The girl’s look of wonder, of disappointment, though there was no shadow of reproach in it, acted upon Humphrey Meadowcroft like a challenge. He felt constrained to defend himself. But how could he do that? It came to the man coldly that he couldn’t explain that it was owing to his sensitiveness because of his crippled condition. He wouldn’t even have had the girl know that not for the world would he have crossed the room on his crutches before her. Frowning still, he sat silent.
Betty stifled a sigh and rose. Coming to his chair, she towered above him, a baby giant, indeed, but with a light in her soft-brown eyes that hurt and almost shamed him.
“I’m sorry if I was thoughtless, Mr. Meadowcroft,” she said gently. “I—didn’t understand. And it will be—all right.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Harrow would come in to see me?” he proposed suddenly. “I should be very glad to talk with her and would do my best to persuade her of the feasibility of her daughter’s going to the high school. Will you ask her, please, Betty, and let me know to-morrow night?”
The girl’s face lighted up as she agreed eagerly. With a shy “Good-night,” she vanished quickly. Meadowcroft sat frowningly silent and motionless. After some little time, he took his crutches, rose, and made his awkward way to a balcony in the rear whence a flight of broad, low steps led to a grass plot below enclosed by brick walls. Here, he walked for one hour daily. He had already spent an hour here this morning, but now he repeated it. At the end, he was so fatigued as almost to forget that sense of remissness that seemed like remorse.
CHAPTER XI
AUNT SARAH was out, but Betty attacked her practising vigorously and with conscientious regard to her weekly lesson. Nevertheless though she was in the middle of a march when her time was up, she rose from the stool at once, as she wouldn’t have ventured to do had Miss Pogany been about. But though she made all haste to get down to the Harrows’, the girl wasn’t, as heretofore, all eagerness.
For she had to ask Mrs. Harrow if she would be willing to call to see Mr. Meadowcroft. All the while she had practised, that alarming necessity had weighed vaguely upon her mind, and now that she was free to consider it, Betty’s heart grew cold. She didn’t know how she should ever endure it. Mrs. Harrow would be shocked and indignant and outraged, and quite likely she would feel that it was all her fault (as, indeed, it was) and would think her impertinent. The girl was sorely tempted to refrain from delivering the message. Since it was a foregone conclusion that Mrs. Harrow wouldn’t be willing to go to the Phillips house, why should Betty excite her for naught and perhaps spoil the half-hour which was all she would have with Rose? But she couldn’t deceive Mr. Meadowcroft. Neither could she tell him she had been unwilling or afraid to do what he had requested. There was nothing to do but to put it through.
Mrs. Harrow refused, indeed, and in no uncertain terms, to enter Mrs. Phillips’s mansion. She had never liked Mrs. Phillips; and since Rose’s illness she had come to dislike her with intensity. Mrs. Phillips was the only person in the village who hadn’t called since Rose had been stricken with blindness. She hadn’t even sent a servant to inquire at the door. Moreover, she was said to have made a cruel pun as to the “Harrowing affair.”
But Mrs. Harrow’s bitterness was all for her. She was kindness itself to Betty. She had always been fond of the girl, and the shock and strangeness of it being over, she appreciated what she had done for Rose, and was increasingly grateful. Rose hadn’t, so far as her mother could judge, had a moment of unhappiness since the afternoon she had started out with Betty looking like her old self. Indeed, she had never before seemed so ecstatically happy. To-day when Betty came in the girl was in the midst of a gay waltz on the piano that she hadn’t touched before for over six months, and Mrs. Harrow smiled affectionately as she squeezed Betty’s hand.