa had said so emphatically about kissing, took what the gods were offering and imprinted a very modest salute on the sweet, upturned face.
Arethusa was so excited that she scarcely heard all of Miss Eliza's last instructions, and she bade some of her party adieu more than once. Timothy claimed the privilege of helping her on the train and escorting her into the coach, and he deposited her satchel on a seat he turned over to face her so she would be sure to have plenty of room.
She chattered away, these last few precious moments, as merrily as if Timothy were companioning the adventure of this trip to Lewisburg, but he found no tongue to reply. It is true that he was not allowed very much chance, but even if he had been, there was no heart in him for talk. Timothy was finding the actual reality of parting with Arethusa for heaven-only-knew-how-long-a-time, far worse than its anticipation, as bad as that had been.
The conductor called, "All a—bo-ard!"
And in sudden, desperate utterance of a wild little wish. Timothy leaned close to Arethusa.
"Kiss me good-bye again, Arethusa," he coaxed, all his young heart in his blue eyes. "Please!"
Arethusa stared at him, frankly amazed at such a remarkable request.
"What's the matter with you, Timothy Jarvis? Kiss you good-bye? Why, the very idea! And what on earth do you mean by 'again'?"
For she was completely unaware that in her excitement she had given Timothy that kiss.
His spirits went clear to zero, but fortune spared him the necessity of a reply, for the conductor called another raucous signal, and the train began to move. Timothy had barely time to save himself from being carried off.
Arethusa stuck her head out of the car window, regardless of one of Miss Eliza's very last and most positive instructions, and waved and waved to the ones she had left behind on the Vandalia platform, and she kept on waving long after they had become mere indistinguishable specks as the train gathered speed.
Then she settled back against the luxury of her dusty red-plush seat with a soft little sigh.
The swift motion of the train was most exhilarating, for every single click of the car-wheels meant a turn which brought her just that much nearer to her father and Elinor and the wonderful Visit.
After a while, when her agitation had begun to subside a trifle, Arethusa began to remember a few of the multitude of directions Miss Eliza had given that were most important to be carried out without fail. She removed her hat with care and reached down into the ancient travelling bag and brought forth a piece of manila paper in which she wrapped it, to save its newness from flying cinders. She took off her coat and folded it, lining outside, and hung it over the arm of the opposite seat and rolled her white cotton gloves into a neat little ball and put them and her purse down into her bag.
Then she drew "The Dove in the Eagles' Nest" out of that capacious receptacle (Miss Asenath had advised bringing something to read and Arethusa had not read this particular romance for a very long while), propped herself primly way over in the corner of her seat and prepared to do just as she had been told.
But she was far too excited to do much more than just open her book. The fortunes of Christina and her two sons in the free city of Ulm, as so graphically portrayed by Miss Charlotte Yonge, could generally transport Arethusa far from the everyday events of her own world into the actual Middle Ages that was the scene of their happening; but to-day.... They seemed to have lost a lot of this power; she could hardly keep her eyes on the book.
The flying landscape outside the window fascinated her at first and after awhile her fellow travellers claimed her attention, and proved far more interesting than even that. Miss Eliza could have no possible objection to her niece watching them if she sat very still.
There were not very many passengers when Arethusa got on; one or two men in the other end of the car, and several women and babies. But as the tram rushed ever nearer to Lewisburg, the passengers increased in number.
A group climbed on at one of the way stations, and took a seat just opposite Arethusa across the aisle, and they particularly attracted her. It was composed of a woman who reminded her very strongly of Miss Letitia in the round chubbiness of her face and her comfortable untidiness, although she was undoubtedly much younger, and her two children. The sex of one of them Arethusa was unable to determine just at first, for it was so small that the cut of its blue raiment might have served for either boy or girl; but the other one was unmistakably of a feminine persuasion. This child had the lightest hair and eyebrows the watcher across the aisle had ever seen, and the very palest of blue eyes. So light were the eyebrows that only a close inspection later on convinced Arethusa that there were any there at all.
These travellers had a great deal of baggage, several boxes and a large telescope, as well as a huge satchel. The handle of the telescope had been broken off at some stage of its career, and this deficiency had been remedied by inserting under the leather straps still remaining, a coat hanger covered with bright red silk ribbon gathered on and tied at the hook with gay little bows.
