So in spite of her brave attempts to forget her grief in her work, and in spite of Madame's unfailing kindness and help, the girl was often very lonely. The big echoing house of Rosemount was always deserted of an evening. Grandma went to bed, and either Helen or the little maid was left on guard, while the two ladies went to a dinner-party or an evening at cards.
One soft languorous September evening, the loneliness promised to be unbearable, and she determined to go alone for a walk. Madame was always too tired for a tramp after school, and she knew no one else who would accompany her.
She spoke of it at the tea-table in the faint hope that Miss Annabel might suggest coming too, but was disappointed.
"Why that'll be lovely, dearie," she cried, "go and have a run in the park. It will do you good. I'd dearly love to go with you, but there's Mrs. Captain Willoughby's musicale. There won't be a soul there that isn't old enough to be in her dotage, but I promised that nothing short of sudden death would make me miss it."
"Annabel, I am surprised at you," said her sister reprovingly. "I wouldn't go far in the evening alone, Miss Murray," she added in her stately way. "It does not seem just—well—exactly proper, don't you know."
"Nonsense, Elinor. How's the poor child to help going alone, when there's no one to go with her?"
Helen had learned to look for these slight altercations at the table. While the sisters were apparently of one mind on all the larger issues of life, they had a habit of arguing and cavilling over the little things that often left their young boarder in a state of wonder.
She slipped away as soon as the meal was over, for the evenings were growing short and she wanted to see the lake in its sunset glory. The night was warm and all the young people were on the lake. The streets were deserted. But on the pretty vine-clad verandas, the heads of families sat sewing or reading and smoking, with the little ones tumbling about the grass. On one veranda a gramophone, the first in the town, screeched out a strain from a Grand Opera to the wonder and admiration of all the neighbours. Helen moved along the street more lonely than ever in the midst of all this home happiness. She passed a little cottage where a young man and woman were tying up a rose vine, beaten down by recent rains. Madame had told her they had been married just the week before. They looked very happy, laughing and whispering like a couple of nest-building robins, as they worked together to make their little home more beautiful. She had to hurry away from the pretty scene. Some one had promised her once that there should be a rose vine over their porch in the new home he had been planning for her.
She turned a corner and was alarmed by a great churning and puffing noise ahead, as though the Inverness had left her native element and come sailing up Main Street. But it was only Captain Willoughby in his new automobile. It was the first, and as yet the only machine in Algonquin, and its unhappy owner would have sold it to the lowest bidder could he have found any one foolish enough to bid at all. For so far, the captain had had no opportunity to learn to run it. His first excursions abroad had been attended with such disaster, such mad careering of horses, and plunging into ditches, such dismaying paralysis of the engine right in the middle of a neighbour's gateway, such inexplicable excursions onto the sidewalk and through plate glass windows, such harrowing overturning of baby-carriages, that Mrs. Captain Willoughby took an attack of nerves every time he went abroad, and the town fathers finally requested that the captain take out his Juggernaut car only at such hours as the streets were clear. So on quiet evenings such as this one, when there were not likely to be any horses abroad, Mrs. Willoughby telephoned all her friends and told them to take in the children for the captain was coming. And so, heralded, like the Lady Godiva, the trembling motorist went forth, while the streets immediately became as empty as those of Coventry, with rows of peeping Toms, safe inside their fences, jeering at the unhappy man's uneven progress. He whizzed past Helen at a terrible speed, grazing the side-walk and giving her almost as great a fright as he got himself, and went whirring up the hill.
She did not want to join the crowds in the park so she followed the familiar street past the school, and out along the Pine Road toward the lake shore. But when she found her way was leading her through Willow Lane, where all the dirty and poor people of Algonquin lived, she turned off into a path that crossed a field and led to the water. Helen had some little pupils from Willow Lane, and their appearance did not invite a closer acquaintance with their homes.