Helen of the Old House

by Harold Bell Wright

Before the man could answer, she ran up the steps and disappeared through the front door.

But McIver's car was no more than past the entrance when Helen appeared again on the porch. For a moment she stood, as if debating some question in her mind. Then apparently, she reached a decision. Ten minutes later she was walking hurriedly down the hill road—the way Bobby and Maggie had fled that day when Adam Ward drove them from the iron fence that guarded his estate. It was scarcely a mile by this road to the old house and the Martin cottage.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WAY BACK

That walk from her home to the little white cottage next door to the old house was the most eventful journey that Helen Ward ever made. She felt this in a way at the time, but she could not know to what end her sudden impulse to visit again the place of her girlhood would eventually lead.

As she made her way down the hill toward that tree-arched street, she realized a little how far the years had carried her from the old house. She had many vivid and delightful memories of that world of her childhood, it is true, but the world to which her father's material success had removed her in the years of her ripening womanhood had come to claim her so wholly that she had never once gone back. She had looked back at first with troubled longing. But Adam Ward's determined efforts to make the separation of the two families final and complete, together with the ever-increasing bitterness of his strange hatred for his old workman friend, had effectually prevented her from any attempt at a continuation of the old relationship. In time, even the thought of taking so much as a single step toward the intimacies from which she had come so far, had ceased to occur to her. And now, suddenly, without plan or premeditation, she was on her way actually to touch again, if only for a few moments, the lives that had been so large a part of the simple, joyous life which she had known once, but which was so foreign to her now.

Nor was it at all clear to her why she was going or what she would do. As she had observed with increasing interest the change in her brother's attitude toward the pleasures that had claimed him so wholly before the war, she had wondered often at his happy contentment in contrast to her own restless and dissatisfied spirit. McIver's words had suddenly forced one fact upon her with startling clearness: John, through his work in the Mill, his association with Captain Charlie and his visits to the Martin home, was actually living again in the atmosphere of that world which she felt they had left so far behind. It was as though her brother had already gone back.

And McIver's challenging question, "What do you know about Mary Martin?" had raised in her mind a doubt, not of her brother and his relationship to these old friends of their childhood, but of herself and all the relationships that made her present life such a contrast to her life in the old house.

With her mind and heart so full of doubts and questionings, she turned into the familiar street and saw her brother's car still before the Martin home.

As she went on, a feeling of strange eagerness possessed her. Her face glowed with warm color, her eyes shone with glad anticipation, her heart beat more quickly. As one returning to well loved home scenes after many years in a foreign land, the daughter of Adam Ward went down the street toward the place where she was born. In front of the old house she stopped. The color went from her cheeks—the brightness from her eyes.