The children were very restless; they did much moving about, climbing in and out of the seat. The mother seemed to find it necessary to admonish her offspring with frequency, and Arethusa discovered in this way that the little girl's name was "Helen Louise" and the being in the straight up-and-down blue garment was a boy infant who answered to the name of Peter.
At a Junction farther down the line, a Man got on. And as the car was pretty full by this time, he took the seat just opposite Arethusa; that seat which Timothy had gallantly turned over for her.
He buried himself immediately in a paper he carried, but when his neighbor's liquid laugh rang out at some ridiculous antic of Peter's, he dropped his paper and regarded her mobile face with interest.
He was rather a nice looking man, quietly dressed in well cut clothes and he had an air of good living about him that was quite attractive. To any experienced traveller, the neat looking leather cases with the brass locks, which he carried, would have been quite sufficient to have immediately told his occupation. He travelled for a notions house, out of Cincinnati, with a territory covering most of the small towns in three states. It was a boring business, and offered very little as diversion on the side; but he hoped before very long to be much better placed. He liked girls, and the one before him was one of the prettiest he had ever seen.
They rode facing one another for about five miles, and he watched Arethusa, without her actually realizing she was being watched. Then she laughed gayly at Peter once more, as his mother all but saved his life when he pitched head first off the seat, and her eager grey eyes caught a glimpse of the brown eyes across from her, smiling in sympathy.
"Isn't he the funniest little boy!" exclaimed Arethusa, involuntarily, to the sympathy.
"He is," replied the Man kindly, then he added, after a bit, "Are you travelling alone, or do you belong with the funny little boy?"
"No, sir,... Yes, sir!" replied Arethusa, suddenly covered with a shy confusion.
"Which is which?" asked the Man, laughing, and he showed attractive white teeth.
The friendliness of his brown eyes and his laugh reassured Arethusa of her momentary feeling of alarm when he had spoken. Her exclamation had not really expected a reply, and she had been quite startled when the sympathetic eyes to which she had addressed herself had been discovered to have this voice belonging to them.
She blushed, and dropped her head. Then she raised it again, after a moment, and he was still smiling at her in the same friendly fashion, so Arethusa found courage to look at him. To her rose-colored view of the inmates of the best of all possible worlds, he seemed in that look to be a very nice man. It is true that Miss Eliza had warned her with emphasis against strange men, but the Man across from her could not be said to come anywhere near the descriptions of the Ogres against which Arethusa had been so warned. Arethusa had not had her Red-Riding-Hood Experience as yet, and it was her habit to trust.
They rode for a few moments silently, and then Peter did what had been inevitable for some time that he would do, he pitched head first out into the aisle.
"Oh!" exclaimed Arethusa, and she jumped clear out of her seat at the loud and high-pitched wail with which he made known his distress.
"That's too bad," said the Man. "But I've been afraid he was going to do that very thing."
"So have I," answered Arethusa confidentially.
And in a very short while, she was talking away as if she had known her new acquaintance all her life, with all the dimples and excitement and gestures that belonged to Arethusa. But what harm to talk to such a Nice, Kind Man? Miss Eliza had not known that she would meet this sort of Man, she was sure. She could not possibly object to a little Friendly Conversation with someone in the very same seat.
And he listened, truly interested, as Arethusa's enthusiasm began to make up for the while it had been pent, in all she told him of the coming Visit and the magnificent expectations she had of that Visit, and of Ross and Elinor.
But the motherly looking woman across the aisle had been watching Arethusa for some time also. And when Peter's sobs had ceased, and she looked up once more from her family cares to see Arethusa conversing so animatedly with her chance acquaintance, she decided at once to interfere. She had heart enough to—at least—attempt the management of any affairs coming under her notice which did not seem to her to be running just as they should.
She bustled over and loomed above Arethusa and her Friendly Man.
"Know this man, dearie?" she demanded peremptorily.
"Why ... no ... I...."
Arethusa almost added, "Aunt 'Titia." For the tone of voice and the little term of endearment and the woman herself were all rather bewilderingly like her aunt.
"Well, I don't reckon you ought to be talking to him then," and she turned to the man, a self-elected champion of a lone maiden, and stared at him as authoritatively as she had spoken to Arethusa. "You're plenty old enough to know better'n this. And you'd better get out of that seat mighty quick, or I'll call the conductor. And you a nice-looking man, too!"
