“You will come to see us again,” Mr. Warren said to his visitor, when the latter arose to go, and smiling down on Alice, who stood with her arm across her father’s neck, Mr. Howland answered:
“Yes, I shall come again.”
Then he bade them good night, and as the door closed after him, Mr. Warren said:
“It seems darker now that he is gone,” but to Alice, the room was lighter far for that brief visit.
Mr. Howland, too, felt better for the call. He had done some good, he hoped, and the picture of the two as he had left them was pleasant to remember, and as he drew near his home, and saw in imagination his own large easy-chair before the fire, he tried to fancy how it would seem to be a blind man, sitting there, with a brown-haired maiden’s arm around his neck.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WHITE HOUSE ON THE HILL.
“Miss Huntington, brother,” Miss Elinor said, and Mr. Howland bowed low to the lady thus presented to him by his sister on his arrival home.
She had been waiting for him nearly an hour, and she now returned his greeting with an air more befitting a queen than Adelaide Huntington—for she it was; and by some singular co-incidence she had come to rent a house of Mr. Howland just as Alice Warren had done but two or three weeks before. The failure which had ruined Mr. Warren had not affected Mrs. Huntington further than the mortification and grief she naturally felt at the disgrace and desertion of her husband, from whom she had never heard since he left her so suddenly on the night of the party—neither had she ever met with Mr. Warren, although she had written him a note, assuring him that in no way had she been concerned in the fraud. Still her position in the city was not particularly agreeable, and after a time she had removed to Springfield, Mass., where she took in plain sewing—for without her husband’s salary it was necessary that she should do something for the maintenance of her family. Springfield, however, was quite too large for one of Adelaide’s proud, ambitious nature. “She would rather live in a smaller place,” she said, “where she could be somebody. She had been trampled down long enough, and in a country village she would be as good as any one.”
Hearing by chance of Oakland and its democratic people, she had persuaded her mother into removing thither, giving her numerous directions as to the manner in which she was to demean herself.