"H-m; like him?"
"If you'll give me my change, please," requested Betty then, the flush deepening on her cheeks. "I am in some haste."
The woman laughed none too pleasantly.
"You don't want ter answer, an' I ain't sayin' I wonder," she chuckled. "He's a queer bug, an' no mistake, an' I don't wonder ye don't like him."
"On the contrary, I like him very much," flashed Betty, hurriedly catching up her magazine, and almost snatching the coins from the woman's hand, in her haste to be away.
Betty had not told her mother of these encounters. More and more plainly Betty was seeing how keenly averse to meeting people her mother was, and how evasive she was in her answers to the questions the market-men sometimes put to her. Instinctively Betty felt that these questions of the newsstand woman would distress her mother very much; so Betty kept them carefully to herself.
The conviction that her mother was fearful of meeting old friends in Dalton was growing on Betty these days, and it disturbed her greatly. Moreover she did not like a certain growing restless nervousness in her mother's manner, nor did she like the increasing pallor of her mother's cheek. Something, somewhere, was wrong. Of this Betty became more and more strongly convinced. Nor did a little episode that took place late in January tend to weaken this belief.
They had gone to market—Betty and her mother. Lured by an attractive "ad," they had gone farther from home than usual, and were in a store not often visited by them. They had given their order and turned to go, when suddenly Betty found herself whisked about by her mother's frantic clutch on her arm and led swiftly quite across the store to the opposite door. There, still impelled by that unyielding clutch on her arm, she found herself dodging in and out of the throngs of customers on their way to the street outside. Even there their pace did not slacken until they were well around the corner of the block.
"Why, mother," panted Betty then, laughing, "I should think you were running away from all the plagues of Egypt."
"I—I was—worse than the plagues of Egypt," laughed her mother, a bit hysterically.