“That is what I want to tell you. Will you come in, please? This is my room. Let me introduce you to two more of your classmates–my room-mate, Miss Alden, and Miss Sutherland, our star student in biology. No, don’t go, girls.”
“I thought that I was to keep intruders out.”
“We will just lock the doors, and pay no attention to any knocks. Now, Miss Van Gerder, if you please, we will tell you first, what we know about Margaret and how we learned it; we are the only ones in the college who do know anything more than she has seen fit to tell. But don’t imagine that she has said that she was anything that she really wasn’t.”
“I am glad of that, now tell me your story.”
So Beth told it, with various interpolations by Dolly and Mary; she repeated both Rob Steele’s story and the conversation which she and Dolly had chanced to overhear on the night of the freshman entertainment.
“Let me introduce you to two more of your classmates.”
Miss Van Gerder drew a deep breath. “I shall never forgive myself for the mischief I have done, but I will do my best to repair it. Let me tell you what I know of Margaret’s family. In the first place, Mr. Worthington was my great-uncle, and I visited at his Chicago home very often, so that is the way I came to know Margaret. I never saw very much of her, for she was in school or busy helping her mother, and, of course, I was going to teas and receptions, and such things, when I was there, although I wasn’t much more than a child. Mrs. Hamilton was uncle’s housekeeper for years, and after his wife died, he depended on her entirely for things not often entrusted to a servant. He had no children. Mrs. Hamilton was a farmer’s daughter; she is a good, sensible, honest woman. She has always been very ambitious for Margaret, and that is not strange, for Margaret has a fine intellect. She inherits it from her father. He was a farmer’s boy and came from the same locality as Mrs. Hamilton. They knew each other as children, and went to the same district school. There Mrs. Hamilton’s education stopped. Mr. Hamilton, however, had made up his mind, as a boy, to go to West Point. He had no political influence to help him, so he studied with all his energy and might. He finally went to the city, obtained employment at a boarding-house to do work out of schooltime, and so he managed to gain a thorough foundation. He knew that his only chance of getting to West Point at all, lay in his ability to outdistance other boys in a competitive examination. So I suppose no boy ever studied harder than did he.”
She stopped a moment to look at the interested faces of her auditors. “His chance finally came and he was ready for it. A congressional appointment was offered the boy who stood highest. Mr. Hamilton won it. He went to West Point, and for nearly three years he did fine work. While he was there, his father died. His mother had died long before. His father was ill for months before his death, and Mr. Hamilton sent home every cent that he could spare. At Easter time in his third year he was invited, with some other West Pointers, to spend the day with an acquaintance up the Hudson. They got permission and went. I do not know who their host was, but he was not a West Pointer. During the afternoon he took the cadets out in a sailboat. I presume he knew enough of boats ordinarily, but he was drunk that day; he would not let any of the other young men take charge, and so, when a little gust of wind came up, the boat went over. The others escaped with a ducking–even the drunken fellow who was solely responsible for the accident; but Mr. Hamilton struck on a rock, on the boat, or on something–no one ever knew just how it happened; anyway, the boys had hard work saving him, though he was a fine swimmer. When they pulled him into the boat, he was insensible. For weeks they thought that he would not recover, and when he did get well, it was only to learn that he must resign his cadetship. There had been an accident to his spine which rendered him totally unfit for a cadet’s life.”