"Don't cry, darling! Cleo will come again!"
And in the long journey to the North the man brooded over the strange tones of joyous assurance with which the girl had spoken.
CHAPTER XX
THE BLOW FALLS
For a time Norton lost himself in the stunning immensity of the life of New York. He made no effort to adjust himself to it. He simply allowed its waves to roll over and engulf him.
He stopped with mammy and the boy at a brown-stone boarding house on Stuyvesant Square kept by a Southern woman to whom he had a letter of introduction.
Mrs. Beam was not an ideal landlady, but her good-natured helplessness appealed to him. She was a large woman of ample hips and bust, and though very tall seemed always in her own way. She moved slowly and laughed with a final sort of surrender to fate when anything went wrong. And it was generally going wrong. She was still comparatively young—perhaps thirty-two—but was built on so large and unwieldy a pattern that it was not easy to guess her age, especially as she had a silly tendency to harmless kittenish ways at times.
The poor thing was pitifully at sea in her new world and its work. She had been reared in a typically extravagant home of the old South where slaves had waited her call from childhood. She had not learned to sew, or cook or keep house—in fact, she had never learned to do anything useful or important. So naturally she took boarders. Her husband, on whose shoulders she had placed every burden of life the day of her marriage, lay somewhere in an unmarked trench on a Virginia battlefield.