The Road to Understanding

by Eleanor H. Porter

At first she had supposed the man's sudden reversion to gloom and silence was a mere whim of the mind or a passing distemper of the body. But when day after day brought no light to his eye, no smile to his lip, no elasticity to his step, she became seriously disturbed, particularly as she could not help noticing that he no longer worked with her; that he no longer, in fact, seemed to want to remain in the library even to hear her read to him.

She was sorely troubled. Not only did she miss the pleasure and stimulus of his presence and interest in the work, but she feared lest in some way she had disappointed or offended him. She began to question herself and to examine critically her work.

She could find nothing. Her work had been well done. She knew that. There was absolutely no excuse for this sudden taciturn aloofness on his part. After all, it was probably nothing more than what might be expected of him—a going back to his usual self. Without doubt the strange thing was, not that he was stern and silent and morose now, but that, for a brief golden period, he had come out of his shell and acted like a human being. Doubtless it was under the sway of his interest in his curios, and his first delight at seeing them being brought into something like order, that he had, for a moment, as it were, stirred into something really human. And his going back to his original sour unpleasantness now was merely a reversion to first principles.

That it should be so vexed Betty not a little.

And when they were having such a good time! Surely, for a man that could be so altogether charming and delightful to be habitually so extremely undesirable and disagreeable was most exasperating. And he had been such good company! How kind he had been, too, when she had told him so much of her own life and home! How interested he had shown himself to be in every little detail, just as if he really cared. And now—

With a tense biting of her lip Betty reproached herself bitterly for being so free to tell of her own small affairs. She ought to have known that any interest a man like that could show was bound to be superficial and insincere. What a pity she should lose, for once, her reserve! Well, at least she had learned her lesson. Never again would she be guilty of making a confidant of Mr. Burke Denby, no matter how suave and human-like he might elect to become for some other brief week in the future!

To her mother Betty said very little of all this. True, at the first, in her surprise at the remarkable change in her employer's attitude, she had told her mother of his reversion to gloom and sternness; but it had seemed to worry and disturb her mother so much that Betty had stopped at once. And always since then she had avoided speaking of his continued disagreeableness, and skillfully evaded answering pertinent questions. She told herself that she realized, of course, it was because her mother was so fearful that something would happen that this fine position, with the generous pay, should be lost. Dear mother—who thought she was hiding so shrewdly the fact of how poor they were!

There was something else that Betty did not tell her mother, also, and that was of her first peculiar and annoying experience with the woman at the newsstand at the station. It was about two weeks after Christmas that Betty had first seen the woman. Mr. Denby had asked her to go around by the station on her way home and purchase for him the December issue of "Research." He said it was not a very popular magazine, and that the woman was one of the few agents in town who kept it for sale. There was an article on Babylonian tablets in the December number, and he wished to see it.

The station was not very far from her home, and Betty was glad to do the errand, of course; but when she arrived at the newsstand she found a most offensive person who annoyed her with questions—a large woman with unpleasantly prominent eyes and a wart on her chin.

"Yes, Miss, I've got the magazine right here," she said with alacrity, in reply to Betty's request. "But, say, hain't I seen you before somewheres?"