Summer | Page 6

later, to talk
of a school at Nettleton, and to say that this time a friend of hers would
"make the necessary arrangements," Charity cut her short with the
announcement that she had decided not to leave North Dormer.
Miss Hatchard reasoned with her kindly, but to no purpose; she simply
repeated: "I guess Mr. Royall's too lonesome."
Miss Hatchard blinked perplexedly behind her eye-glasses. Her long
frail face was full of puzzled wrinkles, and she leant forward, resting
her hands on the arms of her mahogany armchair, with the evident
desire to say something that ought to be said.

"The feeling does you credit, my dear."
She looked about the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of
ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to
make utterance more difficult.
"The fact is, it's not only--not only because of the advantages. There are
other reasons. You're too young to understand----"
"Oh, no, I ain't," said Charity harshly; and Miss Hatchard blushed to the
roots of her blonde cap. But she must have felt a vague relief at having
her explanation cut short, for she concluded, again invoking the
daguerreotypes: "Of course I shall always do what I can for you; and in
case... in case... you know you can always come to me...."
Lawyer Royall was waiting for Charity in the porch when she returned
from this visit. He had shaved, and brushed his black coat, and looked a
magnificent monument of a man; at such moments she really admired
him.
"Well," he said, "is it settled?"
"Yes, it's settled. I ain't going."
"Not to the Nettleton school?"
"Not anywhere."
He cleared his throat and asked sternly: "Why?"
"I'd rather not," she said, swinging past him on her way to her room. It
was the following week that he brought her up the Crimson Rambler
and its fan from Hepburn. He had never given her anything before.
The next outstanding incident of her life had happened two years later,
when she was seventeen. Lawyer Royall, who hated to go to Nettleton,
had been called there in connection with a case. He still exercised his
profession, though litigation languished in North Dormer and its
outlying hamlets; and for once he had had an opportunity that he could

not afford to refuse. He spent three days in Nettleton, won his case, and
came back in high good-humour. It was a rare mood with him, and
manifested itself on this occasion by his talking impressively at the
supper-table of the "rousing welcome" his old friends had given him.
He wound up confidentially: "I was a damn fool ever to leave Nettleton.
It was Mrs. Royall that made me do it."
Charity immediately perceived that something bitter had happened to
him, and that he was trying to talk down the recollection. She went up
to bed early, leaving him seated in moody thought, his elbows propped
on the worn oilcloth of the supper table. On the way up she had
extracted from his overcoat pocket the key of the cupboard where the
bottle of whiskey was kept.
She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She
heard Mr. Royall's voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door,
fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when she
saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his
discomposed face, she understood.
For a moment they looked at each other in silence; then, as he put his
foot across the threshold, she stretched out her arm and stopped him.
"You go right back from here," she said, in a shrill voice that startled
her; "you ain't going to have that key tonight."
"Charity, let me in. I don't want the key. I'm a lonesome man," he
began, in the deep voice that sometimes moved her.
Her heart gave a startled plunge, but she continued to hold him back
contemptuously. "Well, I guess you made a mistake, then. This ain't
your wife's room any longer."
She was not frightened, she simply felt a deep disgust; and perhaps he
divined it or read it in her face, for after staring at her a moment he
drew back and turned slowly away from the door. With her ear to her
keyhole she heard him feel his way down the dark stairs, and toward
the kitchen; and she listened for the crash of the cupboard panel, but

instead she heard him, after an interval, unlock the door of the house,
and his heavy steps came to her through the silence as he walked down
the path. She crept to the window and saw his bent figure striding up
the road in the moonlight. Then a belated sense of fear came to her with
the consciousness of victory,