“Oh, it’s all right now—how glad I am! I—I wish I could begin to tell you, Miss Ronald, how awfully cut up I am about it”—but the girl stopped him.
“I quite understand, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, stiffly. “You had better go now. I am sorry there is no hotel nearer.” And then Miss Arnold heard a muttered good-night and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, and as she opened the doors a moment later Miss Ronald fell limply into her arms.
They sat up and talked it all over for an hour, and Miss Ronald said she was intensely disappointed in Perry Cunningham, and that she could never, never forgive him. Miss Arnold contended that she did not quite see what there was to forgive; it had all been unfortunate, and she thought that Mr. Cunningham had done all he could—that he hadn’t kept the train from stopping at Allston, nor did he make the cab run into the ice-wagon, nor could he compel the New York express to stop for them, and that if he forgot to look at his watch at the Thorndyke—why, she did so too. And she told Miss Ronald frankly that she might have been more civil to him, considering that he had had all the trouble on her account and was now walking three miles in order to get a place in which to sleep for three hours. And she added that she thought if anyone was to be angry about the affair it was herself, since she had taken Miss Ronald for a burglar and had been frightened nearly to death. And finally Miss Ronald grew rather remorseful at the thought of how she had sent the boy off, and of how truly considerate he had been through the whole affair, and of what good friends they had once been, and she went to sleep with the good resolution to write him a very nice note the next day. And on the following morning, when an immense box of roses came with Mr. Perry Cunningham’s card tucked humbly in one corner and almost out of sight, Miss Ronald restored him to full favor and wrote him a charming letter inviting him out for the next week to Float-Day.