"I come down to see about you," spoke the solemn and quizzical figure on the stoop.
"Where on earth did that droll creature come from?" broke out Lowder. "What is the matter, Miss Newton?"
For the suddenness of the apparition, the rude air with which Rob Riley had turned his back upon her, had started a new set of emotions in the mind of Henrietta. A wind from the old farm had blown suddenly over her and swept away the fog. She felt now, with that intuitive quickness that belongs to the artistic temperament, that she had recoiled but just in time from a brink. For a moment she seemed likely to faint, though she was not the kind of woman to faint when startled.
She reached out her hand to Periwinkle, and then, with a reaction of feeling, folded her in her arms and wept. Harry was puzzled. She suddenly became stiff and almost repellent toward him. She seemed impatient for him to be gone. It was a curious effect of surprise upon her nerves, he thought. He mentally confounded his luck, and said good night.
Henrietta bore Periwinkle off to her own room and removed her cloak, crying a little all the time. She was quite too full of emotion to take into account as yet all the perplexities in which she would be involved by the presence of Periwinkle in the house of Cousin John Willard.
"What brought you down here?" she said at last, when the sturdy little girl, divested of her shawl and cloak and mittens and hood, sat upon a chair in front of Henrietta, who sat upon the floor looking at her.
"I come down to see about you. Gran'ma said some things, and gran'pa said some things, and Wob Wiley he looked bad, and I thought maybe I'd just come down and see about you; and gran'ma said you wanted to make a picture of me. You don't want to make a picture to-night, do you? 'cause I'm awful sleepy. You see, Wob had to come on the seven o'clock twain, and that gits in at 'leven; and it took us till midnight to git here, and Wob he's got to go ever so fur yet. What made 'em build such a big town?" Here Periwinkle yawned and seemed about to fall off the chair. In a few minutes she was lying fast asleep on Henrietta's pillow.
But Henrietta slept not. It was a night of stormy trial. By turns one mood and then another dominated. At times she resolved to be a lady, admired and courted in the luxury of the city. As for possible consequences, she had never been in the habit of counting the cost of her actions carefully. There is a delicious excitement to a nature like hers in defying consequences.
But then a sight of Periwinkle's sleeping innocence sent back the tide with a rush. How much better were the simple old home ways and the love of this little heart, and the faithful devotion of that most kindly Rob Riley! She remembered her walks with him, her teasing him, his interference against Miss Tucker, and the deliverance wrought by the little creature lying there. She would go back to her old self, how painful soever it might be.
But she couldn't stay in the city and turn away Harrison Lowder; and to go home was to confess that she had failed in her art. And how could she humble herself to seem to wish to regain Rob Riley's love? And then, what kind of an outlook did the life of a granite-cutter's wife afford her? Here she looked at herself in the glass. All her pride rebelled against going home. But all her pride sank down when she stooped to kiss the cheek of the sleeping child.