Miss Perkins gave him a quick, sharp glance.
“She has acted,” she replied. “But Elvira Price had too much conscience to act long.”
He gave a sigh of relief.
“She acted in Boston, because she was bound to try it. She wanted to try everything—everything that would keep her father out of the poor-house and educate the family. But acting, Mr. Archibald, is a dreadful business! As soon as Elvira saw into it a little she quit. The air wasn’t pure enough, somehow, for her. Elvira, she needs awful pure air!”
Again Archibald felt a certain glow of satisfaction steal over him.
“Do you know,” he said, after a suitable pause, “I am more than half-inclined to make her angry by running up to East Village.”
Miss Perkins gave a little quinzied laugh of satisfaction. She was beginning to like Archibald very much.
“It would startle Elvira; but she’d be pleased,” ventured the thin old maid. “She’d be pleased—in spite of everything!”
A few days later Archibald, after half a day’s journey, found himself in Vermont. As the train drew near East Village the mountains grew higher and the scenery wilder. He could see the great August moon roll itself above the high crest of the mountains to the west. Though Archibald was far from superstitious, he was pained to observe that he saw the moon over his left shoulder.
It was late when he stumbled from the steps of the car upon the wooden platform of the station at East Village. It was dark, also, and to him, extraordinarily cold. He groped his way, shivering, past a blinding reflector, where half a dozen men in cow-hide boots were examing a list of invoices, to what he could dimly outline as the village stage. No one spoke to him, and he found that no one seemed to care whether he, the sole passenger, was carried. He had visions of an unpleasant nature of being deposited inside the coach in a shed or stable to await the morning. He felt the stage pitch and toss for twenty minutes like a bark upon an angry sea. When all was still again he found that the driver had drawn up before a white-pillared old-fashioned house, which stood a little back from the street. At the side of the gate a small wooden building bore the sign, which was illuminated by the stage lamp,