The man turned as red as a well-cooked beet, clear down into his immaculate collar. He wasted no time in expostulation or protest that Arethusa's champion was interfering in something which was none of her immediate business, but he gathered up his neat leather cases and fled to the smoker for safety. He had meant no sort of harm, and he was so embarrassed that he was hours recovering from the experience.
After he had disappeared down the aisle, Arethusa's defender moved her family and most of her baggage across the way, depositing her remarkably decorated telescope in the space between the two seats which had faced each other for Arethusa's adventure, before the astonished Arethusa was thoroughly aware of just what was happening.
"You sit there, Helen Louise," admonished this substitute for the Nice Man to her daughter, indicating the end of the telescope, "and if our friend wants to come back, I reckon he'll have to fall over you. That was a horrid man," she added to Arethusa: "it's the likes of him makes it disagreeable for girls to be travelling by themselves."
"Oh, no," protested Arethusa.
"Yes, he were," replied Helen Louise's mother in a positive way that indicated superior wisdom on such matters.
Arethusa bowed to the superior wisdom and the positive tone, through long habit of her experience with Miss Eliza when she used such a tone.
"But he looked like a Nice Man," she said, though feebly.
"It's most always the nicest looking ones is the worst at heart. I'm raising up Helen Louise to steer clear of anything in pants she ain't been introduced to first by somebody she knows. It's safest."
This speech had a somewhat familiar sound, though perhaps couched differently. Arethusa had a moment of terrified remembrance of Certain Instructions. She looked down at the bulwark of Helen Louise and the telescope between her and the aisle, and she suddenly felt grateful to Helen Louise's mother.
"Thank you," she said, with fervent sincerity, "thank you, ma'am, just ever so much. I never do remember anything Aunt 'Liza tells me, she says."
"You ain't got no real call to thank me," was the placid reply. "I'd be doing the same for any girl as good-looking as you be; and I'd be hoping somebody'd do the same for my Helen Louise. It seems like it's always most easiest for young folks to keep right on forgetting just what they ought to be remembering."
"I know," said Arethusa apologetically. "But this is the first time I ever traveled anywhere, and...."
Mrs. Cherry (for such was the name of Arethusa's latest friend) rescued her small son from his repeated attempts to plunge through the glass in the car window, before she turned around to continue the conversation.
"I should have said you had. You don't look so awfully citified, now I come to think, but I should have certainly said you'd travelled. Who's your Aunt 'Liza, you spoke about awhile back? Ain't you got no Ma?"
Mrs. Cherry was genuinely friendly, and she was safely feminine, so Arethusa once more launched into a glowing description of what wonders the future held in store, and to Mrs. Cherry's interested questioning, told what the past had been like, Timothy and all.
"You certainly have got lots of folks to care about you," was the comment, when the narrator finally paused for breath. "And you ain't never seen your Pa? Well! Well! Helen Louise and Peter and me we're going to the city to meet Helen Louise's Pa. He's got work there and we're going to live there now."
Helen Louise smiled all over herself at this mention of her father, a toothless smile, but of unmistakable joy, and Arethusa's heart went out to her immediately. Here, very evidently, was another girl-child whose affections were centered largely in a male parent.
"Helen Louise favors her Pa considerable. And they're the biggest geese together!"
Helen Louise's silvery treble piped up. "Papa and me just play and play!" She gave herself something like an anticipatory hug. "Gee, but I'm going to be glad to see him! I ain't seen him for a whole year now!"
"Helen Louise, don't you be telling Miss Worth'ton no story now!" warned her mother. Names had been exchanged. "She ain't seen him for more'n a month reely, but I reckon it does seem 'most a year to her."
Peter now joined his voice to the conversation for the first time, "Ma, I'm hungry."
"Bless us! But it might be dinner time, now, mightn't it. Have you got a watch, Miss Worth'ton?"
Arethusa reached down into her waistband and drew forth Miss Eliza's parting gift. Which was a watch that had seen Miss Eliza faithfully through more than one decade, a large and handsomely chased affair of gold on a long ribbon of black gros-grain.
"The child will need a watch," said Miss Eliza.
Arethusa fully appreciated the parting gift, and she reverenced the old-fashioned timepiece fully as much as had its former owner.
