Overland Tales

by Josephine Clifford

"Why?" asked Mrs. Wheaton, regarding her eldest daughter.

"She will have to sit up straight all day long with that bunch of hair on her head. She thinks old Toots is coming to-night, and she wouldn't for the world lose her elegant coiffure and the chance of looking pretty in his eyes."

Before she had finished speaking her eyes were fastened on the book again, and whatever Tilly replied about not wishing to receive a solitaire as gift from her father fell unheeded, apparently, on the fair Fanny's ears.

It was a mistake about Lola's having gone to the matinee. If we follow her we shall see her ascending one of the streets in the same quarter of the city in which the paternal mansion—as the novel-writers have it—stood, though in a far less fashionable part. Indeed, there was no fashion about; for a corner-grocery, or a retail fruit-shop occasionally made its appearance among the ranks of the generally neat houses, each of which was provided with a flower-covered veranda, or a trim front yard. One of them boasted of a garden and veranda both—the former set out with well-tended flowers, the latter almost hidden under creeping roses and trailing fuchsias. Everything about the place looked prim and neat; even the China boy, who opened the door for Lola, seemed to have been infected by the spirit prevailing, and his snowy apron fairly blinked in the rays of the sun falling through the curtain of the foliage, thinned by the cold nights of the winter season.

Miss Myrick was in, sewing by the window, seated in her own chair, so low that she could not see out into the garden, for fear of being tempted to waste her time. The parlor was comfortably furnished, homelike and tidy, though Miss Myrick occupied it most of the time with her work. She did not often sit in the little room at the back of the house, which really had a better light—the windows opening to the ground—because there was another garden there, and Miss Myrick was so passionately fond of her bright-hued pets that it once happened that the sewing which had been entrusted to her by a cloaking establishment in the city was found unfinished and she in the garden when the porter came to take the garments home. Since that time she had been a great deal stricter with herself—she never had been strict with anybody else, not even with Charlie Somervale, when he had been left to her a romping, frolicking boy of thirteen by his dying mother.

She was an old maid even then, dreadfully set in her ways, as people said, and the twelve years which had passed since then had made her no younger. Her ways, however set, must have been gentle and good, for they had won the boy back from the almost hopeless despondency into which his mother's death had thrown him, and she had made of him a man such as few are met with in our time. His mother had left him nothing, his father having died in the mines years before, poor and away from his friends.

Dying his mother had said to her friend, "Find my brother; he will provide for the boy for my sake." This, however, Miss Myrick had failed to do for two reasons: she knew of the whereabouts of the brother only that he was in the Indies; and had she known more she would not have prosecuted the search, because—well, Charlie "didn't know exactly, but he guessed that her mother had intended Miss Myrick for her brother's wife, but the brother had declined taking stock in that mine." Charlie was clerk in the bank, and we must forgive him some of his peculiar expressions on the ground that "he heard nothing but stocks talked from morning till night."

As we are aware that the banks close at twelve o'clock on Saturdays, we need not be surprised to see Charlie coming down the street, on the way to Aunt Myrick's house, his home. Lola seemed very much surprised, so much so that her face flushed when he came in at the door, just as she was about to leave the house. After a few moments' conversation about "the delightful weather—and this time of the year, too—nearly Christmas—" Charlie asked permission to escort Miss Wheaton down the street, which permission was graciously given.

Though we should like much to remain with Miss Myrick in her cozy little home, where nothing indicated that the mistress was compelled to earn her bread with her needle, we have more interest in going with the handsome young couple, moving along in front of us as if they were treading on air. Though there is no lack of deference or respect in the manner with which the young man leans over to whisper something into the ear of the younger Miss Wheaton, he has yet dropped the formal address and speech of which he made use at Miss Myrick's gate.