“There must be something I can do for her. There is something to do for all the girls around town of her age. They are running wild—a good many of them; and they will grow up to be as silly as their older sisters are now, if something isn’t found to interest them.”
Not that this problem occupied all Janice Day’s thought. Since the lawn party she had hoped that Nelson Haley would become more friendly again. She heartily wished that she had been able that evening to broach the subject of their estrangement, but there had been too many people around to enter into any private conversation.
He did not seem to be with Annette so much during these few days before the school opened, but Janice did not happen to run across him save in some public place. She was looking forward to the next Sunday and determined to try to get the school teacher to stroll home with her, as he had formerly been so fond of doing. Saturday, however, intervened; and Saturday was a fateful day.
If Janice had but known it, Nelson Haley was quite as desirous of being friendly with her as she was with him. In spite of his careless, easy-going manner, the young man was sensitive in the extreme. The sight of Frank Bowman speeding about town with Janice in her car had hurt Nelson.
Then slighting little remarks that Annette had let drop served to fan the flame of Nelson’s jealousy. Annette continued to speak of Janice and treat her as though she were a little girl. But she intimated that Frank had become strangely enamored “of the child.” She chose to consider Frank’s praise of Janice as intimating that her brother was in love with her. Her sneering, laughing little quips about this supposed attachment cut Nelson to the quick.
For underneath Nelson Haley’s easy-going exterior was a serious character that he seldom showed to the world. Janice knew it was there; she had seen flashes of sentiment and of strength that few people who met the school teacher would ever have suspected was back of his semi-humorous smile and light-hearted speech. To Janice he had confided his desires and hopes regarding his future career. It had been her suggestion that perhaps, after all, he should teach another year in Polktown before accepting the offer from the small college which he had received a few weeks before.
Nelson missed his quiet little talks with the girl. She had been a help and an inspiration to him and he had long since learned to think much of her. The way she seemed to have taken Frank Bowman, the civil engineer, into her confidence, and to have made a companion of him, did not please Nelson at all. He could not understand Janice’s being fickle; yet it seemed as though she must be. Why—the day she and Marty came to the hotel and drove off with Frank in the car, Janice had not even suggested his going along! And there were seats for four. He and Bowman’s sister might have been asked to join the party, crowding Marty in with them.
Take it all in all, Nelson Haley had spent a very uncomfortable summer. It had been nothing like what he expected when school closed in June and he had come to Janice with the offer he had received from the college faculty to join it in the fall. He thought he had “made good” with her then; and she had been more than kind to him. Now he felt Janice was becoming a stranger.
It bothered Nelson in his studies (he had spent most of the summer in preparing for his work in the Polktown school for the coming winter) and finally, on this Saturday before the opening of the term, he determined that he must have a fair and square understanding with Janice, and free his mind.
He came downtown immediately after dinner, did some errands, and then walked up Hillside Avenue to the old Day house. Had he glanced into the rain-soaked roadway (it had showered the night before) he would have seen the wheel-tracks of Janice’s automobile; but he saw with a pang that the garage door was open when he reached the house.