The train gathered speed. They dwindled. Ben Gartz, standing just beside Charley, took hold of her arm above the elbow and leaning over her looked down into her face, laughing and saying something. Dimly, Lottie saw the little group turning away. Ben's arm still grasped Charley's, proprietorially.
A wave of fear and apprehension so violent as to be almost dizzying swept over Lottie. "Wait a minute!" she cried to the astonished porter who was carrying in bags and boxes piled on the car platform. "Wait a minute!"
"Too late now, lady. Ef yo' fo'got som'hum Ah kin sen' yo' wiah at Elkhart. Elkhart's nex' stop, lady."
CHAPTER XVI
The family thought that Ben Gartz was being heavily attentive. A man who paid court to a woman through her family was an attentive man. But after the first few weeks following Lottie's departure it was unmistakably plain that his attentions were concentrating on the Kemp branch of the family rather than on the Payson. The first box of candy sent to Charley, for example, came a week after Lottie's sailing. It was one of those large satin, brocade, lace-and-gold affairs. You have seen them in the two-dollar-a-pound shops and have wondered who might be so fatuous or so rich or so much in love as to buy them. Charley, coming from work on a cool autumn day, found a great square package on the dressing table in her bedroom. Her letters and packages and telephone calls always were placed there, ready for homecoming.
"Any mail?" she said, to-day. Her quick eye had seen there was none. And yet she so wanted some—one letter in particular—that she asked, hopefully. Mail, to Charley, meant, those days, one of those thin envelopes with a strip pasted over one end to show where the censor had opened it. Then she had seen the box. It was an unavoidable box holding, as it did, five pounds of Wood's most intricate sweets. In these self-sacrificing days candy was one of the things you had learned to forego. Therefore, "Wood's!" exclaimed Charley, removing the wrappers. "Who do you suppose?—Oh, my goodness! It looks like a parlor davenport; or a dressy coffin. Why, it's from that Ben Gartz! Well! Lotta can't say I'm not keeping the home-fires burning."
She gave the brocade box to Jeannette for her dresser and more than half its contents to her grandmother and Aunt Charlotte, both of whom ate sweets in appalling quantities, the flickering flame of their bodily furnaces doubtless calling for this quick form of fuel. She herself scarcely tasted it, thinking more of a clear skin than a pleased palate. She meant to write Ben a note of thanks. She even started one; addressed one of her great square stiff art-paper envelopes in her dashing hand. But something called her away and she never finished it. He called at the house a week later, after dinner—just dropped in as he was driving by—and mentioned it delicately.
"Oh, Miss Charley, I sent you a little—I wondered if you got it——"
Then she was honestly ashamed. "Oh, Mr. Gartz, what a pig you must think me! I started a note to you. Really——" She even ran back to her room and returned with the envelope and the sheet of paper on which she had written his name, and the date. He said he was going to keep the piece of paper, and tucked it into his left-hand vest pocket with a soulful look.
The box containing his second gift made the first one seem infinitesimal. Mrs. Kemp was the recipient. She had said, characteristically, that she didn't mind doing without white bread, or sugar in her coffee, or new clothes, but it was hard not being able to have flowers. She had always had flowers in the living room until now—a standing order at the florist's. The box held two dozen American Beauties whose legs stuck out through a slit in the end. It was November, and American Beauties were fifteen dollars a dozen. There weren't enough tall vases in the house to accommodate them all. Their scarlet heads glowed in the jade-green background of the sun parlour and all over the living room and even spilled back into Belle Kemp's bedroom. Charley told her father that he ought to realise the seriousness of it. "Where's your pride and manhood, Henry Kemp! Two dozen American Beauties! It's equivalent to jewelry."