Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880», sayfa 11
WESTBROOK
Ruth looked very warm and tired as she came up the path in the strong sunlight; and in striking contrast to her sat Miss Custer in the sheltered veranda, with her cool gray draperies flowing about her in the most graceful folds that could be imagined, as though a sculptor's hand had arranged them. Her dress was cut so as to disclose her white throat rising, swan-like, above a ruffling of soft yellow lace; and her sleeves, flaring a little and short enough to reveal a good deal of the exquisitely-moulded arms, were edged with the same costly trimming, throwing a creamy shadow on the white skin and giving it a tinge like ivory.
Miss Custer liked being considered a brunette, and directed all the arts of her toilette to the bringing out of that idea. She had not much to commence with, however. Her eyes were brown, it is true, but they were a sort of amber-brown, large and serene, with dusky, long-fringed lids drooping over them; and her hair, which was dark in the shadow of the veranda, all hemmed in with trees in thick foliage, was bright gold in certain lights.
She was an amply-framed, finely-proportioned person, and rejoiced in her physique, having a masculine pride in her breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. But in all other respects she was exquisitely feminine: she never displayed either strength or agility. Westbrook was a country place, and in the young folks' rambles about town and out over the hills she was more often fatigued than anybody else, and obliged to accept support from some one of the gentlemen, all of whom were eager enough to offer their services.
She had been in Westbrook only two weeks—she had come to rest herself from the burdens of fashionable life—but she was already very much at home with the place and the people. She was one of those persons who immediately interest the whole neighborhood, and of whom people say, "Have you met her? Have you been introduced to her?"
She was not an entire stranger: there were a good many people in Westbrook who had known her parents years before, and who took her at once upon the credit of her family.
Ruth looked tired and warm, I say, as she came up the path. It was after four o'clock, and school was just out. She was the teacher of the grammar department in the ugly red-brick school-house down at the other end of the town, and she had had a tiresome walk through the heat.
Miss Custer dropped her work, some delicate embroidery, in her lap and folded her white hands upon it, and smiled down at her. She liked Ruth, and was glad to see her coming: the afternoon had been rather dull because she was alone, and she was not constituted for solitude.
Doctor Ebling had said at the dinner-table that, with Ruth's permission—at which Ruth blushed and said something rather saucy, for her—he would read The Spanish Gypsy to Miss Custer out in the shade.
"It is so confoundedly healthy at this particular season," he said, "especially up among these Connecticut hills, that a physician's occupation's gone."
First, however, he went down town—going part of the way with Ruth—to make sure that no orders were awaiting him at his office, intending to come back immediately.
Miss Custer stepped across the hall from the dining-room into the sitting-room, made cool by having the blinds closed, and struck a few chords on the piano. Herbert Bruce, a young attorney of some wealth and some renown, and bosom friend of Doctor Ebling, followed her, and stood, hat in hand, with his shoulder against the door-jamb. "So you have never read The Gypsy?" he remarked.
Miss Custer turned quickly and came a step toward him. "Oh yes, I have read it," she returned. "Or, rather, a good many people have read it to me. But one can stand hearing a poem a good many times, you know."
"By Jove! that's a cooler!" thought Bruce. "No doubt she has been bored to death by that wretched Gypsy, and now Ebling is going to martyrize her again, and make a fool of himself into the bargain."
"Won't you be seated?" Miss Custer asked, "and let me play you something?"
In the shaded room, with her languid eyes intensified, she was a decided brunette, and a very brilliant and beautiful one. Mr. Bruce, pleading business, although he knew there was not a soul stirring down street, and nothing more to be done in his office than in that of Mortimer Lightwood, Esq., declined rather ungraciously and stalked off.
"A born coquette!" he muttered with his hat pulled over his eyes. "Ebling's a fool: Ruth Stanley is worth a dozen of her."
Miss Custer went up stairs and made her afternoon toilette, then got out her embroidery and came down to her accustomed rustic arm-chair, smilingly conscious of the perfection of all that pertained to herself, from the soft ringlets on her broad forehead, so different from the stiff, frowsy crimps of the country-girls, to the small Newport ties with their cardinal-red bows, the only bright color about her. She was just beginning to wonder what kept the doctor so long, when, raising her eyes from a reverie which had been almost a nap, she saw him driving by at a fast trot, with a farm-boy galloping on horseback beside him. He waved his hand to her.
