“‘Always the best of friends,’ Miss Cis, like Joe Gargery and little Pip, aren’t we?” he asked, holding Cis’s hand for a dallying moment of farewell.
“Yes, indeed, if you’ll keep up your half of it, though I don’t know Joe Gargery, nor little Pip,” Cis said.
“That doesn’t matter; they were the best of friends; that’s the salient point,” Anselm said. “And I don’t want you to forget that so are we. You’ll come back this winter, when Miss Braithwaite comes?”
“I don’t know; I think so, if she wants me. I’ll miss her—and you—and the dear library; the whole wonderful house and my life in it, and all the kindness I’ve had, and the untellable things I’ve learned. Oh, I shall miss it all!” Cis choked.
“Only for a visit; you’re going only for a visit! Beaconhite holds you on the other end of a tether! Good-bye, Miss Cicely. I’m afraid the sunshine goes out with your hair.” Anselm pressed Cicely’s hand hard, put into her lap a book and a box of candy, together with a long box with a protruding ribbon over one side, all of which Cis had pretended not to see, though she knew quite well what their purpose was, and she felt a girlish satisfaction in being thus freighted and sped.
The train rolled out of the station, and Cis was on her way home.
It was a long, tiresome journey, but it gave Cis time to consider her history since she had made the same journey in the reverse direction. A lifetime lay between the journeys, it seemed to her. Basically she was the same Cicely Adair who had come to Beaconhite to try her fortune; in her on that day had lain the potential qualities and attitudes of mind which these months had brought out, but so tremendous had been all that had happened to her, so far-reaching in its effect—reaching as far as all eternity—that it was by no means the same Cis who was going back to Nan.
At the station, when Cis arrived in the growing dusk, a young man came forward to greet her. He was attired in such perfection that his effort to appear at his best positively screamed aloud to all passers-by. Cis did not know him, and, though he was bearing down on her, it was with a hesitation, in spite of his advance toward her, that spoke a like uncertainty in him. Only when he came quite up to her did Cis cry:
“Well, Tom! Tom Dowling! To think of my not knowing you! Nice of you to come!”
“I wasn’t sure of you, Cis,” said Tom uneasily. “You’re—you’re awfully different!”