“It would take more than my tooting to disturb their innocent slumbers, the little dears,” the answer came.
Nan watched the boat disappearing into the dimness of the night, but heard the dipping of paddles and the tinkle of laughter after the canoe was lost to view. So did her hero pass out of her sight as dramatically as he had entered, and so was Nan’s first romance ended.
She stole back to her tent, chilled by the cool night air, and crept shiveringly under the covers. Once in a while a tear would steal from under her closed lids to fall upon her pillow as she lay with hands tightly locked over her throbbing heart. Who drives a sun chariot falls far, and Nan was bruised and hurt after her wild plunge from heaven to earth.
She was pale and wide-eyed the next morning when she took her note and gifts to show her mother. “My blessed lamb,” murmured Mrs. Corner folding her arms around the girl.
Nan dropped her head on her mother’s shoulder. “I heard all you and Aunt Helen and Dr. Paul were saying out there on the porch the other day,” she confessed. “I was in the tent dressing, and I could not come out, and I heard. I wanted to tell you before, but I couldn’t.”
“Dearest daughter, I understand.”
“I know you do, but oh, mother, it hurts, oh, it hurts.”
“My precious child, I know, I know.” Her mother held her close, her cheek against the girl’s bowed head.
Nan was very still for a few minutes, then she said hesitatingly, “Did you feel so when you woke up from your dream about the young clergyman? What woke you, mother?”
She did not see the smile which came over her mother’s face at the recollection of her disillusionment. “I saw him eating roast goose and onions, with the perspiration standing out upon his forehead. It was at a church supper, and I heard him say, ‘If the quail which fed the children of Israel were anything like this roast goose I don’t wonder they sighed for the flesh-pots of Egypt.’ I watched him consume two mighty plates of the supper, smack his greasy lips, and pick his teeth with such an expression of carnal delight as completely disenchanted me, and I realized that the saintly priest in white robes was not the every-day man eating a good dinner.”