“It was all wrong, my coming here,” she said, looking away to the village where lights twinkled; “I am not their sort, nor they mine. I’d better go away.”
Then, lifted a wee bit by this new resolve, she rose and returned to the house.
The tall clock in the sitting room was just chiming ten when she entered, and Aunt Comfort was there alone.
“Raymond was here this evening,” she said kindly, “and waited quite a spell. Where have you been?”
“Oh, nowhere,” answered Chip, pleasantly, “only I was lonesome and went out for a walk.”
Little did good Aunt Comfort realize what a volcano of hope, despair, shame, and tender love was concealed beneath that calm answer, or the new resolve budding in Chip’s heart.
No more did Ray suspect it when he met her coming home from school the next afternoon.
For during those two wretched hours when she was alone on the worn schoolhouse step, poor Chip McGuire, the low-born, pitiful waif, had become a woman and put away girlish impulses.
“I couldn’t come to see you that first evening,” he said at once, “for uncle and aunty kept me talking till bedtime. Where were you last night?”
“Oh, I didn’t much think you would come,” answered Chip, calmly, smiling at him in a far-off way. “I am a nobody here, as you will soon find out, and I don’t expect–anything. I got lonesome last night and went off for a walk.”