Just then Hugh, son and heir of Aunt Ruby, mistress of this Westbrook boarding-establishment, who had been sent down town after dinner to do some marketing, came in at the gate with a basket on his arm, eating an apple. He paused when he came up, and rested himself by putting one foot on the lower step and settling his weight upon the other. "There's a man out east bin awfully cut up in a mowin'-machine," said he, glancing up at Miss Custer sideways from under his broad-brimmed straw hat, sure that she would appreciate the news, he being the first to tell it; for he had a boyish conceit that Miss Custer had a very high opinion of him, and even indulged the fancy that if he were a man—say twenty-one—instead of a youth of seventeen, he could cut out all them downtown fellers that hung round her.
"Oh! poor man!" said Miss Custer with a sweetness of sympathy that must have comforted the wounded person immensely had he heard it.
"Burnses' boy came in for Doc Ebling," continued Hugh. "They don't know whether they can patch him up again or not."
"I suppose the doctor will find out," said Miss Custer complacently; and Hugh flung away his apple-core and walked on around the house.
Miss Custer hardly knew what to do with herself. She went back to her room, and was tempted to lie down, but then it would rumple her dress and spoil her hair. She thought of the invalid lady, Mrs. Tascher, whose room was at the other end of the hall, but she had an uncomfortable intuition that Mrs. Tascher disliked her. For herself, she disliked nobody: there were people who were not congenial to her, but she never took the trouble to get up a feeling against them. But it seemed to her Mrs. Tascher had not only clearly defined but conscientious likes and dislikes. She had tried to overcome the opposing current so far as it concerned herself, because it was unpleasant; and, although not wholly unaccountable—for she was conscious of some weaknesses, as most mortals are—so far as Mrs. Tascher was affected by her shortcomings the prejudice seemed unfounded. She had never injured her—never, except in that large sense in which all good souls are injured by wrong-doing; which large sense Miss Custer, perhaps, had but a dim consciousness of even when stung—for she was very susceptible—by the criticism, open or implied, of certain high, discriminating natures.
After a while she went down to the back regions, and glided in upon the white kitchen-floor with her sweeping skirts.
Aunt Ruby looked up with an exclamation of surprise. She was picking over raspberries for tea: "Oh, you oughtn't to come in here, Miss Custer: you'll spoil your clothes."
"Impossible," said Miss Custer, glancing around at the cleanness of everything with flattering significance, and seated herself in a low splint-bottomed chair.
"To be sure, Peggy scrubbed this morning," said Aunt Ruby with a feeling of satisfaction, "but one can't ever be very sure about a kitchen-floor."
"I could always be sure enough of yours to scatter my best things upon it," said Miss Custer, who, wishing to be entertained, was exceedingly good-natured; though, for that matter, she was seldom otherwise.
Aunt Ruby, who was greatly taken with the fine-lady boarder who made herself so common, entertained her better than she thought, for Miss Custer took a curious interest in most of the people she met, and liked to study them.
Of course Aunt Ruby could not spend time for her own or anybody else's amusement merely: when she got through with the raspberries she went at something else, her loose slippers clattering over the floor back and forth wherever her duty called her. But still, she talked, and Miss Custer sat looking out into the clean-swept back yard with its boxed-up flower-beds blooming with the gayest annuals, and its cooped-up hens with their broods of puffy chickens scratching and picking and chirping outside.
"Have Doctor Ebling and Miss Stanley been long engaged?" Miss Custer asked, the conversation having somehow led up to that query.
"Oh, la! yes," Aunt Ruby answered—"for more'n a year. The way of it was: Ruth's guardian, Mr. Murray, who was a minister, went off to some forrin country several years ago to be a missionary, and left Ruth here to finish her education. He was to send for her to come an' teach in a mission-school if she wanted to go—an' she al'ays said she did—after she'd graduated in the normal. But she came up here to stay a spell after graduatin', an' met Doctor Ebling; an' they took a notice to each other right away, an' were engaged. She wrote to Mr. Murray about it, an' he gave his consent to the marriage. But it couldn't take place just yet, for the doctor had only just begun his practice an' wasn't ready to settle down."
"That is, I suppose, he had not sufficient means to set up housekeeping?" said Miss Custer, smiling.
"Well, perhaps not in the way he'd like," Aunt Ruby returned evasively, not being a gossip in the mischievous sense.
