"Why should I stay here?" she said aloud. "Why? What's to keep me here? I can make my living anywhere."
"But, no," she asserted passionately, "I won't run away. That would be running away, and I haven't anything to be ashamed of. I will not run."
Still the idea kept recurring to her. It promised relief from the hurt of averted faces and coolness where she had a right to expect sympathy and friendship. She had never been more than two hundred miles from Granville in her life. But she knew that a vast, rich land spread south and west. She was human and thoroughly feminine; loneliness appalled her, and she had never suffered as Granville at large was making her suffer.
The legal notice of the bequest was mailed to her. She tore up the letter and threw it in the fire as if it were some poisonous thing. The idea of accepting his money stirred her to a perfect frenzy. That was piling it up.
All during the next week she worked at her machine in the office of the furniture company, keeping strictly to herself, doing her work impassively, efficiently, betraying no sign of the feelings that sometimes rose up, the despairing protest and angry rebellion against the dubious position she was in through no fault of her own. She swore she would not leave Granville, and it galled her to stay. It was a losing fight, and she knew it even if she did not admit the fact. If she could have poured the whole miserable tale into some sympathetic ear she would have felt better, and each day would have seemed less hard. But there was no such ear. Her friends kept away.
Saturday of the second week her pay envelope contained a brief notice that the firm no longer required her services. There was no explanation, only perfunctory regrets; and, truth to tell, Hazel cared little to know the real cause. Any one of a number of reasons might have been sufficient. But she realized how those who knew her would take it, what cause they would ascribe. It did not matter, though. The very worst, she reasoned, could not be so bad as what had already happened—could be no more disagreeable than the things she had endured in the past two weeks. Losing a position was a trifle. But it set her thinking again.
"It doesn't seem to be a case of flight," she reflected on her way home, "so much as a case of being frozen out, compelled to go. I can't stay here and be idle. I have to work in order to live. Well, I'm not gone yet."
She stopped at a news stand and bought the evening papers. Up in the top rack of the stand the big heads of an assorted lot of Western papers caught her eye. She bought two or three on the impulse of the moment, without any definite purpose except to look them over out of mere curiosity. With these tucked under her arm, she turned into the boarding-house gate, ran up the steps, and, upon opening the door, her ears were gladdened by the first friendly voice she had heard—it seemed to her—in ages, a voice withal that she had least expected to hear. A short, plump woman rushed out of the parlor, and precipitated herself bodily upon Hazel.
"Kitty Ryan! Where in the wide, wide world did you come from?" Hazel cried.
"From the United States and everywhere," Miss Ryan replied. "Take me up to your room, dear, where we can talk our heads off.