Hidden Creek | Page 5

asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered,
oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly
through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the
subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.
"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once
after a particularly deplorable failure.
"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon
you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country
walks, in--what's the name of the foreign 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 cañons 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,