"And your other gentleman-boarder, Mr. Bruce—" began Miss Custer, and then stopped.
"Oh, he's got enough money to set up housekeeping like a king," said Aunt Ruby, feeling that this was safe ground. "If he had anybody to set up with him," she added, and laughed at her own wit.
"But did Miss Stanley really think of going to teach in a foreign mission-school?" Miss Custer asked.
"To be sure she did," said Aunt Ruby. "She's a Christian girl, if ever there was one. You might look the world over, Miss Custer, an' you'd hardly find another girl like Ruth Stanley. She's the same as a missionary right here at home, because she looks out for every poor an' sick body in the town, an' spends half her wages to help them."
"Just the sort of person, then, for a doctor's wife," laughed Miss Custer, and gathered up her embroidery to go back to the veranda.
Instead of going through the dining-room, the way she had entered, she crossed over to the door of the back sitting-room, which was ajar, and pushed it open. She started and her cheeks crimsoned, at the recollection of her conversation with Aunt Ruby, on finding the sitting-room occupied.
Mrs. Tascher sat in Aunt Ruby's great arm-chair, with its calico cushions, looking over some fashion-plates in the carelessly-indolent way that very warm weather induces. She had some pieces of muslin and a pair of scissors beside her on the table, as though she had been cutting out. She looked up with a smile that was intended simply as an expression of politeness, and not such a smile as she would give a friend, and nodded: "Good-afternoon, Miss Custer."
Miss Custer, feeling herself compromised by having been caught gossiping—and by Mrs. Tascher, of all people!—fortified herself by a little accession of pride in her usually suave demeanor. "Good-afternoon," she returned, passing on through the room. "How stiflingly warm it is here!"
"Yes. I have been thinking of going into the parlor," said Mrs. Tascher: "it is always cool there, because the blinds are kept closed."
"Does she say that to prevent my taking refuge in the parlor?" thought Miss Custer, and moved on and went outside.
By and by some soft piano-strains came through the window, the sash of which was raised, at her back. When they ceased she became conscious, without turning her head to look through the shutters, that Mrs. Tascher had seated herself in an easy-chair and taken up a book from the centre-table, which held the usual stock of gilt-edged poems—Whittier's, Tennyson's, etc.
Nearly an hour passed in sultry silence, broken only by the buzzing of flies and, now and then, a subdued sound of wheels on the sandy road below. At last the gate-latch clicked, and Ruth came in, walking slowly up the path.
Doctor Ebling had driven by a few moments before, and gone up the alley to the stable, and just as Ruth reached the steps, shutting her parasol and smiling up rather wearily at Miss Custer, he came around the corner of the house, lifting his hat and wiping the perspiration from his face.
"Why, where have you been?" Ruth asked in surprise.
"In the country," said he.
"And just think, Miss Stanley," exclaimed Miss Custer, speaking to Ruth, but looking a smiling reproach at the doctor, and for a moment forgetting the parlor occupant at her back, "here I have been sitting this whole blessed afternoon! I could have borne the infliction of my own solitary company better, of course, if I had not been promised an entertainment."
"You must charge your disappointment to a poor fellow who got himself cut to pieces by a grass-mower," said the doctor.
"Who was it?" asked Ruth quickly, with a sympathetic play of facial muscles.
"A man by the name of Burgess, out east of town."
"And is he in a bad way?"
"Rather."
Ruth stood for a moment with her eyes upon the ground, absorbed in the thought of a fellow-being in distress, and the doctor, glancing from her up to Miss Custer, was conscious of the strong contrast between them.
Miss Custer was ten years Ruth's senior, but just now it looked as if it might be the other way: teaching gave Ruth a jaded look that seemed like age. But she was only eighteen. She wore a plain brown dress and linen cuffs and collar, all of which bore the stamp of the school-room. Her shoes were dusty, and her hair, untouched since early morning, had settled into a mass at the back of her neck, more artistic than stylish.
By and by she excused herself and went into the house. It was her habit to take a bath and dress herself before tea. The doctor came up and seated himself on the top step, and remarked that he didn't know whether it would be worth while to go up town before supper or not. Miss Custer was about to persuade him that it would not be worth while, when a movement on the part of Mrs. Tascher recalled her to the consciousness of that lady's proximity and put her under a sort of constraint. "Do you suppose your office to be strewn with orders for your immediate attendance upon wounded individuals?" she asked carelessly.
