“In so many weeks I’ll see father. In so many days!”—she kept saying to herself. And now it had come to Saturday evening, and she was to start home on Monday. She was walking back from her little pupils’ house, where she had said good-by until September. She was not alone.
A certain Dick Temple, a cousin of her pupils’ mother, had a way of running down from town to spend Sundays with the Pauls, to play, he said, with the children, and get in some rowing on the river, and to exercise his cousin John’s polo ponies, and—to see Annie Graham.
But this last was not so stated in the bond.
He had a way of appearing in time to walk across the campus with her, after little Kate’s music lesson Saturday afternoon, and once or twice he had beguiled her into his boat, and they had gone floating down the river in the twilight, talking of everything in heaven and earth. Being young, religion had been their first theme; and then, by and by, love;—in the abstract, of course. A month ago, they both had feared themselves incapable of experiencing this beautiful emotion—Annie, because she was going to devote herself to study and her father; Dick, because he had outlived such things, and was very bitter and cynical and mysterious in his allusions to life, which, he said, “he knew.” Sometimes they talked of their future; and it was then that Annie had told him, smiling, that she had no such luxurious prospects as those which he had been outlining for himself,—travel, and study, and the philanthropic opportunities of great wealth.
They were walking slowly along under the great elms toward her door; it had rained earlier in the day, and the worn bricks of the narrow pavement held here and there shallow pools of water; the sun struck across the wet grass in a low flood of gold; and there was the scent of young leaves and roses in the air.
“We are poor people,” Annie had said, with an amused look; “I’m going to teach school and wear spectacles, and be very stern and learned.”
“Ah, well,” returned the young man, “it’s the thing to be poor nowadays; it’s awfully vulgar to be rich! It’s queer, now, when you think of it, Miss Graham, how many people in our class have lost their money, isn’t it?”
“We’ve never had it to lose,” Annie said; “the family fortunes are to rise on school-teaching.”
Dick glanced at her with quick admiration in his handsome young eyes. He was twenty-four, but he blundered over his words like a schoolboy.