But surely her own Aunt Harriet would not deliberately wrong her! She had given some explanation, of course, but why had she not explained clearly?
There had never been the slightest danger of Gloria telling her father of this change, for that would have caused him to give up instantly every thought of the foreign trip. It had only been the boarding school opportunity for his daughter that had finally influenced him to leave her. But the lure of a whole winter, and even early summer at a most carefully managed seminary, the very one her own dear mother had expressed a feeble wish for, as a place to educate the baby when she should have grown to girlhood, this was that great opportunity for Gloria that had induced Edward Doane to consider his own chance on the foreign business trip.
And she had managed to get him away without discovering the truth!
Even Tom and Millie had been suspicious, but, of course, there was by no means so great and so brave a reason for her secrecy, so far as companions were concerned.
Well, she had managed it all this far, Jane was gone, and now she faced the first result of her heroic sacrifice.
“Part payment,” she reflected.
Could she go through with it?
And why was her aunt so secretive?
Why did her Uncle Charley not come home from his business out in Layton?
After the shock she had experienced on the day of her arrival, when the full weight of her loneliness descended upon her, Gloria now picked up the stray ends of all these questions and turned them over in her mind. But looking at the gray haired woman in the chair before her, she who was too gray for her years and too nervous for any reasonable discussion, Gloria could not find the courage to ask again why all this must be so.