"If I thought it was," said he, "I'd make for the woods over yonder and hide myself."
"Unnatural physician! I always supposed medical men to be the most devoted to their profession, and the fondest of exercising it, of all beings."
"As to devotion," said the doctor, "I agree with you—we are a devoted class. But as to exercise of any description, that is contrary to all human inclination in such a temperature as this."
"And yet Miss Stanley endures it," said Miss Custer, and could have bitten her tongue the next moment.
A grave expression settled upon the doctor's face. "Yes," said he, "her brave spirit surmounts everything. She is of a different make-up from all the other people I know. And, by the way, it always seems to me irrelevant to bring her into comparison with ordinary mortals," he added; and, getting up and settling his hat upon his head, he strode off.
Miss Custer felt a pang of keen regret. "I have offended him," she thought.
But at the supper-table, an hour or two later, there was no evidence of offence in his attitude toward her, though it must be allowed that he paid rather more attention to Ruth than usual when she came down stairs freshened up in a light-colored lawn dress and her dark hair handsomely coiled and ornamented with a half-blown rose. She sat just opposite Doctor Ebling and beside Miss Custer, and stood the contrast with that amber-eyed beauty very well. Doctor Ebling thought so, and it had a tendency to elevate his spirits. The three carried on an animated dialogue. Mr. Bruce, at the end of the table, was abstracted, and ate his supper with great diligence, except when Mrs. Tascher, being his nearest neighbor, addressed a remark to him: then he turned to her with the utmost deference and replied as elaborately as friendly politeness demanded.
"Any of you folks in for a boat-ride this evening?" called up Hugh from the lower end of the table. "My Sally Lunn is anchored down by the big oak if you want her, and here's the key," holding it up.
"Why, yes," said Doctor Ebling, taking it upon himself to answer. Hugh's questions and remarks were usually addressed to the company collectively, and the doctor generally was tacitly elected spokesman.—"Don't you want to go, ladies?" he asked, "and you, Bruce?"
The ladies, Ruth and Miss Custer, assented with bright looks.
Mr. Bruce replied deliberatively that he was not sure he could leave the office.
"Oh, come now, Bruce, that's put on," said the doctor. "No man, whatever his profession, unless he be a farmer, can convince me of a pressure of business at this season. Banish the delusive idea and make yourself agreeable for once."
Mr. Bruce raised his head, showing at the same time a flash of his white teeth and his black eyes. "For once?" he repeated. "Making myself agreeable, or making a grotesque caricature of myself in my struggles to be agreeable, has been the business of my life."
"Oh, Mr. Bruce!" laughed Ruth. "Everybody knows you are delightful, but the idea of your making an effort in that direction is too absurd."
"If I had made that speech," thought Miss Custer, "Mrs. Tascher would have looked a severe criticism."
Mrs. Tascher, as it was, looked across at Ruth and said laughingly, "That hits him hard, my dear, but he ought not to wince."
Mr. Bruce had colored slightly and broken up the gravity of his face.
Later, when they all rose from the table, Mrs. Tascher, under some pretext or other, detained him a moment. "Do go!" she said: "you see how it is—Ruth never has the doctor to herself a moment any more. They used to take delightful little moonlight strolls together, and were as happy as a pair of young lovers ought to be. Now there is always a third party."
"Oh! So you think I ought to sacrifice myself to the happiness of the precious lovers? And what if I get enthralled myself? Who will come to my rescue?"
"I am willing to trust you," laughed Mrs. Tascher. "You have thirty years upon your head, and a vast amount of hard practicality in it: Dr. Ebling lacks something of both."
The girls had got their hats and were already out upon the veranda.
"Come, Bruce: have you decided whether there is an important case pending or not?" called the doctor.
Mrs. Tascher gave him a little push, and he sauntered out. She stood in the doorway and saw him, with a feeling of satisfaction, pair off with Miss Custer after they had got outside the gate. "I believe she likes him twenty times better than she does the doctor," she soliloquized. "And yet with what persistency she clings to Ruth and her lover! Poor Ruth! She takes her down in good faith."
The stream upon which Westbrook was built was about half a mile distant, and the sun was going down when they reached the big oak where the boat was anchored. Doctor Ebling clambered down the steep bank and unlocked it, and got in and rowed up a little way to where there was a better descent.
"Now, then, shall we all go at once," said he, "or take turns?"