What though it was a trifle heavy in her hand as she held it to read the dial! Was it not an actual watch and gold at that, and did not its tiny hands count off the moments of each one of the twenty-four hours for her to note as they flew by? And was not all of its wonder her very own now?
"A quarter to one," she announced proudly.
"Well, well, you don't say so! No wonder he's hungry! You'll be having some lunch with us, Miss Worth'ton, won't you now?"
But Arethusa refused this cordial invitation. She could not possibly eat a mouthful. Food would have stuck in her throat right on top of the big lump of excitement that was already there. And besides the drawback of this decided inability to swallow, she had not the slightest sensation of hunger that would have tempted her to try to eat.
"I had some lunch of my own," she shyly offered the neatly tied-up box; "Aunt 'Liza makes awfully nice jam and things and Mandy said she was going to fix me some fried chicken. But I don't want a bit of it. Wouldn't Helen Louise and Peter like to have it?"
Helen Louise's pale blue eyes glistened at this mention of fried chicken. Her own lunch contained no such appetizing delicacy. She had helped to tie it up, and she knew just what was in it. This was far superior in every way. She pulled at her mother's dress in eagerness, and Mrs. Cherry reached down and slapped her.
"Don't you act like you never had nothing in your life to eat," she said sharply.
Then Helen Louise's eyes began to glisten with tears. Arethusa felt very sorry for her. She had seemed so like a kindred spirit in her plainly manifested father worship. So Arethusa opened the dainty little packet of chicken and sandwiches and spread it temptingly on Helen Louise's lap with her own hands.
"Here," she said, "you may have it, Helen Louise. But you'll give Peter some? Do," she added quickly.
For Peter's large round eyes were regarding with a greediness unmistakable the munificence of food that had been so generously bestowed upon his sister.
"Well, I will say this," remarked Mrs. Cherry, as she divided Arethusa's contribution into equal portions between her offspring, after the donor had succeeded in convincing her that she honestly wanted none of it. "I will say this for my children. They might be acting like hoodlums over this here food, but they ain't never seen none just like it before," She bit into one of Mandy's beaten biscuit sandwiches with the pink ham in between, herself, with relish. "Your aunt must have a mighty good cook. She cert'inly must!"
Watching the little Cherry's devour her lunch and the garrulity of their mother consumed so much time for Arethusa, that almost before she knew it the little wave of excitement denoting the nearing of a journey's end swept through the car. The conductor passed by and gathered the little slips of stiff paper from the men's hats; every passenger began his or her peculiar preparations for leaving the train.
Mrs. Cherry began gathering up her boxes and parcels. Helen Louise was sent to the water cooler to wet a handkerchief and then her face and Peter's were vigorously scrubbed. At any other time, Mrs. Cherry would have dragged both children to the cooler, but she was not taking any chances with pretty, unprotected Arethusa. No one else should have that seat of hers.
The baggageman came through the car; calling as he went, "Anybaggageyouwantdeliveredinthe-city, car-ri-age or omnibus."
It gave Arethusa a most delightful little thrill all down her spine to hear him. She was not exactly sure he was the person to give her check to, but decided it would be best to obey the letter of the law this time. Miss Eliza had mentioned no baggageman, but she had been most explicit in her directions to Arethusa that she give that check to no one but her father.
She rescued her hat from its paper protection and put it on her tumbled hair, from which some of the precious hairpins had fallen during the excitement of the journey; unfolded her coat and donned it; drew on the cotton gloves and clutched her purse and satchel once more as when she had started, and with the death grip Miss Eliza had adjured for fear of those pickpockets with which railway stations are always infested, and Arethusa was Ready. And she was ready with a palpitating heart, for the brakeman had accommodatingly called, "Lewisburg," right in her very own ear, as if he wished her to be quite sure this was the right place to leave her seat.
Mrs. Cherry had been very busy with her progeny and her paraphernalia and impedimenta of various sorts—it was marvelous how she managed to gather them all together with only two hands—and she was ready also. But even in the midst of this sleight of hand performance, she did not forget her self-constituted guardianship of Arethusa.
"Sure you're going to know your Pa?" she enquired. "Don't you want me to be waiting and help you hunt for him?"
No, Arethusa was very, very sure she would know him. She did not need any help to find him.
