Hidden Creek | Page 5

part?--Normandy? No friends of your own age? No beaux?"
Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a child's. It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring moonlight. In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland.
"What you need is--Millings," prescribed Sylvester. "Girlie and Babe will wake you up. Yes, and the boys. You'll make a hit in Millings." He contemplated her for an instant with his head on one side. "We ain't got anything like you in Millings."
Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical--a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his broken heart upon her spirit, she was a Puck. She could make laughter and mischief for him and for herself--not for any one else yet; she was too shy. But that might come. Only, Puck laughter is a little unearthly, a little delicate. The ear of Millings might not be attuned.... Just now, Sheila felt that she would never laugh again. Sylvester's humor certainly did not move her. She almost choked trying to swallow becomingly the mother-in-law anecdote.
But Sylvester's talk, his questions, even his jokes, were not what most oppressed her. Sometimes, looking up, she would find him staring at her over the top of his newspaper as though he were speculating about something, weighing her, judging her by some inner measurement. It was rather like the way her father had looked a model over to see if she would fit his dream.
At such moments Sylvester's small brown eyes were the eyes of an artist, of a visionary. They embarrassed her painfully. What was it, after all, that he expected of her? For an expectation of some kind he most certainly had, and it could hardly have to do with her skill in washing dishes.
She asked him a few small questions as they drew near to Millings. The strangeness of the country they were now running through excited her and fired her courage--these orange-colored cliffs, these purple buttes, these strange twisting ca?ons with their fierce green streams.
"Please tell me about Mrs. Hudson and your daughters?" she asked.
This was a few hours before they were to come to Millings. They had changed trains at a big, bare, glaring city several hours before and were now in a small, gritty car with imitation-leather seats. They were running through a gorge, and below and ahead Sheila could see the brown plain with its patches of snow and, like a large group of red toy houses, the town of Millings, far away but astonishingly distinct in the clear air.
Sylvester, considering her question, turned his emerald slowly.
"The girls are all right, Miss Sheila. They're lookers. I guess I've spoiled 'em some. They'll be crazy over you--sort of a noo pet in the house, eh? I've wired to 'em. They must be hoppin' up and down like a popper full of corn."
"And Mrs. Hudson?"
Sylvester grinned--the wrinkle cutting long and deep across his lip. "Well, ma'am, she ain't the hoppin' kind."
A few minutes later Sheila discovered that emphatically she was not the hopping kind. A great, bony woman with a wide, flat, handsome face, she came along the station platform, kissed Sylvester with hard lips and stared at Sheila ... the stony stare of her kind.
"Babe ran the Ford down, Sylly," she said in the harshest voice Sheila had ever heard. "Where's the girl's trunk?"
Sylvester's sallow face reddened. He turned quickly to Sheila.
"Run over to the car yonder, Miss Sheila, and get used to Babe, while I kind of take the edge off Momma."
Sheila did not run. She walked in a peculiar light-footed manner which gave her the look of a proud deer.
"Momma" was taken firmly to the baggage-room, where, it would seem, the edge was removed with difficulty, for Sheila waited in the motor with Babe for half an hour.
Babe hopped. She hopped out of her seat at the wheel and shook Sheila's hand and told her to "jump right in."
"Sit by me on the way home, Sheila." Babe had a tremendous voice. "And leave the old folks to gossip on