“Will the Club meet here next Friday?” asked Elsa eagerly.
“Yes, next Friday; and we shall have something new to work upon,” Miss Ruth replied.
“Will you give Miss Ruth her cape, Uncle Ned?” asked Elsa. “She let me take it for our sleigh-ride. I wonder what the new thing is going to be,” she added, with lively interest.
But Miss Ruth only smiled and said: “Wait and see!”
As Elsa’s Uncle Ned took off his hat in farewell, Ruth Warren saw that his hair was quite gray and that his face had the careworn look of a very busy man. Elsa herself seemed like another girl since her uncle had come.
Miss Virginia Warren had left the shade up, at her front window, and had seen Ruth’s meeting with the tall man whom Elsa Danforth had greeted so affectionately.
“There, Ruth!” said Miss Virginia when her niece came into her room; “I was sure something would happen! What could that young gentleman have thought of your being in that dreadful old sleigh?”
“It was Elsa’s uncle, and he is not so very young, Aunt Virginia; I am sure he is forty, and his hair is gray,” replied Ruth Warren. “I don’t believe he was thinking of me at all; he seemed so rejoiced that Elsa’s cheeks were red instead of white that I don’t believe he thought about anything or anybody else.”
But Miss Virginia was not to be pacified: “You do such strange things, Ruth, for a young woman of your social position, and thirty years old, too,” she sighed; “going off in that pung, was it, you called it? with a lot of children, and to a market-gardener’s home.”
Ruth Warren, leaving the first part of her aunt’s remark without answer, made haste to say: “Mrs. Holt is in every sense a lady, and I shall call upon her at the very first opportunity.”