By the time she had reached her own house again, the young girl was somewhat calmer and a great deal more reasonable. The fault was not that of Richard Crawford, after all; and God bless him!—she was heartily glad that he had recovered sufficiently to be able to leave the house for a ride of four or five hundred miles. So she summoned back all the patient and benevolent elements of her own nature (she had plenty of them, but they were sometimes like badly-trained troops, and needed a recall),—sat down and wrote a letter to Richard, giving him a brief account of what had occurred, abusing him playfully for going off without informing her of his intention, and ordering him to West Falls immediately, in such terms as a commander-in-chief might have employed towards a recruiting sergeant. That done, and the letter despatched, she felt partially relieved.
But what a fool she had made of herself—she thought—by leaving West Falls so soon! Neither her mother nor herself was yet ready to leave for Newport (she much less than her mother, until certain half-finished arrangements, in which Mr. Tom Leslie bore a part, were more satisfactorily settled); the city was growing dull as well as hot, and most of the "people one cares for," flitting to one or another of the sea-shore or mountain resorts; and there were the pigs and chickens at Aunt Betsey's all lying neglected. Joe Harris was nearer to being ennuyeé—absolutely bored, for the next hour, than she had before been for a twelvemonth.
There is an old adage that some of us may have read in the primer (or was it the hymn-book?) that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Josephine's late life had been sufficiently exciting to make her undeniably restless; and it was while ruminating upon the misery of being too quietly happy, that she remembered her rencontre with Emily Owen, at Wallack's, the magnificently bearish manner in which Judge Owen had lugged his daughter out from the theatre, and the promise she had made the mortified and abashed girl that she would run up and call upon her some day. Why not now? Not much sooner thought of than done; and in less than an hour thereafter she was ringing at the door of Judge Owen's house near the Harlem River, having endured the smashing of toes and disorder of dresses incident to a ride by car on a hot afternoon when half the city was rushing to the Central Park and the cool places over in Westchester.
She had better fortune, here, than she had experienced at the Crawfords'. Emily was at home, sewing by the open window in her little chamber, while by the other window of the same room showed the tall figure and placid face of Aunt Martha. The meeting between the two school-mates was very warm and cordial, and accompanied by those embraces which, when they occur between two young girls and an unfortunate masculine friend happens to be an observer, are so likely to destroy his equanimity for a long period. Emily's cheek reddened a little, to be sure, with shame at remembering where she had last met her visitor; but perhaps this evidence of sensibility broke down all barriers between the two, much easier than they could have been removed under other circumstances. Josephine Harris had accidentally become aware of the one secret of Emily's life, and so long as warm friendship existed this fact could not be otherwise than a tie, just as it could not fail to be a cause for avoidance if the two hearts once became separated. Aunt Martha, something of an oddity among women, and Joe Harris, an oddity without any qualification, were pleased with each other at once; and a pleasant chat sprung up in the little room, which lasted until Aunt Martha thought it proper to make an excuse for absence and leave the young girls alone together.
It would have been something more or less than natural, if within a minute afterwards the conversation of the two had not been running upon the topic of which both had been thinking, but of which neither would speak before the third person. Josephine broke into the theme at once:
"Who was he?"
"Who was who?" and the face of pretty Emily Owen was red enough in a moment to show that she knew who was intended.
"Oh, you know that I saw part of it," said Joe. "I want to know the rest. Who was the young man from whom your father took you away? A lover, of course, or he would not have taken the trouble."
"It was—it was—Frank—Mr. Frank Wallace," said the young girl, the color on her face by no means diminishing.
"Oh, don't blush so," said Josey. "We all get into some such scrape, at one time or another—that is, so many of us as can find any one to form the other half of the pair of scissors. He was your lover, of course?"