She wrung her hands. It seemed as if she could not endure it.
“Betty!” cried Tommy, “what is it?”
“O, Tommy, there’s Mr. Meadowcroft!” she cried in utter consternation. “Whatever shall I do? You see all the time I was really just as bad as he thought I was, because Dr. Vandegrift wasn’t a good man and we were truly running away. And I told him that I would never forgive him!”
“Get your hat and come on over to his house. We’ll ask when he’s coming home, and that’ll give us something to figure on,” suggested Tommy.
CHAPTER XXXVII
AS Humphrey Meadowcroft changed cars at a junction twenty miles below Paulding, though he exchanged a Pullman express for a crowded and dingy coach of an accommodation train, he experienced, nevertheless, a strange sense of satisfaction which increased momentarily. He felt as if he were going home. He didn’t remember to have experienced before just that peculiar sensation. It was almost as if he were a boy—the boy he had never been—going home for the holidays.
There were still lingering patches of snow in this section of the country on hillsides and in sheltered corners of meadows and fields; but it would not be long now before the elms of the avenue of South Paulding would be clad in their first delicate veiling of green. And already the children would be finding the first wild flowers in the woods. Next week when the schools would reopen, again he would see the little ones in starched blouses and pinafores, as he had first seen them a year ago, carrying tidy bouquets of anemones, hepaticas, blood-root, and mayflowers to their teachers. But last year he had been merely a spectator at the window. Now he felt himself a part of it all, one of the village people. Wherefore, it was truly home-coming.
He almost expected to find that odd, faithful Tommy Finnemore at the station. But he was returning two days earlier than he had expected, and there was no way for the boy to learn of his change of plan. True, he had telegraphed his sister; but Isabel was the last person to take any trouble in a case of that sort. It wouldn’t, indeed, be unlike her purposely to keep the knowledge from Tommy and Betty Pogany.
Whereupon Humphrey Meadowcroft shrugged his shoulders. It was hardly likely that Betty would make any attempt to inquire for him. He sighed. His journey had been in the interest of Rose Harrow and he had accomplished more than he had expected to be able to do. He wondered, half-whimsically yet seriously, too, whether even the stony-hearted Miss Pogany might not be moved by these results. He hadn’t, of course, acted with any such purpose in mind—he had begun the quest at New Year’s, and being interrupted had taken his first opportunity to return to Philadelphia and complete it. Nevertheless, there was no reason why it shouldn’t serve as an entering wedge, and he felt that he might hope for an end of the absurd as well as uncomfortable relations between them that had held for the last weeks he had been in Mr. Appleton’s place.
At the same time, the girl had declared she would never forgive him, and it might be that she would continue obdurate in the face of everything. Meadowcroft wasn’t sure that she wasn’t of the stubborn sort who cannot relent. After all, there was that curious Indian type of countenance which must stand for something. It wasn’t so noticeable now that she was so thin—or was he more accustomed to it?—but it was the mold in which her features were cast. It might be that, once she had become convinced that another was her enemy, she was herself implacable thereafter.