"It is such a diminutive vessel," said Bruce, eying it doubtingly, "that perhaps Miss Custer and myself had better 'pause upon the brink' here, and wait until you two have made a short voyage."
"Oh, we shall not make a very short voyage," said Ruth, running down the bank and grasping the doctor's hand as he held it out to steady her in stepping into the boat. "I want to go up as far as the bridge and make a sketch to-night: the sunset and the moon-rise are lovely."
"Better come on—don't think we'll upset," said the doctor, beginning, nevertheless, to push off.
Bruce looked about and found a log to sit on. "Just spread your shawl on it," said he; and Miss Custer was obliged to unfold her beautiful white burnous.
"What an idea!" she thought, "and how ungallant he is!"
And yet he had a remarkable power of fascination, though, as Ruth said, he made no effort to please.
He took a seat beside her, and for some time his eyes followed the boat. After a while he said, "And did you manage to get through with The Spanish Gypsy again?"
"Oh no," said Miss Custer. "Didn't you know? The doctor was called into the country."
"Ah! he was?"
"Yes."
"Then you lost your afternoon's entertainment? That must have been a great deprivation."
He turned his head and looked at her with a lingering, exploring gaze that was difficult for her to fathom. How should she answer? He was certainly the only being of his sex who baffled or embarrassed her.
"It was indeed," she returned demurely, and yet with a hope that he might discover that she was but half in earnest. Her eyelids drooped and her lips were curved with a smile. She was pleasurably conscious of his prolonged gaze, and hoped something from it, knowing from much previous experience the power of her beauty.
The silence was very eloquent. He broke it—or intensified it indeed—by repeating from The Gypsy, in a low and remarkably well-modulated voice,
"Do you know
Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air
Breathes gently on us from the orange trees,
It seems that with the whisper of a word
Our souls must shrink, yet poorer, more apart.
Is it not so?
Do you know the answer?" he asked, never once taking away his eyes.
She raised hers and gave it with equal effect:
"Yes, dearest, it is true.
Speech is but broken light upon the depth
Of the unspoken: even your loved words
Float in the larger meaning of your voice
As something dimmer."
There was nothing audacious in her manner of repeating it—no coquettish reference, in voice or glance, to him. She threw into her eyes an expression of complete absorption in the spirit and story of the poem, and appeared to be far away with Don Silva and Fedalina.
Her seriousness and evident intensity of feeling were a surprise to him. He had simply been trying her with a careless stroke, but he seemed to strike true flint. "I could have sworn," he thought to himself, "that she was making fun of Ebling's proposition to read to her to-day when she said one could stand hearing a poem a good many times." And he actually went on repeating passage after passage, while she sat with her hands folded and her eyes fixed dreamily, drinking it in like distant music sounding all the way from the Spanish shores.
They were both so absorbed—not in the poem, but in thoughts that floated under the poem and circled right around themselves—that they did not hear the dipping of the oars as the doctor rowed back to shore in the white moonlight—not softened now, as it had been a while ago, by the mellow tints in the west. "Hallo!" he called. "Come down now and embark."
"Shall we?" asked Bruce in a voice so low that it seemed almost tender.
She answered by getting up, and he took the burnous off the log and folded it about her shoulders. It gave her a conscious thrill.
They sauntered down, and Bruce gave her his hand to make the descent of the bank. Ruth sprang up like a gazelle while the doctor held the boat to shore, and then pushed it off when the occupants were seated.
"I'm the poorest rower in Christendom," said Bruce, taking up the oars and making a few awkward strokes.
"Never mind about rowing," said Miss Custer. "When we get out into the current let us drift: I like it just as well."
Bruce did so, resting the handles of the oars upon his knees.
Perfect silence reigned. The moon was strangely bright, making the very air silvery. Miss Custer, with the rarest tact, let the stillness alone, knowing there was power in it.
By and by Bruce murmured,
"With dreamful eyes,
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.
What a strange effect moonlight and water have upon us, Miss Custer! They seem almost to disembody us. I can hardly ever recall a single line of poetry in the daytime when the sun is shining. But moonlight brings out all the delicate images of the mind's palimpsest."
"Pray, then, go on and repeat something more," said Miss Custer in a low voice: "I like to hear you. Repeat the rest of 'Drifting.'"
