“Perhaps I shall if that tiresome Lytton girl keeps calling me up and wanting to talk, only I’m afraid your shoes would pinch me rather badly, they are so much smaller than mine,” Nell answered, with a merry laugh, looking from her own stout footgear, bought from the store at Nine Springs, and eminently suitable for country wear, to the high-heeled, pointed-toed shoes with great steel buckles which Miss Simpson was wearing.
“That isn’t a girl at Lytton; but Claude Hale, a friend of mine. I didn’t tell him I was going away to-day, so, of course, he wonders why I am so unresponsive. Pray don’t tell him I am gone, then he’ll be puzzled to death at my coldness,” giggled Miss Simpson, in a high state of glee.
“I shall not tell him anything, but I hope he will soon leave off worrying,” replied Nell; then, as the cars came rumbling down the valley, she went to the door of her office to see Miss Simpson get on board.
“If nothing is harder than to-night has been, I shall be able to manage all right, and I will write to Gertrude to-morrow and tell her so,” murmured Nell to herself, as she stood at the door watching the retreating figure of Miss Simpson.
A wave of homesick longing came over her as, with a screech, a roar, and a clatter, the train of cars moved on out of the station. Lorimer’s Clearing was not her home, but it was the only place in the wide world which had given her a home feeling, and she yearned to go back to the toil and the drudgery, if only with these she could have the love which had surrounded her there.
In her generous heart she had quite overlooked and forgotten Mrs. Lorimer’s first hard treatment of her, and although it was quite possible that she would never feel the same warm love for the mistress of the house as she had felt for all the others, there was no danger of her remembering, as a grudge, that Mrs. Lorimer had been unfair, nay, positively unkind.
Punctually on the stroke of eight came puffing, wheezing Mrs. Nichols, who subsided on the one chair which the office contained, to wait while Nell shut everything up safely for the night.
Even in the pauses of her work she was conscious again of that same close scrutiny which had bothered her so much before.
“Perhaps it is her way, or her squint,” she said to herself, with a shrug, as she locked the office door and put the key in her pocket, then plunged with her guide into the frosty dark.
The baggage clerk had taken her box earlier in the evening, and in a very few minutes Nell found herself in a warm, cosy sitting-room, in darkness at present save for a ruddy glow from the half-open door of the stove.