She took the money. Her throat had contracted so that she could not thank him for it in words. But she retained a humble, thankful attitude, and it sufficed.
He cared nothing about hurting the feelings of the girl. He did not even inquire—in his own mind—if she had any feelings to be hurt! He was so self-centred, so pompous, so utterly selfish, that he never thought how he might wrong other people.
Willets Starkweather was very tenacious of his own dignity and his own rights. But for the rights of others he cared not at all. And there was not an iota of tenderness in his heart for the orphan who had come so trustingly across the continent and put herself in his charge. Indeed, aside from a feeling of something like fear of Helen, he betrayed no interest in her at all.
Helen went out of the room without a further word. She was more subdued that evening at dinner than she had been before. She did not break out in rude speeches, nor talk very much. But she was distinctly out of her element—or so her cousins thought—at their dinner table.
“I tell you what it is, girls,” Belle, the oldest cousin, said after the meal and when Helen had gone up to her room without being invited to join the family for the evening, “I tell you what it is: If we chance to have company to dinner while she remains, I shall send a tray up to her room with her dinner on it. I certainly could not bear to have the Van Ramsdens, or the De Vornes, see her at our table.”
“Quite true,” agreed Hortense. “We never could explain having such a cousin.”
“Horrors, no!” gasped Flossie.
Helen had found a book in the library, and she lit the gas in her room (there was no electricity on this upper floor) and forgot her troubles and unhappiness in following the fortunes of the heroine of her story-book. It was late when she heard the maids retire. They slept in rooms opening out of a side hall.
By and by—after the clock in the Metropolitan tower had struck the hour of eleven—Helen heard the rustle and step outside her door which she had heard in the corridor downstairs. She crept to her door, after turning out her light, and opening it a crack, listened.
Had somebody gone downstairs? Was that a rustling dress in the corridor down there—the ghost walk? Did she hear again the “step—put; step—put” that had puzzled her already?