“I suppose he’s working too hard,” she said to herself. “Wearing himself out, and wasting all his youth—to take care of me. I suppose what he wants is—”
But she couldn’t quite imagine what he might want.
“Perhaps he’d rather go off and live in the city with one of his friends, like Dick Judson,” she thought. “I wonder if I couldn’t—” So there she sat, calm and composed as ever, making the most absurd plans for living on her own private income of thirty dollars a month.
“Perhaps Louie and I together might manage something,” she thought. “Louie knows more than I do about things of that sort. I’ll speak to her.”
Geordie went off, and still Mrs. Russell sat at the breakfast table, waiting for her sister, and silently condemning this sloth that kept her so late abed.
As a matter of fact, Louie was half a mile away from the house, picking daisies in a wide, sunny field. Seen from the road, you might have thought that tall and slender creature with fair hair shining in the sun was a care-free young girl; she moved so lightly, and now and then she sang a snatch of song.[Pg 435]
But all this was mere bravado, her own especial method of preparing herself for a painful ordeal. She had something to do that morning which she dreaded, and instead of taking an extra cup of coffee, or anything of that sort, the silly creature forgot all about breakfast and wandered off into a daisy field. No wonder she was such a failure!
She had peculiar compensations, though. The fierce hot sun, and the rank, sweet smell of the humble little field flowers and weeds, even the troublesome insects that crawled out from the daisies onto her hands, and the little winged nuisances that flew in her face, amused and solaced her, and did her, or so she fancied, more good than ten breakfasts.
And after a time she felt strong and tranquil enough to face her day. From a pocket in her skirt she drew out a bit of paper—one of those dropped by her nephew the evening before, and she looked at it carefully.
It was a pawn ticket, marked: