“Betty, dearest and best, don’t take it to heart so, please, please. Honest and true, cross my heart and hope to die I don’t care,” she cried. “And anyhow, Dr. Vandegrift may be sick or he may have had to move his office somewhere else. He wouldn’t have any way to send us word, you know.”
Encouraged by this suggestion, again Betty summoned forth her courage. Next day she went alone to Millville. She didn’t venture to ask permission. Aunt Sarah, she knew, would refuse and she wasn’t sufficiently sure of her father’s approval of her going to Paulding two days in succession to risk it. Moreover, he had advised her at noon to lie down and have a nap after dinner. She started to wash the china, thinking she would steal away afterwards, but had hardly begun when there was a knock at the door. It was old Mrs. Crowe, who never cared how early she came and whose calls were sure to be visits. The moment she and Aunt Sarah were safely in the sitting-room, Betty packed all the china in the dish-pan, piling the pots and pans on top. Concealing it beneath the sink that it shouldn’t call unnecessary attention to her absence, she got her hat and jacket and rushed away over the Paulding turnpike.
At Millville she went first to the building on Parrot Street and went fearfully through the uppermost story and the ground floor, but found no tenants. The whole building was empty and indescribably dreary in its darkness and dirt and in the chill closeness of the atmosphere. In an adjoining tenement house, she found only foreigners unable to speak or to understand English.
Thence she went up into the main street and made her way to an apothecary shop. She wouldn’t venture to make inquiries of a doctor, but very likely the apothecary would know. She had heard Dr. Vandegrift speak so often of the heavy bills he had to pay for drugs that she concluded he must be on friendly terms with the apothecary and that the latter was to be trusted.
The apothecary shop was also a center for the sale of liquor and a general lounging-place. Betty entered timidly and glanced rather shrinkingly about the crowded room. The clerk looked like a veritable bar-tender and she hesitated to approach him. She was battling against an impulse to flee when a man came forward to her from behind a partition in the back of the shop.
He was a pharmacist and only handled the prescriptions. But he noticed the entrance of the sweet, refined-looking girl who, tall as she was, had the face and bearing of a frightened child, and took pity on her shyness and confusion.
“Can I do anything for you, miss?” he inquired deferentially.
Betty raised her brown eyes to him gratefully.
“There was a gentleman who—treats the eyes that I was trying to find,” she explained politely. “I thought you might know about him—whether he’s ill or—he isn’t at his office.”
As the man stared at her, he muttered something under his breath.