"Mrs. Harrington's idea is, and I think rightly, that a conscientious woman would feel the marriage tie, however nominal, a bond that would obligate her to a certain duty toward her husband. As to why we selected you, my dear, my husband and I have had an interest in you for some years, as you know. We have spoken of you as a girl whom we should like for a relative——"
"Why, isn't that strange?" cried Phyllis, dimpling. "That's just what I've thought about you!"
Mrs. De Guenther flushed, with a delicate old shyness.
"Thank you, dear child," she said. "I was about to add that we have not seen you at your work all these years without knowing you to have the kind heart and sense of honor requisite to poor Angela's plan. We feel sure you could be trusted to take the place. Mr. De Guenther has asked his friend Mr. Johnston, the head of the library, such things as we needed to supplement our personal knowledge of you. You have everything that could be asked, even to a certain cheerfulness of outlook which poor Angela, naturally, lacks in a measure."
"But—but what about me?" asked Phyllis Braithwaite a little piteously, in answer to all this.
They seemed so certain she was what they wanted—was there anything in this wild scheme that would make her life better than it was as the tired, ill-paid, light-hearted keeper of a roomful of turbulent little foreigners?
"Unless you are thinking of marriage—" Phyllis shook her head—"you would have at least a much easier life than you have now. Mrs. Harrington would settle a liberal income on you, contingent, of course, of your faithful wardership over Allan. We would be your only judges as to that. You would have a couple or more months of absolute freedom every year, control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it. You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his mother has nothing to fear for him."
Mr. De Guenther stopped with a grave little bow, and he and his wife waited for the reply.
The Liberry Teacher sat silent, her eyes on her slim hands, that were roughened and reddened by constant hurried washings to get off the dirt of the library books. It was true—a good deal of it, anyhow. And one thing they had not said was true also: her sunniness and accuracy and strength, her stock-in-trade, were wearing thin under the pressure of too long hours and too hard work and too few personal interests. Her youth was worn down. And—marriage? What chance of love and marriage had she, a working-girl alone, too poor to see anything of the class of men she would be willing to marry? She had not for years spent six hours with a man of her own kind and age. She had not even been specially in love, that she could remember, since she was grown up. She did not feel much, now, as if she ever would be. All that she had to give up in taking this offer was her freedom, such as it was—and those fluttering perhapses that whisper such pleasant promises when you are young. But, then, she wouldn't be young so very much longer. Should she—she put it to herself crudely—should she wait long, hard, closed-in years in the faith that she would learn to be absolutely contented, or that some man she could love would come to the cheap boarding-house, or the little church she attended occasionally when she was not too tired, fall in love with her work-dimmed looks at sight, and—marry her? It had not happened all these years while her girlhood had been more attractive and her personality more untired. There was scarcely a chance in a hundred for her of a kind lover-husband and such dear picture-book children as she had seen Eva Atkinson convoying. Well—her mind suddenly came up against the remembrance, as against a sober fact, that in her passionate wishings of yesterday she had not wished for a lover-husband, nor for children. She had asked for a husband who would give her money, and leisure to be rested and pretty, and—a rose-garden! And here, apparently, was her wish uncannily fulfilled.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" inquired the Destinies with their traditional indifference. "We can't wait all night!"