"Oh, no, I couldn't think of that, Kitty!" Hazel faltered. "You know I'd love to, and it's awfully good of you, but I think I'm just about ready to go away from Granville."
"Well, come and stop with us till you do go," Kitty insisted. "We are going to take a furnished cottage for a while. Though, between you and me, dear, knowing people as I do, I can't blame you for wanting to be where their nasty tongues can't wound you."
But Hazel was obdurate. She would not inflict herself on the one friend she had left. And Kitty, after a short talk, berated her affectionately for her independence, and rose to go.
"For," said she, "I didn't get hold of this thing till Addie Horton called at the hotel this afternoon, and I didn't stop to think that it was near teatime, but came straight here. Jimmie'll think I've eloped. So ta-ta. I'll come out to-morrow about two. I have to confab with a house agent in the forenoon. By-by."
Hazel sat down and actually smiled when Kitty was gone. Somehow a grievous burden had fallen off her mind. Likewise, by some psychological quirk, the idea of leaving Granville and making her home elsewhere no longer struck her as running away under fire. She did not wish to subject Kitty Brooks to the difficulties, the embarrassment that might arise from having her as a guest; but the mere fact that Kitty stood stanchly by her made the world seem less harsh and dreary, made it seem as if she had, in a measure, justified herself. She felt that she could adventure forth among strangers in a strange country with a better heart, knowing that Kitty Brooks would put a swift quietus on any gossip that came her way.
So that Hazel went down to the dining-room light-heartedly, and when the meal was finished came back and fell to reading her papers. The first of the Western papers was a Vancouver World. In a real-estate man's half-page she found a diminutive sketch plan of the city on the shores of Burrard Inlet, Canada's principal outpost on the far Pacific.
"It's quite a big place," she murmured absently. "One would be far enough away there, goodness knows."
Then she turned to the "Help Wanted" advertisements. The thing which impressed her quickly and most vividly was the dearth of demand for clerks and stenographers, and the repeated calls for domestic help and such. Domestic service she shrank from except as a last resort. And down near the bottom of the column she happened on an inquiry for a school-teacher, female preferred, in an out-of-the-way district in the interior of the province.
"Now, that—" Hazel thought.
She had a second-class certificate tucked away among her belongings. Originally it had been her intention to teach, and she had done so one term in a backwoods school when she was eighteen. With the ending of the term she had returned to Granville, studied that winter, and got her second certificate; but at the same time she had taken a business-college course, and the following June found her clacking a typewriter at nine dollars a week. And her teacher's diploma had remained in the bottom of her trunk ever since.