With a feline’s deference to one who has always filled the saucer for her the cat turned and scampered over to the Appleby house, tail up.
“He ain’t even fit to associate with the cat!” snapped Mrs. Dunham, and she picked up the purring creature and switched into the house. But that uncomfortable hankering for occupation, that queer little feeling of being a fifth wheel, obsessed her.
“I’m goin’ to slip on one of your aprons, Mis’ Appleby,” she announced, “and help you to get supper on.”
“Now you jest set right down and fold your hands, Mis’ Dunham,” remonstrated the hostess. “I don’t expect boarders to do one namable thing. No,” she said hastily, stripping the apron from Esther before she could tie it, “I’ve sort of got my own ways ’round the house jest the same’s you have around yours, and there ain’t a thing you can do to help. You go right into the settin’-room and look over the album, or anything you’re a mind to.”
Esther wandered into the other room. She reflected that she had always said the same things to “company” that tried to mess in. But the smug faces of the Applebys, enshrined between the plush covers of the album, palled on her. Nothing to do! She peered through the interlacing leaves of Mrs. Appleby’s geranium and a sob shook her. She was homesick, and she knew it. Her hostess, stirring briskly about her kitchen, made her long for her own domain of kitchen floor, even as a disgraced skipper hungers for his own quarter-deck. A boarder! A thing without authority, without aim or purpose! The clang of the oven door reminded her that Mrs. Appleby didn’t make cream of tartar biscuit exactly after her own receipt. How she would like to be back in front of her own oven door pulling out a tinful of those odorous, hot, crisply browned biscuit! But the reflection that Micajah would eat them made her snap her jaws together and wink the tears back from her eyes.
Yet she went out to the gate once more and watched to see if there was now any trail of smoke from the kitchen chimney. Then she stared at the school house, and her features hardened.
“Oh, I don’t understand it!” she murmured. “It ain’t been like ’Caje at all to do it! I can’t understand it!”
She could control herself no longer. Despite the fact that she had stubbornly forced the issue herself, nagged on by the neighbours who had counselled her to stand up for her rights, she felt abandoned by the world. Her face puckered with the unsightly grimace of those who do not often weep, and the hot tears bubbled freely.
“You don’t appear to be enjoying very high spirits, Mrs. Dunham.” She raised her head from the fence post with a jerk, for the drawling voice startled her. King Bradish’s rubber-tired carriage had made no sound on the dusty road. He had swung in upon the grass and sat looking at her, his elbows on his knees.
“It ain’t any one’s business how I feel,” she retorted indignantly, ashamed at having been detected.