Bruce complied, and then struck upon Byron, and was surprised and delighted to find that Miss Custer followed him even there. The truth was, Miss Custer had rehearsed all these things many times before with different actors. The whole plot lay before her, ending and all. Bruce was certainly hooked, and all she had to do was to draw the line carefully in. To be sure, he was an odd specimen, a sort of man she was not much acquainted with; but that made him all the more interesting, and she was conscious of her power to manage him.
At last Bruce put the boat about without consulting her, and rowed back to the landing in silence and with considerable dexterity, considering his self-depreciation as a rower. Ruth and the doctor, who had no doubt been affected by the moonlight too, stood on the bank waiting for them. They all went home together, a rather merry party, and immediately dispersed for the night.
The next morning, when Miss Custer came down to breakfast radiant and joyous, with a consciousness of being in perfect keeping with the unpoetic sunshine, she was stricken with consternation at finding Mr. Bruce as distant and nonchalant as ever. No lingering, exploring glance this morning—nothing but the usual flash of his dark eyes as he bowed to her. Was it possible that all the fine effects of last night had passed out of his consciousness?
Some time during the day Bruce found an opportunity to say to Mrs. Tascher, "Don't ask me to do it again: I came near making a fool of myself last night. Got to quoting poetry and all that."
"Did you, indeed?" said she, laughing. "If the siren had that effect on you, a hardened bachelor, consider how it would go with Ebling."
"Ebling's heart is supposed to be preoccupied," said Bruce: "mine is an 'aching void.'"
That evening Hugh challenged Miss Custer to a game of croquet, and she, with secret reluctance, but a very good grace—being one of those sweetly-amiable people who never speak ill of any one, and never manifest the least boredom, no matter who undertakes the office of entertainer to them—accepted. However, she would make the most she could out of it. She invited the rest of the company to come down and look on and see that she had fair play. Bruce, at whom she glanced appealingly, paid no heed, but put on his hat and went down town with the air of a man greatly preoccupied and oppressed with business cares. Mrs. Tascher never went out when the dew was falling, and so there was nobody but Ruth and the doctor. They complied at once, and took seats on a rustic bench under the trees.
Miss Custer was conscious of showing to advantage in this picturesque game, and paid far more attention to her attitudes than her strokes: as a consequence, she was beaten, and immediately threw down her mallet.
"I'll give you another chance," said Hugh wistfully.
"Oh, I could never redeem myself with you if we should play till doomsday," she answered.
"You have beaten me," persisted Hugh.
"But I have a presentiment that I can't do it to-night," she returned.
"Well, then, Hugh," said the doctor, getting up and helping himself to a mallet, "if she is so disheartened, suppose we give her a chance to come off second best by taking a game with me?"
Hugh, smiling, but a little put out, stepped back, and the contest began, with far more animation on the part of Miss Custer. Presently Hugh's mother called him, and he went away. After a time Ruth called to the players, who were both at the other end of the ground, "Say, folks, if you'll excuse me I'll go in."
Miss Custer turned round and answered, "Oh, poor child! I presume you do find it dull."
Ruth ran up to Mrs. Tascher's room. Her acquaintance with that lady she counted among the best things of her life. The world had seemed larger and brighter and better since she had known her.
Mrs. Tascher was a widow: she had considerable wealth, but being an invalid she was deprived of the enjoyment of it to a great extent. She welcomed Ruth's friendly little visits always with a smile that seemed to make her soul stand out upon her face. She was what one might call a woman of the world. That is, she had travelled much, read much, studied people much, and mingled all her previous life in intelligent and refined society.
"Why, where is the rest of your party, my dear?" she asked as Ruth tapped on the door and came in.
"Hugh's mother wanted him," Ruth answered, "and I left Frank and Miss Custer playing a game."
Mrs. Tascher's smile faded. She felt tempted to speak a word of warning, but it seemed too bad to destroy the innocent faith of this high-minded, unsuspecting girl. She gave Ruth a chair, and Ruth begged her to read something: Mrs. Tascher's reading was sweeter than music to her. She complied readily, because it gave her pleasure to do anything Ruth asked. "Here is a poem by Whittier, just out," she said, taking up a magazine, the leaves of which she had cut only that afternoon. She began it, and Ruth leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes the better to see the images that passed in her mind. Mrs. Tascher read on until the light grew so dim that she could not see the lines, and then she got up and went to the window to finish. She glanced out as she did so, and stood silent. At last she said, "Come here, Ruth."
