The victoria drew up at the gate. Meadowcroft got out and told the man to take Miss Pogany home and return here for him. As they turned, he waved his hat and smiled.
As she saw him toiling laboriously up the flagged walk, tears came to the girl’s eyes and a lump to her throat. Her first drive in a victoria made no impression upon her. She couldn’t even tell Aunt Sarah whether it was comfortable or whether there were springs in the seat. The conviction that she had been riding beside a hero so filled her with wonder and awe that there was no place for lesser sensations.
CHAPTER XII
“THERE’S a man I could easily find it in my heart to envy,” Humphrey Meadowcroft said to himself one evening a fortnight later as he sat alone in his room in the almost empty house. Mrs. Phillips and the servants had already gone to her place at Gloucester for the summer, but he had waited until he should have settled certain details connected with Rose Harrow’s entering the high school at Paulding. He and Herbie were to leave next day.
Mrs. Harrow had been so charmed by Meadowcroft’s personality that she would in any event have been as wax in his hands. But he had been more than usually deferential as he exerted himself to make her see the wisdom of not only allowing but urging her daughter to be as nearly normal as it was possible to be in all her relations, and had convinced her readily. She saw the folly of her fears, entered into the anticipations of Rose and Betty almost as eagerly as they, and helped Rose make up what she had lost since Christmas so that she could take examinations in the fall.
Meadowcroft had been driven over to Paulding to-day to arrange with Mr. Appleton, principal of the high school, for Rose to take oral examinations and to discuss her course of study with him. It was of the school-master he was thinking when he made the remark that his was an enviable lot.
On the face of it, however, nothing could have seemed more absurd than for the rich man of leisure to envy the poor over-worked school-master. The lot of the latter would have seemed such as to elicit pity rather than covetousness. Worn, tired-looking, stooping, shabby, domestic care added to the strain of teaching had bent Mr. Appleton’s thin shoulders and streaked his sandy hair prematurely with gray so that he looked ten years older than his five and forty years. His salary was meager; the high school, which received pupils from two villages outside Paulding proper, large; and he had only one assistant. His wife, who was ailing and fretful, reckoned the time spent in their lodgings in Paulding (which was his life) merely as so much dreary waiting for the vacations which they spent with her family in the town in another state where both had grown up.
None the less, as he talked eagerly and enthusiastically of his work that afternoon to a rarely sympathetic listener, he acted as if he hadn’t a care in the world. A scholar, a lover of mankind and particularly of youth, his happiness in his work, which was almost his whole life, was truly sufficient to make him appear singularly fortunate to the thoughtful observer.
Meadowcroft went straight to Mr. Appleton’s lodgings. The business was readily concluded. Mr. Appleton agreed to go over to South Paulding the week before the high school should open to give Rose her examinations. She could then enter with her class and pursue the regular course with the exception of algebra, which they agreed would be out of the question. Meadowcroft spoke of the two other children in whom he was especially interested, assuring the school-master that he would enjoy Betty Pogany’s singularly mature intelligence and lovely disposition and Tommy Finnemore’s piquant oddity.
Mr. Appleton proposed that his guest might like to see the high school, and Meadowcroft eagerly assenting, they drove over in the carriage. It was the first time Mr. Appleton had ever ridden in a victoria, and he frankly enjoyed the novel pleasure. He felt a trifle guilty as he realized how much his wife would have liked it; but Mr. Meadowcroft hadn’t proposed asking her and certainly he couldn’t speak of it. And if she had gone she would have monopolized the conversation—Mrs. Appleton was always a great talker and particularly so with strangers, who were at her mercy—and it was certainly so rare a treat to have such a gentleman as Meadowcroft to himself that his regret for her didn’t trouble him deeply.