When the door had quite closed behind her, they sat silent and hushed. Suddenly Miss Ronald walked over to the window, and picking up the photograph where it had fallen, face downward, she tore it into little bits.
AN AQUARELLE
ALLARDYCE felt both aggrieved and bored when he found that his sister had gone off with a walking-party and was not likely to return for an hour or two. He had this unwelcome bit of news from the young woman in cap and gown who had come from the office into the reception-room and was standing before him, glancing every now and then from his face to the card she held, with a severely kind look out of her gray eyes.
“I telegraphed her I was in Boston and would be out,” remarked Allardyce, in an injured tone.
“Yes,” assented the young woman, “Miss Allardyce had left word in the office that she was expecting her brother, but that as he had not come by the 2.30 or 3.10 train, she had concluded he was detained in Boston, and that if he did arrive later he was to wait.” She added that he would be obliged to do so in any case, as there was no express back to Boston for two hours, and that if he would like to see the college while he waited she would send someone to take him over it.
But Allardyce seemed so doubtful as to whether he cared to become better acquainted with the architecture of the college, and so disappointed about it all, that the kindly senior felt sorry for him and suggested sympathetically that he “might amuse himself by strolling through the grounds.” She could not have been over twenty, but she had all the seriousness and responsibility of an undergraduate, and Allardyce suddenly felt very young and foolish in her presence and wondered hotly how old she thought he was, and why she hadn’t told him to “run out and play.” He decided that her idea was a good one, however, so he took his hat and stick and wandered down the south corridor to the piazza. Standing there he could see the lake and the many private boats lying in the bend of the shore, each fastened to its little dock, and beyond, the boat-house with the class practice-barges, slim and long, just visible in the cool darkness beneath. He thought it all looked very inviting, and there was a rustic bench under a big tree half-way down the hill where he could smoke and get a still better view of the water.
So he settled himself quite comfortably, lit a cigarette, and looked gloomily out over the lake. He assured himself bitterly that after having been abroad for so many years, and after having inconvenienced himself by taking a boat to Boston instead of a Cunarder to New York—his natural destination—in order to see his sister, that she was extremely unkind not to have waited for him. He was deep in the mental composition of a most reproachful note to her when he discovered that by closing his eyes a little and looking intently at the Italian Gardens on the opposite side of the water, he could easily fancy himself at a little place he knew on Lake Maggiore. This afforded him amusement for a while, but it soon palled on him, and he was beginning to wonder moodily how he was ever to get through two hours of the afternoon, when he saw a young girl come out of the boat-house with a pair of sculls and make her way to one of the little boats. She leaned over it, and Allardyce could see that she was trying to fit a key into the padlock which fastened the boat to its dock, and that after several attempts to undo it she looked rather hopelessly at the lock and heavy chain. He went quickly down the hill and along the shore. He was suddenly extremely glad that he was in America, where he could be permitted to speak to and help a girl, even if a total stranger, without having his assistance interpreted as an insult.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, lifting his hat. “Can I be of any help?”