CHAPTER XX
CHASED AS A BIRD WITHOUT CAUSE
Stargarde had had a busy afternoon. The table in the middle of the room was littered with account books, in the midst of which she had cleared a small space so that she might take her tea and go on with her work.
Bread and cheese, celery and tea, composed her frugal meal, and she was eating and drinking cheerily and thanking God in her heart that she had so many more blessings than she deserved.
Yet there were some things that caused a shadow to pass over her lovely face. Zeb was one of them. All the afternoon she had been thinking of her. Out in the playground in front of her windows, the ruddy-faced children whose parents lived in the Pavilion, had been playing merrily, and she had wished a dozen times that Zeb was among them.
The very air of Halifax is military, and even the children are warlike in their games. The children had built a huge snow fort and manned it with a body of resolute defenders, who gallantly resisted the besieging[besieging] force till their supply of ammunition, consisting of snowballs, had given out. A spirited sortie had not mended matters. They were overpowered, their officer in command captured, their flag trampled in the snow, and that of their conquerors run up in its place.
And Zeb might be sharing the children’s fun and frolic if she would; but she would not. She had plainly given Stargarde to understand that she did not wish to have anything more to do with her, and was going on in her own way with sullen resignation.
Stargarde sighed mournfully as she drank her tea. “And it was all on account of Brian,” she murmured. “Zeb was getting on well with me till he came here that evening. Strange that she should be so frantically jealous of him; and she promised to come too. But I will not complain. God will give me back my wandering lamb. I must beg Brian not to come here for a time.”
As if in punishment of her inhospitable thought, she at that moment heard his heavy step on the veranda, and the utterance of her name in his peremptory accents:
“Stargarde, Stargarde, let me in.”
She sprang up, opened the door, and watched Dr. Camperdown in surprise, as he walked in holding something in his arms closely wrapped in his sleigh robe.