North of Fifty-Three | Page 2

laughingly, ran along the path, and up
the steps, kissed her finger-tips to the lingering figure by the gate, and
went in.
"Bed," she soliloquized, "is the place for me right quickly if I'm going

to be up and dressed and have that lunch ready by ten o'clock. I wish I
weren't such a sleepyhead--or else that I weren't a 'pore wurrkin' gurl.'"
At which last conceit she laughed softly. Because, for a "pore wurrkin'
gurl," Miss Weir was fairly well content with her lot. She had no one
dependent on her--a state of affairs which, if it occasionally leads to
loneliness, has its compensations. Her salary as a stenographer amply
covered her living expenses, and even permitted her to put by a few
dollars monthly. She had grown up in Granville. She had her own circle
of friends. So that she was comfortable, even happy, in the present--and
Jack Barrow proposed to settle the problem of her future; with youth's
optimism, they two considered it already settled. Six months more, and
there was to be a wedding, a three-weeks' honeymoon, and a final
settling down in a little cottage on the West Side; everybody in
Granville who amounted to anything lived on the West Side. Then she
would have nothing to do but make the home nest cozy, while Jack
kept pace with a real-estate business that was growing beyond his most
sanguine expectations.
She threw her light wraps over the back of a chair, and, standing before
her dresser, took the multitude of pins out of her hair and tumbled it, a
cloudy black mass, about her shoulders. Occupying the center of the
dresser, in a leaning silver frame, stood a picture of Jack Barrow. She
stood looking at it a minute, smiling absently. It was spring, and her
landlady's daughter had set a bunch of wild flowers in a jar beside the
picture. Hazel picked out a daisy and plucked away the petals one by
one.
"He loves me--he loves me not--he loves me--" Her lips formed the
words inaudibly, as countless lips have formed them in love's history,
and the last petal fluttered away at "not."
She smiled.
"I wonder if that's an omen?" she murmured. "Pshaw! What a silly idea!
I'm going to bed. Good night, Johnny boy."
She kissed her finger-tips to him again across the rooftops all grimed

with a winter's soot, and within fifteen minutes Miss Weir was sound
asleep.
She gave the lie, for once, to the saying that a woman is never ready at
the appointed time by being on the steps a full ten minutes before Jack
Barrow appeared. They walked to the corner and caught a car, and in
the span of half an hour got off at Granville Park.
The city fathers, hampered in days gone by with lack of municipal
funds, had left the two-hundred-acre square of the park pretty much as
nature made it; that is to say, there was no ornate parking, no attempt at
landscape gardening. Ancient maples spread their crooked arms
untrimmed, standing in haphazard groves. Wherever the greensward
nourished, there grew pink-tipped daisies and kindred flowers of the
wild. It was gutted in the middle with a ravine, the lower end of which,
dammed by an earth embankment, formed a lake with the inevitable
swans and other water-fowl. But, barring the lake and a wide drive that
looped and twined through the timber, Granville Park was a bit of the
old Ontario woodland, and as such afforded a pleasant place to loaf in
the summer months. It was full of secluded nooks, dear to the hearts of
young couples. And upon a Sunday the carriages of the wealthy
affected the smooth drive.
When Jack Barrow and Hazel had finished their lunch under the trees,
in company with a little group of their acquaintances, Hazel gathered
scraps of bread and cake into a paper bag.
Barrow whispered to her: "Let's go down and feed the swans. I'd just as
soon be away from the crowd."
She nodded assent, and they departed hastily lest some of the others
should volunteer their company. It took but a short time to reach the
pond. They found a log close to the water's edge, and, taking a seat
there, tossed morsels to the birds and chattered to each other.
"Look," said Barrow suddenly; "that's us ten years from now."
A carriage passed slowly, a solemn, liveried coachman on the box, a

handsome, smooth-shaven man of thirty-five and a richly gowned
woman leaning back and looking out over the pond with bored eyes.
And that last, the half-cynical, half-contemptuous expression on the
two faces, impressed Hazel Weir far more than the showy equipage, the
outward manifestation of wealth.
"I hope not," she returned impulsively.
"Hope not!" Barrow echoed. "Those people