And then with one last shrieking grind of the wheels, the train stopped in the shed at Lewisburg, and Arethusa, all injunctions to sit still for a half hour forgotten as if they had never been, immediately began with her fellow passengers a movement towards the door. But so slow was this movement that her impatient heart thought she would never, never be out of that car.
Helen Louise's quick eyes spied, through the car window, her father, among the crowd on the platform and she gave a joyful shout. But it was a shout, which although loud and very near, Arethusa never even heard. Her own eyes, star-like and intent, were busy searching that same crowd for her own father.
CHAPTER XI
Just as the music room was primarily Elinor's retreat, so was the library the place which Ross loved best.
It was a long, narrow room; two square rooms had been thrown together to make it, and it was lined, on the longest walls to about half the distance from the ceiling, with low, deep, unglassed book-cases full of books on a bewildering variety of subjects, haphazardly arranged; some of them well worn as to bindings as if much read. A brick fireplace of generous proportions with a high, narrow mantel shelf of brownish red marble occupied most of one of the other, and narrower, walls. A log fire burned there fitfully now, throwing little dancing gleams on the brass andirons and the dark polished floor just in front. All the chairs in the room were broad and deep and enticingly comfortable. An enormous davenport stood at one side of the fireplace, and there was a long, heavy table of carved mahogany directly in front of the hearth. The few rugs in the room were all in dull, subdued tones that melted into the floor unobtrusively.
Here, in the library, Ross spent his days in the arduous labor with which he kept body and soul together; the translation of various bits of the literature of Southern Europe into English. Ross was quite a student in his way and a good deal of a linguist.
But he was not working just at this moment.
At the enormous desk between the two long windows at the end of the room opposite the fireplace, he was reading a detective story and playing with a bronze paper cutter at the same time, banging it up and down on the desk.
Ross loved detective stories as much as any boy who has ever thrilled over them, and Elinor loved to watch him read them. She stood still in the doorway for a moment and watched him now. She could tell by his changing expression just when the story he was reading was sad, just when it was merry, just when the meaning was hard to understand, and just when he began to dislike the way things were working out, almost as well as if he read it aloud to her.
The paper cutter poised in the air for just a second, and his eyebrows drew together in a little puzzled frown. Evidently, things were going badly. Then the paper cutter came down on the desk with a swoop, and his whole face lighted.
Elinor crossed the room with her swift, graceful movement, and kissed him lightly on the tiny bald spot on the very top of his head, which he insisted was being widened by "financial worries."
"Ross, Clay is waiting."
He gave her an absentminded squeezing of the hand nearest him by way of answer without lifting his eyes from his book.
She leaned over and covered the page with one hand.
"Oh, come now," he remonstrated, "that's not a bit fair! That's the most interesting place for pages and pages!"
"That may be, you infant, but you must stop right there. Clay is waiting for you."
"What for, please? I don't remember telling him I wanted him!"
"Ross Worthington! Have you actually forgotten Arethusa is coming this afternoon!"
Ross returned, with the most commendable suddenness, from the Long Island country place, scene of his sojourn for the last few hours where a most fearful and intricately involved crime had been committed, to things which were happening in Lewisburg.
"Ye gods! And I had!"
"You ought to be ashamed to admit it!"
"I don't see why you say that," his air was one of mild protest. "You remembered her, didn't you? And that's what a wife's for, anyway, one of the things, to remember what her husband ought to. What's the use of having one if...."
But Elinor hurried him into the hall without allowing him to finish this speech, thrust his coat and hat forcibly upon him, and propelled him on toward the open front door, and then on down the steps.
"Wait a minute here," Ross came back from halfway to the automobile, "Aren't you going?" For it had penetrated his consciousness that she had not come any farther than the top step.
"No."
"Why not?"
She blushed a trifle. "I ... I thought I wouldn't."
All her shyness was up in arms.
It was very probably going to be hard enough at best, this first meeting with Arethusa, without staging it before a crowd of prying eyes in a railroad station. In spite of all her longing to see and know the girl, and her loving preparation, now that the moment was actually come, Elinor's shyness intruded and kept her at home.
Ross understood (it was one of the very nicest things about him, his understanding) but as he was feeling a bit the same way himself, he would have liked the bulwark of her presence. Two shy folk to back each other up are in not nearly so bad a fix as the one who goes it alone. So he stood hesitatingly in the middle of the front walk, slowly drawing on his gloves. Perhaps Elinor would change her mind.
