"I had—hadn't I, Fran?"
Fran gave her father a look such as had never before come into her dark eyes—a look of reproach, a look that said, "I can not fight back because of the agony in my heart." She went away silent and with downcast head.
CHAPTER XV
IN SURE-ENOUGH COUNTRY
One morning, more than a month after the closing days of school,
Abbott Ashton chanced to look from his bedroom window as Hamilton
Gregory's buggy, with Fran in it, passed.
There were no more examination-papers for Abbott to struggle with; but, like bees who spend the pleasantest weather in hardest work, he was laying up mathematical sweetness and psychological succulence against the day when he might become a professor at Yale or Harvard.
Unthrifty Fran, on the contrary, was bent upon no mission of self- improvement. Long fishing-poles projecting from the back of the buggy, protested against the commercialism of the age; their yellow hue streaked the somber background of a money-getting world, while the very joints of the poles mocked at continuity of purpose.
By Fran's side, Abbott discovered a man. True, it was "only" Simon
Jefferson; still, for all his fifty years and his weak heart, it was
not as if it were some pleasant respectable woman—say Simon's mother.
However, old ladies do not sit upon creek-banks.
The thought of sitting upon the bank of a stream suggested to Abbott that it would be agreeable to pursue his studies in the open air. The June morning had not yet had its dewy sweetness burned away by a droughty old sun. Abbott snatched up some books and went below. In almost every front yard there were roses. Up and down the street, they bloomed in all colors, with delicate, penetrating, intoxicating fragrance. They were not hidden away in miserly back-gardens, these roses; they smiled for the meanest beggar, for the most self- sufficient tramp, for the knowledge-burdened scholar, for the whistling driver of the grocer's wagon. They had often smiled in vain for Abbott Ashton, but that was before he had made the bewildering discovery that they were like Fran.
On the green veranda he paused to inhale their fragrance.