“Oh, thank you!” replied the visitor, sinking into a chair with a sigh of content.
“You see, I haven’t any friends up here at Shady Nook,” she explained. “Nothing’s turned out right. I thought Horace and I would have a lovely time with the young people—belong to the crowd and have lots of fun. But everybody avoids us. It’s all Horace’s fault, of course, for people were friendly at first. But when you repeatedly turn down invitations and are grouchy when you do go anywhere, naturally nobody invites you again.”
“It’s a wicked shame—for you, I mean!” exclaimed Mary Louise.
“And yet I can’t blame Horace entirely. It’s circumstances. Nothing turned out right,” she repeated.
“Tell me how you happened to come here, Adelaide,” urged Mary Louise. She wanted to hear the story from the girl’s own lips, to see whether it coincided with Cliff Hunter’s.
“Well, Horace is an architect, you know,” began Adelaide. “And he did some work for Mr. Hunter last fall, just before we were married and before Mr. Hunter died. Mr. Hunter was so pleased with it that he gave Horace a little piece of land up here as an extra bonus, to build a cottage for ourselves, and he got Mr. Robinson to let him design his too.
“We got married, and everything went finely until Mr. Hunter died. Then Horace didn’t have much work. But Mr. Hunter had indicated that it would be good business for us to live up here during the summer and meet wealthy people.”
“Some of us are far from wealthy!” put in Mary Louise.
“We didn’t know that. We judged everybody to be like the Hunters. Besides, Mr. Hunter said that he owned a lot more land around Shady Nook, and as he sold it off in lots, he’d see that Horace got the contracts to design the new cottages.
“We came up early in the spring, and Horace enjoyed designing our bungalow and the Robinsons’. We had enough money left to see us through the summer, but no prospects for the fall, unless something unexpected turned up.... Then Horace began to worry....