"You'll be late," she warned.
But still he hesitated. "How in the dickens am I going to know the child? I haven't the remotest idea what she's like. I may miss her altogether. I think I need you."
His statement of not knowing what Arethusa was like was perfectly true, for in none of her letters had Miss Eliza once mentioned Arethusa's personal appearance and Elinor had never thought to ask about it.
"You should have told her," he continued, almost reproachfully, "to wear a red carnation or something. I am quite sure I shan't be able to find her. And you're so much smarter than I am. Your woman's intuition is a great thing to have in a search, You better come go 'long."
Elinor came down the walk to where he was and gave him a push. "Do go on, Ross. You really will miss her altogether, if you don't. And I haven't time to dress now, so I can't possibly go. She probably looks like her mother or some member of the family."
"Now, I don't know about that," he answered, still lingering. "She may not at all. I don't look like my mother, and you...."
"Oh, please go on and stop fooling!" Though she laughed, his wife's patience was ebbing. It would be dreadful for Arethusa to come and find no one to meet her. "You always hurry so, Ross, when there's no real necessity for it and won't when there is!"
Ross decided that the moment for actual departure was certainly at hand, so he made haste to the automobile.
Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the shed, toward the iron gates she had to pass through to reach the station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in this comparatively small space than she had ever seen in one company before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers of travelling daughters they had come to meet.
She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along, unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware she had passed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one side of the station.
From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various other relationships (there were some she was quite positive were fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy; for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed to have been met by somebody.
Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose.... she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!
But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.
The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her. And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation, directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts' weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort of protection.
Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!
The Cherry family had been so long in their greetings that they were among the last to pass by the unmet traveller and her pillar. Mrs. Cherry, seeing that the girl was alone, crossed the platform to her, the whole collection of Cherrys trailing in her rear.
"Found your Pa yet, dearie?" she asked cheerfully.
"This is the pretty Miss Worth'ton I was telling you about we saw on the train, Cherry," to her husband, and "This is Helen Louise's Pa," to Arethusa.
Arethusa managed to acknowledge this introduction, but being in such a state of mind as she was, she could not make her acknowledgment very cordial.
Helen Louise was dancing up and down and hanging on to one hand of a man who could have been nothing else but a close relation to the little girl, pale blue eyes and pale eyebrows and all. The daughter certainly favored "her Pa considerable" as her mother had said.
"My Papa," Helen Louise announced happily.
Mrs. Cherry sensed something wrong. She looked at Arethusa more closely. "You ain't found him? Here, Cherry, you take the children and the bundles and put them in the waitin'-room and then come straight back here and we'll help Miss Worth'ton hunt her father."
"I don't want to be put in the waitin'-room!" wailed Helen Louise in protest, "I want to stay with Papa!"
Mrs. Cherry was reproving her and starting her off in the direction of the designated depository, when Arethusa interrupted the proceedings. She did not want Mrs. Cherry, kind as she had been and kind as her intentions still were to continue being, with her just now. If this was a fiasco to her Beautiful Dream she needed a few moments to face it alone. A funny sort of little pride gave her this feeling. She had talked to Mrs. Cherry so glowingly and at such length about her father and her Visit.
But Mr. Cherry, till just now silent, had a suggestion to make. "S'pose," he drawled, "if Miss Worth'ton wants to wait by herself here, Maria, me and you set inside awhile, and then if she finds she reely has missed him somehow, I might help her to look him up, mebbe."
Arethusa considered this a decidedly brilliant idea. It relieved her of present society, which though friendly was irksome, and promised future comfort.
She rewarded the tall, thin father of Helen Louise with a misty smile.
Mrs. Cherry thought it very good, also. Miss Worth'ton wasn't to worry a mite now, not a mite. If her father didn't come for her, the Cherry family would escort her right up to his front door.
So the little procession trailed away and left Arethusa once more alone, and most disconsolate, against her kindly iron pillar.
The station had gradually become deserted, until there were only a few employees pottering about here and there, and one lone man standing talking to the blue-capped man at the gate.
Arethusa's mental picture of her father had been very clear. All this while she had been looking for the handsome youth of the wavy dark hair, eccentrically long, and the graceful Italian military cape. And she had been looking for him without adding a single year to his age, perfectly confident she would know him anywhere.
