Her eyes softened.
“I think I understand,” she answered, quietly.
“Perhaps,” he said, with a far-away look in his eyes, “perhaps I’m a fool. You can’t know how I feel about you. But Lee—he loves you and needs you—and I can’t help caring. Why am I such a fool?”
Freda gently released her hand from Mauney’s, and, rising, walked slowly down the hall towards her room. On entering it, she closed the door and sank down upon her knees beside a big chair and deliberately rested her face upon her arms. She was not weeping or praying. Seldom did she do either. Her intense mind was engaged with Mauney Bard. He did not know that he was being pierced with arrows of shrewd analysis, that he was being tried in the fires of a woman’s relentless gauging. Nor did he see her serene face presently lifted to the warm sunlight that flooded from her window. Her features wore a new restfulness, for she had found the beautiful answer to her thoughts. Delicately the balances of her justice had tipped, to find Mauney not a fool.
CHAPTER VII.
The Last Days at Franklin Street.
Freda MacDowell was one of the most remarked women who had attended the University of Merlton in recent years. First as a student, then as a departmental secretary, she had left behind her a definite impression on the unchanging portion of the college—the faculty. Occasionally a student does this, but never by academic prowess. The brilliant scholar passes through his four years with lustre of a kind, but is soon swallowed up in the oblivion of the graduate status. The remembered student betrays, even in those budding years, a definite mould of mind, illustrates a definite viewpoint and adheres to the peculiar details of conduct that mark a distinct personality.
Freda possessed some unaccountable leverage on life that bestowed this distinction. She was just a little mysterious. No one knew why she had come upon the college world, from the very start, as a rebel, fortified capably against the acknowledged virtues of a university. Books were proclaimed a burden, lectures and classes were boring. Girl associates freely disagreed with her and disliked her. But on attempting to engage her in altercation they discovered a handful of unanswerable arguments. Freda’s tenets were never flippant. On the surface they sometimes appeared even affected yet were found to be based on carefully-digested opinion.
She never ventured on speculative problems. She followed her own injunction: “Open your eyes and look at life.” In so doing she ran the risk of the realist. Life, too closely inspected, often seems monstrous.