But the damage had been done. Poor Mrs. Johnnie Dunn had a very harmless but very great desire to shine before her neighbours. She had expected to return to Orchard Glen with a blare of trumpets and astonish every one with her tales of California with geraniums in the garden at Christmas, and bathing in the ocean in January, and oranges everywhere for the picking, and a host of kindred wonders in which her untravelled neighbour friends were to be instructed. And instead she found the very name of California and El Monte were a byword and a hissing in the mouths of the inhabitants of Orchard Glen, and had to spend the first month after her return in voluble explanations and denials.
CHAPTER VII
OFF WITH THE OLD LOVE
It seemed to Christina as if there had never been a summer that opened so joyously. In the first place she was preparing to go West with Allister when he came home in July, and she would not be very far from the Mission Field where Neil had gone, and that was good fortune enough in itself. Added to that, Sandy came home in May, and life was all holiday when Sandy was near, but best of all, at the closing of college, who should come riding over the hills but her Dream Knight. He was to stay the whole summer, Tilly explained on Sunday when he appeared with his mother and uncle at church, and Mrs. Sutherland was scared to let him go beyond the garden gate alone.
Though his coming to Orchard Glen brought such joy to Christina, young Mr. Sutherland had really come home under a cloud, though his mother took great care to turn it inside out for the public benefit and allow the silver lining of Wallace's many virtues to shine through. He was so handsome and so genuinely glad to see everybody in Orchard Glen, and so free and hearty in his manner, that it was very easy for people to believe the best of him. And indeed the worst was only that he had been a little less studious in college than he should have been.
He had barely passed his examinations in his first year, and now in his second, when he should have retrieved himself, he had gone under altogether. And the worst of it all was that Uncle William, who was paying his college bills, and who was rich and childless and would never miss the money, was making a dreadful fuss. Wallace wrote him apologising deeply, and explaining just how it all happened, the inconvenient examinations having come on just when he was labouring under a heavy cold.
Mrs. Sutherland wrote her brother explaining still further, Wallace had been ill, he was not at all well now. He had been really quite indisposed all Spring, and it was cruel to blame the dear boy for not studying.
But Uncle William seemed to enjoy being cruel. He wrote that he had done his best to give her son an education, but it appeared that it couldn't be done, and he felt it was time to stop wasting money. So he was sending Wallace home to her to see what she could make of him. Perhaps she could find something for him to do in Orchard Glen that would not tax his mentality as the University seemed to have done.
Poor Mrs. Sutherland was overcome with grief. Dr. McGarry was too, and he stormed and scolded Wallace and his sister by turns, and ended up by declaring that William was getting to be nothing but a skinflint and that he might give the boy another chance.