A large red open car went by, sending forth upon the wintry air some cheerful cadences of song as it passed;—young gentlemen collegians merrymaking not indecorously in this holiday time. Cornelia looked down upon the manly young faces, rosy with the wind. “How terrible!” she murmured, dreamily. For they were no part of her mountain; her sister’s baby had nothing to do with Mr. Bromley; neither had the song from the big red car; both were dross.
A negro rattled by upon an ash cart drawn by a lively mule. The negro whistled piercingly to a friend in the distance, and the mule’s splendid ears stood high and eager; he was noble in action, worthy of all attention. Cornelia could not bear him. “Oh, dear!” she said, probably thinking of his master, who was proud of him. “What lives these people lead!”
She was in the act of turning away from this barren window when something far down the street caught her attention. It was the figure of a thin, somewhat middle-aged gentleman in gray clothes, approaching slowly upon the sidewalk. For a moment Cornelia was uncertain; then there appeared for an instant, beneath the rim of his soft hat, twin sparklings of reflected light. They vanished, but Cornelia needed no further proof that the gentleman in gray wore the eyeglasses that completed her identification of him.
She said, “Oh!” in a loud voice, and clapped her joined hands over her mouth to stifle this too-eloquent revelation. Then the bright eyes above the joined hands semicircled impulsively to the bed, where lay her hat and coat as she had tossed them when she came into the room. The impulse that made her look at them increased overwhelmingly; she seized them, put them on hurriedly; opened her door with elaborate caution, tiptoed to a back stairway, descended it noiselessly, and a moment later left the house by a rear door. No one had seen her except the cook’s cat.
XII
HER HAPPIEST HOUR
THUS Cornelia saved herself from replying to intrusive questions about where she was going, and why; but in her impulsive haste she had forgotten something. Upon her desk, upstairs, lay her heart’s secret, her mountain, all in loose sheets of paper. Beside the desk was an open window;—she had left the door open, too, and this was a breezy day. Such was instantly her condition at sight of Mr. Bromley; and with no thought but to have more sight of him, she flitted across the back yard and through an alley gate, leaving calamity brooding behind her.
Mr. Bromley, returning homeward with a book under his arm, after his morning’s browsing in the suburban public library, was not surprised to see one of his pupils emerge from a cross-street before him, since this was the neighbourhood in which most of the school’s day scholars lived; but he wondered why Cornelia Cromwell was so deeply preoccupied. She seemed to look toward him, though vaguely, and he lifted his hand to his hat; but before he could complete his salutation she looked away, apparently unconscious of him. She was walking in a rather elderly manner, with her head inclined forward and her hands meditatively clasped behind her—the right posture for an engrossed statesman philosopher, but not frequently expected of sixteen. At the corner she turned northward upon the boulevard sidewalk, Mr. Bromley’s own direction, and went pensively on before him, some thirty yards or so in advance.
His gait was slow, for that was his thoughtful habit; and the distance between them, like Cornelia’s attitude, remained unvaried until the next cross-street was reached. Here, without altering that scholarly attitude of hers by a hair’s-breadth, she walked straight into what was the proper path and right-of-way demanded by an oncoming uproarious taxicab.
With his hoarse warning signal and with his own hoarse voice, the driver raved; she heeded him not. So, taking his life in his hands, he saved her by charging into the curbstone. The wheels providentially mounted and bore him fairly upon the sidewalk;—he crashed down again to the pavement of the boulevard and roared onward, biblically oratorical about women, let hear him who would.