In Apple-Blossom Time | Page 5

he wanted to eat her up, the poor little lamb. Unless the mother's something different from the son she'll be driven to desperation. No knowin' what she'll do." Miss Upton clasped her plump hands together in great trouble of spirit. "I believe I said Keefe more'n once. Perhaps she'll have sense enough to write to me. Why didn't I just tell that old rawbones that her plans was changed and she was goin' with me. Oh, I am a fool! I don't know what I'd have done with her; but some way would have opened. Let's see. Where am I!" Miss Upton delved distractedly into the large bag that hung on her arm. "Where's my list? Am I through or not?" She seemed to herself to have lived long since her wearied entrance into that restaurant.
In her uneventful life this brief experience took deep hold on her imagination. As she rode out to Keefe on the train that afternoon she constructed the scenes of the story in her mind.
The weak, handsome, despairing father begging his child's forgiveness. The dismantling of the home. The placing of Geraldine in a cheap lodging while her father's widow shed all responsibility of her and set forth in new raiment for green fields and pastures new.
The shabby and carelessly put on suit in which Geraldine had appeared this morning told a tale. The girl had said she despised her looks. Her appearance had borne out the declaration. The lovely hair had been brushed tightly back; the old hat would have been unbecoming if it could: all seemed to testify that if the girl could have had her way not an element of attractiveness would have been observable in her. Miss Upton waxed indignant as she went on to picture the probable scenes which had frightened and disgusted the child into such an abnormal frame of mind. The memory of Rufus Carder's gaze, as his oblique eye had feasted upon his guest, brought the blood to Miss Mehitable's face.
"I'll find out where she is if I have to employ a detective," she thought, setting her lips. "Now there's no use in bein' a fool," she muttered after a little more apprehensive thought. "I shall get daffy if I go on thinkin' about it. I'll do my accounts and see if I can take my mind off it."
* * * * *
Meanwhile Geraldine with her escort was also on a moving train. A creeping train it seemed to her. Rufus Carder was trying to make himself agreeable. She strove with herself to give him credit for that. She had not lived to be a nineteen-year-old school girl without meeting attractive young men. Her stepmother had always kept her in the background at times when it was impossible to eliminate her altogether, quite, as Geraldine had said, like the stepmother of a fairy tale; but there had been holidays with school friends and an occasional admirer; although these cases had been rare because Geraldine, always kept on short allowance as to money and clothes, avoided as much as possible social affairs outside the school.
She tried now to find amusement instead of mental paralysis in the proximity of her present escort, contrasting him with some men she had known; but recent bitter experiences made his probably well-intentioned familiarities sorely trying. There was a lump in his cheek. Geraldine hoped it arose from an afflicted tooth, but she strongly suspected tobacco. Oh, if he would but sit a little farther away from her!
"So you've renounced the city, the world, the flesh, and the devil," said Rufus when the conductor had left them, and he settled down in an attitude that brought his shoulder in contact with Geraldine's.
She drew closer to the window and kept her eyes ahead. "He is as old as Father," she thought. "He means to be kind."
"There is not much chance for those at school," she replied. "School is about all I know."
"Well, you don't need to know anything else," returned Rufus protectingly. "I'll bet Juliet kept you out of sight." He laughed, and his companion turning saw that he had been bereft of a front tooth.
"I didn't see very much of my stepmother," she answered in the same stiff manner.
"I'll bet you didn't," declared Rufus, "not when she saw you first." Again he laughed, convinced that his companion must enjoy the implication.
"I mean that I have been away from home at school for several years," said the girl coldly.
"Oh, I know where you have been, and why, and when, and just how long, and all about it." The tone of this was quiet, but there was something disquieting to Geraldine in his manner. "Perhaps you didn't know," he added after a pause filled by the crescendos and diminuendos of the speeding train, "that your father and