III
BRENDA AT THE MANSION
One fine afternoon, not so very long after she had wasted her twenty dollars and made a friend of Maggie McSorley, Brenda in riding costume opened the front door. As she stood on the top step, somewhat impatiently she snapped her short crop as she gazed anxiously up Beacon Street.
On the steps of the house directly opposite were three girls seated and one standing near by. They were schoolgirls evidently, with short skirts hardly to their ankles, and with hair in long pig-tails. As she looked at them, by one of those swift flights of thought that so often carry us unexpectedly back to the past Brenda was reminded of another bright autumn afternoon, just six years earlier. Then she and Nora, and Edith and Belle, an inseparable quartette, had sat on her front steps discussing the arrival of her unknown cousin, Julia.
How much had happened since that day! Then she had been younger even than those girls across the street, and Julia, who had come and conquered (though not without difficulties) was now a college graduate.
But Brenda was not one to brood over the past, and when one of the girls shouted, "We know whom you're looking for," she had a bright reply ready.
Soon around the corner came the clicking of hoofs on the asphalt pavement. Brenda, shading her eyes from the sun, looked toward the west.
"Late, as usual, Arthur!" she cried, a trifle sharply, as a young man, flinging his reins to the groom on the other horse, ran up the steps toward her.
"Impatient, as usual!" he responded pleasantly, consulting his watch. "As a matter of fact, I'm five minutes ahead of time. But I'd have been here half an hour earlier had I known it was a matter of life and death."