Now it was clear to Gloria that Sandford girls had purposely avoided her. Those who sought her companionship were not such as she would have chosen, and only Trixy, the independent, was really her chum.
“And that’s why the girls have been avoiding me,” she mused bitterly. “The folks around here—are shunned—for being—in debt.” All the narrowness of a place like Sandford suddenly confronted her. Trixy, the brave and lovable, had been her friend, while the others turned their heads away scornfully. Suspicion painfully confirmed, brought to the little girl from Barbend a sense of something very like shame. She who had never known the blight of contempt, now felt the full blast of its venom. And being a girl, like a fragile human flower, the hidden thing was magnified. She suspected all Sandford as her enemy, she brooded over the disgrace until it seemed unbearable. Debt! How she had always pitied those in debt! But to owe a poor workman with a sick wife and a family of small children!
“I must see those children,” she determined. “Perhaps I can do something.” It was just before Thanksgiving and during a long damp spell of weather that so often proceeds the onset of heavy frost. For two days Gloria watched in vain for the Gorman children, then she learned from the boy in the drug store, that their mother was dangerously ill.
Her first impulse was to ask Trixy to drive her out to this place, wherever it might be, but that was discarded in the face of its consequent revelations. She could not let even Trixy know that money, which should have been hers, had been used with such disastrous consequences. She must find the children alone.
Second River, that section where the Gormans lived, according to the drug clerk, was too far away to admit of ordinary foot travel. It was well enough for the children who, no doubt, knew many short cuts, but not for Gloria. A bicycle was the most practical means of making the trip, and, fortunately, Mona Sheehan was friendly enough to lend Gloria her wheel for a few hours on this Saturday morning.
Each new development in her tangle added more to the already overwhelming weight of suspicious disgrace. And of all dreadful things possible, that of public censure seemed to the high-strung Gloria the most dreadful.
“If I could ride away from it all—and go to Jane,” she sighed as the borrowed wheel rolled over the country road out toward Second River. The roads were heavy with mud, and as Gloria pedaled along, her spirits became imbued with the unhealthy conditions surrounding her.
“I don’t blame them one bit,” she told herself. “They always have to live in the worst places, these poor hard working folks, and if any one has to wait for their money it’s the poorest. Jane always said so.”
One more long pull up a hill and a coast down another, then the house with the red barn out front, described as Gorman’s, hove into view. Confronting it Gloria felt a surge of apprehension sweep over her.
Suppose the mother should be very cross and unreasonable? Or worse yet, suppose the father were home and should scold—oh, she never could stand any one scolding, especially a stranger! Even Jane respected Gloria’s fear and hatred of a wordy war.