Helen turned inquiringly to Glory and Glory shook 240 her head. The episode, confirming her own anxieties, had unnerved her steadfast courage into collapse.
Had any warning come to her in advance of the event her bearing toward this stranger would have been a different one. The pride that bowed submissively to no one except in love, would have sustained her. The natural dignity which was the gift of her blood would have been the thing that any observer must have first and last recognized. With a chance to have shaped her attitude, Glory would have received Harrison as a Barbarian princess might have met an ambassador from Rome, but no such chance had been afforded her and she stood as distraught and as panicky as a stage-struck child whose speech fails.
She even slid back into the rough-hewn vernacular that had been so completely banished from her lips and custom.
“I ain’t got ther power ter say,” she faltered, “when he’ll git back. He’s goin’ ter Frankfort first.”
“I’ll write to him there,” said the capitalist.
Harrison departed with the stiff dignity of an affronted sachem, and Helen Merriwell, looking after him, smiled with amusement for the incident which she so well understood, until she turned and saw Glory.
The girl had wilted back against the wall and stood there as if she had been stricken. Her great, violet eyes were brimming with the spirit of tragedy and held the despair of one who has blithely returned home—to find his house in ruin and ashes.
Glory stole away to her own room, escaping the embrace of sympathetic arms, as soon as she could. “He’s done denied me ter his friends,” she told herself 241 wildly. “He dast’n’t acknowledge me ter fine folks!”
Then through the first, torpid misery of hurt pride, crept a more terrifying thought. Spurrier had been practically engaged to this man’s daughter. He had been diverted from his purpose by motives of pity, and now that Harrison knew, he might be ruined—probably would be ruined. If so disaster would come to him because of her—and at last she rose from the chair where she had dropped down, collapsed, with a light of new resolution in her eyes.
“If that’s all I’m good for,” she declared tempestuously, “he’s got to be rid of me.”