"Piled a box on a chair on a table," she explained with an effort, "until I could reach up high enough to prize the top off. 'Twas old and loose—and I still had the augur!"
"Neva! Think of the perseverance! And after all that, you didn't get to see him?"
At my words her mouth tightened at the corners, and her eyes looked very bright and dry.
"Oh, I saw him," she answered bitterly, after a moment's struggle. "He drove right past me while I was trudging down that dusty road to church. But he didn't see me. He had Stella Hampton in the buggy with him."
"Stella Hampton? Who is she?"
"She's the girl that sicked the fit doctor on to me!"
I tried to comfort her, but she was desolate.
"It ain't that I care so much about him," she assured me, forgetting, in her misery, her boarding-school English, "but oh, I can't bear to face them at home. It's so terrible to be made ashamed before folks."
I agreed with her and insisted that she go home with me, not braving the ordeal of facing her own family until late in the afternoon, when they should have forgotten it a little. Tears of gratitude came to her pretty, troubled eyes as she joyously accepted my invitation.
Mother was on the front porch as we came up the walk and she welcomed Neva cordially.