He got up from his Morris chair, in his room where he had been vainly trying to study, when he came at last to this moment of decision, picked up his cap and went with firm ringing step down the corridor to the professor's house.
A scant five minutes before Susan in the kitchen had been startled by the ringing of the telephone. She climbed up on the stool, placed there for her short, spare self, and put the receiver to her ear.
"Susan?" came over the wire, interrogatively.
"Miss Frances," delightedly, "dat you?"
"Yes, how's everything getting along?"
"So—so!"
"How is father?"
"Ain't seen him but a minute, he went out to Marse Edward Montague's."
Frances, far off in the rear of a store on the mountain-side, made a little exclamation that carried to Susan as she stood with pendant lip and wrinkled forehead, the receiver at her ear.