REUBEN’S first impulse, when he found himself alone in the little shop with his former pupil, was to say good-by and get out as soon as he could. To the best of his recollection, he had never before been in a store consecrated entirely to the fashions and finery of the opposite sex, and he was oppressed by a sense of being an intruder upon an exclusively feminine domain. The young girl, too, whom he had been thinking of all this while as an unfortunate child whom he must watch over and be good to, stood revealed before him as a self-controlled and sophisticated woman, only a few years younger than himself in actual age, and much wiser than himself in the matters of head-gear and textures and colors which belonged to this place. He could have talked freely to her in his law-office, with his familiar accessories of papers and books about him. A background of bonnets was disconcerting.
“How beautiful she is!” were Jessica’s first words, and they pleasurably startled the lawyer from his embarrassed revery.
“She is, indeed,” he answered, and somehow found himself hoping that the conversation would cling to this subject a good while. “I had never met her before, as you saw, but of course I have known her by sight a long time.”
“I don’t think I ever saw her before to-day,” said Jessica. “How wonderful it seems that she should have come, and then that you came, too, and that you both should like the plan, and take it up so, and make a success of it right at the start.”
Reuben smiled. “In your eagerness to keep up with the procession I fear you are getting ahead of the band,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite call it a success, at present. But, no doubt, it’s a great thing to have her enlisted in it. I’m glad she likes you; her friendship will make all the difference in the world to you, here in Thessaly.”
The girl did not immediately answer, and Tracy, looking at her as she walked across to the showcase, was surprised to catch the glisten of tears on her eyelashes. He had no idea what to say, but waited in pained puzzlement for her to speak.
“‘Friendship’ is not quite the word,” she said at last, looking up at him and smiling with mournful softness through her tears. “I shall be glad if she likes me—as you say, it will be a great thing if she helps me—but we shall hardly be ‘friends,’ you know. She would never call it that. Oh, no! oh, no!”
Her voice trembled audibly over these last words, and she began hurriedly to re-arrange some of the articles in the showcase, with the obvious design of masking her emotion.
“You can do yourself no greater harm than by exaggerating that kind of notion, my girl,” said Reuben Tracy, in his old gravely kind voice. “You would put thoughts into her head that way which she had never dreamt of otherwise; that is, if she weren’t a good and sensible person. Why, she is a woman like yourself—”
“Oh, no, no! Not like me!”