The President of the People's Lyceum Club made a little speech, and dismissed the audience. "Miss Kent had received by telegraph most painful intelligence from her family; was utterly unable to appear again."
The audience behaved as an American People's Club knows so well how to behave; dispersed quietly, without a grumble, or a recollection of the half value of the tickets lost. Miss Kent's carriage drove rapidly from a side door. In two hours, she was on board the night train down from Vermont.
That was on Friday night.
On Sunday morning Frank Sunderline came in on the service train, and went up to Pilgrim Street.
"Mrs. Kent is dead," he told Kay. "Marion is in awful trouble. Can't you come out to her?"
Ray was just leaving the house to go to church. Instead, she went with Frank to the horse-railroad station, catching the eleven o'clock car. She had been expecting him in the afternoon, to take her to drink tea with his mother, who was not able to come in to see her.
In an hour, she went in at Mrs. Kent's white gate,—Frank leaving her there. They both felt, without saying, that it would not be kind to appear together. Marion had that news, though, as she had had the other; from her Job's comforter, Mrs. Knoxwell, who was persistently "sitting with her."
"There's Frank Sunderline and Ray Ingraham at the gate. She's coming in. They're engaged. It's just out."
"What do I care?" cried Marion, fiercely, turning upon her, and astounding Mrs. Knoxwell by the sudden burst of angry words; for she had not spoken for more than an hour, in which the blacksmith's wife had administered occasional appropriate sentences of stinging condolence and well-meant retrospection. "I wish you would go home!"
Every monosyllable was uttered with a desperate, wrathful deliberateness and flinging away of all pretense and politeness.