A quarter of an hour later Betty was hurrying down the road in happy haste, a telegram in her hand for Warwick Hall. It was to Madam Chartley asking if she knew of any vacant position for teachers, in any of the schools of her acquaintance.
CHAPTER X
BY THE SILVER YARD-STICK
With her days shadowed by anxiety over Ida's illness, the care and responsibility of Wardo and her sympathy for Betty's disappointment, Lloyd still found one bright spot, untouched by other people's troubles. If, like the old sun-dial at Warwick Hall, she had taken for her motto: "I only mark the hours that shine," those hours when Leland Harcourt came to teach her Spanish were the ones that would have been numbered.
If she had felt that he regarded it as a bore, or that it cost him the slightest effort, she would have dropped the study immediately; but when he made it plain that it was the chief interest of his days, and the one thing that made his summer in the Valley endurable, she could not help being flattered by his assertions, and exerted herself all the more to make the hour a pleasant one.
It was an agreeable sensation to know that she could interest a man who had known so many interests; that it was she who held him in Lloydsboro; that every turn of her head, every inflection of her voice, every phase of her varying moods had a charm for him. It made her tingle with satisfaction when she realized that she had justified Gay's confidence in her power, but sometimes after he had gone she felt that she was not exerting it to the extent she had promised. She wasn't "keying him up to any higher pitch." She wasn't inspiring him with the ambition which his family seemed to think was all that was necessary to make him capable of any achievement. The idea of her influencing him did not seem as preposterous and ridiculous as it had the first few weeks of their acquaintance, but somehow it did not seem so necessary. Sometimes she wondered if the "sweet doing nothing" that Gay said was in his blood had not affected her also. Maybe that was why she liked his very indolence, and forgave in him what she would have condemned in any other chronic idler. Maybe he was influencing her.
"But he sha'n't!" she declared to herself when the thought first startled her, and to prove that he hadn't she seized the first opportunity which came in her way to take him to task. His signet ring bore the same crest that was on the silver ladle, and he used it one morning to seal a note for her. With a significant glance in its direction she asked saucily, "Señor Tarrypin, when are you going to put your family motto into actual use? When are you going to begin striving till you ovahcome—till you do something really worth while in the world?"
With the question came the quick remembrance of a winter day by the churchyard stile, and Malcolm's boyish voice protesting earnestly—"I'll be anything you want me to be, Lloyd." And then like a flash came that other scene and Phil's pleading voice, "I say it in all humility, Lloyd, this little bit of turquoise kept me 'true blue.'"