Ross had really been on time, despite his "fooling." He had arrived before the first passenger left Arethusa's train. And he had waited until every human being had gone before starting to leave himself, so he was the lone man Arethusa saw questioning the gatekeeper.
Elinor's last suggestion that the daughter might resemble her mother had been taken literally, and all these moments Ross's search had been for a tiny, dainty bit of a girl with cornflower eyes. When the crowd had somewhat thinned, he had noticed Arethusa and her prettiness and her height, standing so forlornly by herself, had mentally labeled Miss Letitia's costuming, "a Godey's Ladies' Book relic," and had turned away again to his search for the Dresden china daughter, who did not seem to be anywhere about. Ross was vexed to have been snatched from his book for this fruitless trip to the station. If Miss Eliza had postponed Arethusa's coming once more, she should have written them about it, or telegraphed; for they should surely have been notified.
As he passed Arethusa on his way out he saw that her grey eyes under their long black lashes (he noticed them first because they were such unusually beautiful eyes) were full of shining tears, some of which were beginning to roll, unashamed, down the girl's cheek. A damsel in distress always appealed to Ross, for no knight of the time of tournaments had no more real chivalry in his composition, and so he stopped.
"Could I help you in any way?" he asked courteously. "Are you in trouble?"
Arethusa was just on the point of seeking Mr. Cherry and his promised assistance, when out of the bleak expanse of that awful and lonely platform Providence had sent this other help: a Man with reassuring grey hairs and a smile which she could not possibly mistake for anything but kindness. She seized it gratefully: and there would be no embarrassment of a Mrs. Cherry connected with it. This new Man knew nothing of any Dream that had been shattered. And if he lived in Lewisburg, he most probably knew her father. Her experience with municipalities was that everybody in a town knew everybody else and all their affairs into the bargain. And she was far past remembering Certain Instructions in such a Crisis.
She turned to Ross, a tear-stained face on which her gratitude at his offer struggled with her woes and the Horror of the Situation.
"My ... my fa-ther...." she began brokenly, and then gulped, and stopped.
It sounded very much like a greeting of the man before her, but it was only that her unruly voice refused entirely to respond to her efforts to use it.
Ross's look searched her quickly, up and down. She was as unlike the child he had expected to find as he could have found in a day's long journey; but there could hardly be two sets of fathers and daughters in so similar a predicament in the same station.
"I think you've found him, right here," he said lightly, to down a curious little feeling that suddenly surged through his heart, "if you're Miss Arethusa Worthington, that is. I'm...."
Arethusa waited not for him to finish with a definite announcement of his identity; she needed no further words to convince her of just who he was. And although this was far, far from being what she had always visioned the wonder of their Meeting, she put her whole soul into her side of it.
She flung both arms tight around his neck as if she never intended to let him go; and sobbed violently, salty tears that soaked clear through the expensive tweed of his new suit. But these were not the tears of unhappiness which he had noticed and which had caused him to stop and make his offer of help; they were tears of joy for the sheer relief that his bodily presence gave to his volatile daughter. With the impulsive suddenness of her embrace her hat had flown clear off, but Arethusa recked not, in such a moment, of hats with precious and beautiful turkey feathers, and she lost, of necessity, her careful grip of her purse and satchel.
Ross, for a moment or two, was entirely bereft of coherent thought by the suddenness of her movement. He was nearly strangled by the clinging arms, and a trifle embarrassed besides; for it was not every day that a strange young lady precipitated herself into his arms and sobbed so violently. That it was a daughter whose acquaintance he was making for the very first time, did not altogether deprive the situation of its strangeness.
"Here," he said, when he began to recover somewhat, "here, buck up, child! Buck up. This won't do at all, you know. Let's go home and finish this!"
Arethusa "bucked up."
She drew away from him as suddenly as she had grabbed him and blushed hotly all over with a most unusual accession of sudden shyness. And Ross made straight for the waiting automobile without further parley. She followed behind him in silence, but about halfway she stopped and clapped her hand to her head.
"Oh, my hat!" she exclaimed. "And I've lost my purse and satchel!"
Ross turned around and went back to find them.
But the purse was gone beyond any power of their finding it, though hat and satchel were safely retrieved and progress once more resumed.