The child had no reason to think the young man was not fulfilling the promise he had given. His alert carriage and concentrated expression contradicted any suspicion of faltering. Yet she was restless; his friends came often to see him.
"Why did they come, disturbing him at his work?" she asked spitefully.
Mr. Standish called her a hard little taskmaster, and received his friends cordially. A formless fear was at the child's heart. She haunted the threshold of his door when they were in his room; she lay awake of nights when she knew that he had gone out with them. She magnified to herself the number of times that he had gone out earlier and come home later than he used. If she dropped asleep her slumbers were broken until she heard the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.
One evening Mr. Standish went off in company with two journalistic comrades to a public dinner, given to members of the press by the directors of a new railway company. Meg would not retract the unfavorable verdict she pronounced upon his appearance in the new dress suit he had ordered specially for the occasion. She was not to be mollified by the promise of an orange from the directors' table. "She did not want an orange; she did not see what a dinner had to do with a railway," she averred.
That night she could not sleep. The formless fear at her heart lay heavy upon it; it seemed to her that the fulfillment of that nameless dread was approaching. As the hour came and passed Mr. Standish had fixed for his return, visions began to group about her bed and pass before her wide-open eyes. All the sorrowful stories of accidents Mr. Standish had related to her enacted themselves before her, in which he appeared the central figure. The night plodded slowly on; the clock in the hall struck the hours at intervals. When the clock struck three Meg got up and paced about the room, a wan little ghost.
When another hour struck the four peals sounded like a hammer-stroke on a coffin. Meg began to dress. She did not know why she did so, or what she would do after, but a vague sense of being needed impelled her. She fumbled her way to the staircase and sat on the topmost step.
She waited in the darkness and silence. A faint whiteness began to steal through the sides of the blinds drawn over the window on the lobby. The banisters, the flight of stairs, showed shadowily, gradually growing more distinct.
Suddenly she sprang to her feet. There was the scrape of a key in the latch. A step sounded in the hall, made its way up the stairs. It was Mr. Standish. When he reached the topmost flight of steps he perceived the little gray figure standing waiting in the gray dawn, erect, immobile. He steadied himself against the banisters and began to laugh. He looked pale, his eyes dark; his hat was thrown back, his hair disordered.
"Why, Meg, you little detective, are you there? Such a jolly night! splendid dinner! No humbug this time, Meg—real turtle, tuns of champagne!" He came up a few steps. "Tuns of champagne, Meg! Speeches, Meg! Such nonsense! Everybody complimented everybody else. I did not forget you, Meg. Look here, I stole an orange and sweetmeats!" He began fumbling in his pockets.