The old man smiled, a gentle smile lit with the warmth of much affection.
“I thought it better to try it when Miranda was not in the house,” he answered. “If it had refused to run I did not want any one to know of it. My daughter is always very quick to see when I am disappointed, and I do not like to give her pain.”
He took up a wrench to loosen a bolt but found it jammed and immovable. With ready skill the boy took the tool from him and unscrewed the obstinate nut.
“By the way,” questioned the old man, “ought I to remember your name? Have I ever seen you before?”
His confessed absent-mindedness was so disarming that the boy laughed.
“Miss Miranda knows me,” he said, “but you have never seen me, at least you have never noticed me. My name is David Warren, and I am staying with my uncle who owns the place on the east side of this hill. He is farming a great part of it this year and finds labor so difficult to get that I am working for him for the spring and summer. And I think old Dobbin will be wondering where I have gone and will be dragging his plow all across the field. You have a wonderful thing here, this machine. I—I would like to come and see it run again.”
He was out of the door and across the road before a word could be said to thank him. Elizabeth, still feeling rather dazed with the suddenness of the whole affair, returned to her forgotten errand of fetching the lettuce seeds, which Miss Miranda would surely be needing by now. However, on coming back to the garden, she found that her long absence had been scarcely noticed. The brown ducklings had escaped again and even Michael had been obliged to put down his spade and go in pursuit of them.
“Shoo, ye varmints,” he was saying, as the fat balls of down, their lemon-colored bills wide open in faint baby quackings, went scuttling in a dozen different directions from between his feet. “You might know they would be wild creatures, they were hatched out in a thunderstorm!”
The afternoon had been cheerful, but the evening was long and lonely, with Anna plunged into one of her blackest moods. Yet, though the hours dragged, they did not suffice for the mastering of to-morrow’s lesson. Geometry and history were Betsey’s two great difficulties, so great indeed that, with the college examinations coming nearer, they began vaguely to threaten real disaster. She sighed as she turned for the tenth time to the worn page in her textbook, dealing with the volume of the frustum of a pyramid. She knew the drawing and the text drearily by heart, but would she ever understand it? Would the looming bulk of this misshapen figure grow bigger and bigger until it blocked her road to higher education? As she crept away to bed she was thinking that it was only that morning that Aunt Susan had left her, proclaiming to the last Betsey’s mistaken foolishness in remaining behind. Perhaps, after all, Aunt Susan had been right!
She awoke next morning still depressed, more discouraged than ever when her eye fell upon the cover of her geometry book. It would be a good plan to set off for school early, she decided, and go around by Somerset Lane for a cheering moment of talk with Miss Miranda. Her heart felt lighter as soon as she thought of it.