Summer | Page 8

get it done there. I'll do whatever you say." His eyes fell
under the merciless stare she continued to fix on him, and he shifted his
weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he stood there before her,
unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he
pressed against the desk, and his long orator's jaw trembling with the
effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly
old man she had always known.
"Marry you? Me?" she burst out with a scornful laugh. "Was that what
you came to ask me the other night? What's come over you, I wonder?
How long is it since you've looked at yourself in the glass?" She
straightened herself, insolently conscious of her youth and strength. "I
suppose you think it would be cheaper to marry me than to keep a hired
girl. Everybody knows you're the closest man in Eagle County; but I
guess you're not going to get your mending done for you that way
twice."

Mr. Royall did not move while she spoke. His face was ash-coloured
and his black eyebrows quivered as though the blaze of her scorn had
blinded him. When she ceased he held up his hand.
"That'll do--that'll about do," he said. He turned to the door and took his
hat from the hat-peg. On the threshold he paused. "People ain't been
fair to me--from the first they ain't been fair to me," he said. Then he
went out.
A few days later North Dormer learned with surprise that Charity had
been appointed librarian of the Hatchard Memorial at a salary of eight
dollars a month, and that old Verena Marsh, from the Creston
Almshouse, was coming to live at lawyer Royall's and do the cooking.

III
It was not in the room known at the red house as Mr. Royall's "office"
that he received his infrequent clients. Professional dignity and
masculine independence made it necessary that he should have a real
office, under a different roof; and his standing as the only lawyer of
North Dormer required that the roof should be the same as that which
sheltered the Town Hall and the post-office.
It was his habit to walk to this office twice a day, morning and
afternoon. It was on the ground floor of the building, with a separate
entrance, and a weathered name-plate on the door. Before going in he
stepped in to the post-office for his mail--usually an empty
ceremony--said a word or two to the town-clerk, who sat across the
passage in idle state, and then went over to the store on the opposite
corner, where Carrick Fry, the storekeeper, always kept a chair for him,
and where he was sure to find one or two selectmen leaning on the long
counter, in an atmosphere of rope, leather, tar and coffee-beans. Mr.
Royall, though monosyllabic at home, was not averse, in certain moods,
to imparting his views to his fellow-townsmen; perhaps, also, he was
unwilling that his rare clients should surprise him sitting, clerkless and
unoccupied, in his dusty office. At any rate, his hours there were not

much longer or more regular than Charity's at the library; the rest of the
time he spent either at the store or in driving about the country on
business connected with the insurance companies that he represented,
or in sitting at home reading Bancroft's History of the United States and
the speeches of Daniel Webster.
Since the day when Charity had told him that she wished to succeed to
Eudora Skeff's post their relations had undefinably but definitely
changed. Lawyer Royall had kept his word. He had obtained the place
for her at the cost of considerable maneuvering, as she guessed from
the number of rival candidates, and from the acerbity with which two of
them, Orma Fry and the eldest Targatt girl, treated her for nearly a year
afterward. And he had engaged Verena Marsh to come up from Creston
and do the cooking. Verena was a poor old widow, doddering and
shiftless: Charity suspected that she came for her keep. Mr. Royall was
too close a man to give a dollar a day to a smart girl when he could get
a deaf pauper for nothing. But at any rate, Verena was there, in the attic
just over Charity, and the fact that she was deaf did not greatly trouble
the young girl.
Charity knew that what had happened on that hateful night would not
happen again. She understood that, profoundly as she had despised Mr.
Royall ever since, he despised himself still more profoundly. If she had
asked for a woman in the house it was far less for her own defense than
for his humiliation. She needed no one to defend her: