The girl had thought so much about her equivocal position that her future troubled her. If there was just enough money to give her a college education, she wanted to know it. If she must prepare herself for taking some place at the end of her schooldays in the work-a-day world, she wanted to know that, too.
These were practical thoughts for so young a girl; but Nancy Nelson was practical, despite her imagination.
She had already looked up Clintondale on the map, and upon the railroad time-table. It was half a day’s ride east of Malden, and Cincinnati was one of the points where she changed cars.
Although she had never traveled by train herself, Nancy had heard the other girls exchanging experiences, and she knew that she could get a “stop-over” from the conductor of the train.
She had seen one of Mr. Gordon’s letters which he had written Miss Prentice; the principal had shown it to her.
At that time the girl had memorized the street and number printed at the top of the lawyer’s stiffly-worded communication. She would never forget “No. 714 South Wall Street.”
That was the one secret Nancy Nelson kept hidden within her heart all that long summer while she waited with Miss Trigg, the secretary and general utility teacher, for the return of the principal of Higbee School and the beginning of her new life.
Miss Trigg tried to be nice to her; indeed, she was nice to her after a fashion. But Miss Trigg’s pleasures were between bookcovers; Nancy Nelson was too healthy a girl not to desire something of a more exciting nature than Roman history or higher mathematics on a long, hot summer afternoon.
That was why she stole away from the deeply absorbed Miss Trigg on one such occasion late in August, when they had ridden out to Granville Park to spend an hour or two in the open.
Granville Park bordered a good-sized pond, dammed at its lower end, where was an old mill site. An automobile road crossed the bridge that had been built here; but the mill had not been in commission for years. It was a quiet and picturesque spot.