"If you would be so good as to not use the word board. I don't know why it should be so offensive to me," she added with a little laugh. "My ears are very sensitive, I suppose. But if you wouldn't mind saying, in the course of your conversation, that you are staying with the Rosemount Armstrongs, it would please me so much."
"Certainly, I shall remember," said Helen, much relieved.
"Thank you so much. And now if you would like to rest for a little after your journey you may. Supper will be served in the course of half-an-hour."
Helen felt a lump growing in her throat that made the thought of food choke her. But she dared not refuse. To remain alone in that big echoing room, was only to invite thoughts of home and other far off and lost joys.
When Miss Armstrong had left her, and her trunk had come bumping up the back stairs and been deposited in the vast closet, she sat down on the black haircloth chair and looked hopelessly around the big dreary room. There rose before her a vision of her own room at the old home, the room that she and her sister Betty had shared. It had rose-bordered curtains and rose-festooned wall-paper and pink and white cushions. And it had a dear mother-face peeping in at the door to chide her gently if she sat too late writing those long letters to Dick.
The memory of it all came over her with such a rush that she felt she must throw herself upon that broad white bed and sob herself sick. But she sat still, holding her hands tightly clenched, and choking back the tears. She had work to do and she must be ready for that work. To give way in private meant inefficiency in public to-morrow. School-teaching was a new, untried field of labour for her, and if she went to bed and cried herself to sleep, as she wanted to do, she would have a headache for to-morrow and she would fail. And she must not fail, she told herself desperately; she dared not fail, for Mother was depending upon her success. And yet she had no idea how that success was to be gained. She knew only too well that she was not fitted for her task. She had never wanted to teach school, and had never dreamed she would need to. Her place had always been at home, and a big place she had filled as Mother's help and the minister's right hand. But her father had insisted upon her taking her teacher's certificate. "It's easy to carry about, Nellie," he was wont to say, "and may come useful some day."
So Helen had gone, with good-natured indulgence of Father's whim, and studied at a training school, with one eye on her books and the other watching for Dick to come up the street. And when she brought home her despised diploma, there was a diamond ring on the hand that placed it on her father's desk. That had been a year ago. And almost immediately after, her father had been taken from them. The old home went next. The boys and girls scattered to earn their own living. Mother had gone with Betty, who had married, and who lived away in the West. And then the last and best treasure had been taken, the diamond with its marvellous lights and colours, and with it had gone out all the light and colour of life.
She was just twenty-three, and she had been given the task of working out a new strange life unaided, with nothing ahead of her but work and loneliness.
At first she had given way to a numb despair, then necessity and the needs of the family aroused her. There was something for her to do, something that had to be done, and back of all the wreck of her life, dimmed by clouds of sorrow, there stood her father's God. In spite of all the despair and dismay she felt instinctively He must be somewhere, behind it all. She did not know as yet, that that assurance spelled hope. But she knew that there was work for her and there was Mother waiting until she should make her a home.
She sprang up, as her misery threatened to overwhelm her again, and began swiftly to change her dress and arrange her hair. She pulled back the stiff curtains of one of the tall windows and leaned out. A soft blue haze, the first glimpse of September's tender eyes, was settling on the distant hills. The sun was setting, and away up the street towards the west flamed a gold and crimson sky, and away down in the east flamed its gold and crimson reflection on the mirror of Lake Algonquin. From the garden below, the scent of the opening nicotine blossoms came up to her.