And the laugh that followed was catching, and even the good old grizzled Grimes felt the tension gone and she too chuckled. All three women sat down to tea, and Martha Heath ate supper again, although she had eaten at home before, and they chatted and the visitor talked a little more than was necessary. She told how she had that afternoon ran her bicycle into a nearsighted dude, who was chasing his hat, and how she not only upset the dude but ran over his hat; and how the dude called on a policeman to arrest her, but the policeman said he “darsen’t tackle the gal alone.” The mother forgot her troubles and the Grimes laughed so that she upset her tea, and when Martha Heath said “Good-bye girls,” they all laughed again, and Grimes wiped her brass-rimmed spectacles with the corner of a big check apron and said, “Now ain’t she a queer un? and so kind too for her to come clear down here to tell us ’Pasia wasn’t killed entirely!”
Gentle and pious reader, you would not tell a lie, would you? Oh, no! But, Martha Heath had faith in me. I am self-reliant, strong, and able to take care of myself, and homely enough, thank Heaven! so I am no longer ogled on the street by blear eyed idlers. Martha Heath knows all this. She believes in me. Martha Heath has faith in Providence—have you?
Well, the work did fly! “Everything goes,” said Hustler as he looked on approvingly. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and some way I grew a little more thoughtful; not nervous, but serious. Friday night I scarcely slept an hour. It seemed as if I was about to depart to another and better world. At breakfast Saturday morning my mother said:
“It was a week ago to-day, Aspasia!”
“Oh, yes,” I said, inwardly.
“A week ago to-day! And now, never try to kill your old mother who loves you just the same whether you love her or not, by going off without telling us. Why, if Martha Heath hadn’t come and told us where you was, I would have died before morning. It was awful thoughtless of her too, not to have come here at once. She ought not to have put it off until ten o’clock.”
It was only nine, but we like to make our troubles as great as possible, for greater credit then is ours for bearing them.
I arose, kissed my good mother, and said: “Yes, I will always tell you myself hereafter when I am to be away—and so I tell you now. I am going away every Saturday to be gone over Sunday from now until October.”
“‘How sharper than a rattlesnake’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,’ the Bible says, and after all I have done for you too! Oh, it is too much to think my only child should thus desert me in my old age, and go off nobody knows where, and disgrace us all! Disgrace us, disgrace us, dis——”