“It seems to me,” and Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes twinkled a little now, “that you have proved quite the contrary. I am proud of you. You have done so well according to your school reports, and been able to earn so much money, too, that I feel you are to be highly commended. I wonder what Euphemia will say?”
Beth looked at her mother sharply. In that moment she guessed half her mother’s secret. The four hundred dollars had been loaned by Larry’s mother!
She felt that she could say nothing to her mother about it. The subject of the supposed loan and her possible return to Rivercliff in the autumn was avoided by both of them for a time. Meanwhile, however, Beth thought deeply about it.
If there was anybody in the world to whom Beth did not wish to feel indebted, it was to Mrs. Euphemia Haven. She could scarcely have told why had she been taxed with the question. She certainly had no dislike for Larry’s mother; only she always felt that the lady was patronizing her and trying to push her aside.
She might have guessed before, Beth told herself, that Mrs. Haven was the only person her mother could possibly have borrowed four hundred dollars from—and without security. So that was how, the summer before, Larry had known that she was going away to school and when, and so had filled her stateroom aboard the Water Wagtail with flowers.
Beth suspected, from what Larry let drop when he called at Rivercliff, that he had come there for the special purpose of learning if reports his mother had evidently heard of Beth’s work were true.
“And he got his answer—with a vengeance,” sighed Beth.
She believed that now Mrs. Haven must be sorry that she had lent the money to pay for the first year’s expenses at Rivercliff. “Of course, my earning money in the way I do has disgusted her. And Larry——”
She could not bear to think of her old friend. Never—till the day she died—could she have just the same measure of affection for a friend that she had for Larry Haven!
He must have known that his mother had loaned the four hundred dollars which Beth had mentioned at their last interview—the day Larry called at Rivercliff School. He knew then that Beth was intent upon paying that loan with the money she earned. And here was her mother desiring her to go on with her education, and so necessarily postponing the evil day of payment into the future.