Thus reassuring himself, he put his purse in his pocket, and glancing again at Rossie’s letter his eye fell upon Miss Belknap’s name, and he laughed aloud as he said: “Poor bald Bee Belknap. She must look comical. I can imagine how it hurts her pride. Buy Rossie’s hair, indeed! I should think not, when that is her only beauty, if I except her eyes, which are too large for her thin face; but that will round out in time, and Rossie may be a beauty yet, though not like Josey; no, never like Josey.”
And that brought the young man back to Miss Fleming’s letter, and its imperative request. Could he comply with it now? Ought he not to go at once to the sick mother, who was missing him so sadly, and who had made all the happiness he had ever known at home? Duty said yes, but inclination drew him to Holburton and the fair Josephine, with whom he believed himself to be and with whom he was, perhaps, as much in love as any young man of twenty well can be. Perhaps Rossie had been unduly alarmed; at all events, if his mother were so very sick, his father would write, of course, and on the whole he believed he should go to Holburton by the afternoon train, and then, perhaps, go home.
And so the die was cast, and the young man walked to the telegraph office and sent across the wires to Miss Josephine Fleming the three words: “I will come.”
CHAPTER II.
DR. MATTHEWSON.
The train from Ellicottville was late that afternoon. In fact, its habit was to be late, but on this particular day it was more than usually behind time, and the one stage which Holburton boasted had waited more than half an hour at the little station of the out-of-the-way town which lies nestled among the Berkshire hills, just on the boundary line between the Empire State and Massachusetts. The day was hot even for midsummer, and the two fat, motherly matrons who sat in the depot alternately inveighed against the heat and wiped their glowing faces, while they watched and discussed the young lady who, on the platform outside, was walking up and down, seeming wholly unconscious of their espionage. But it was only seeming, for she knew perfectly well that she was an object of curiosity and criticism, and more than once she paused in her walk and turning squarely round faced the two old ladies in order to give them a better view, and let them see just how many tucks, and ruffles and puffs there were in her new dress, worn that day for the first time. And a very pretty picture Josephine Fleming made standing there in the sunshine, looking so artless and innocent, as if no thought of herself had ever entered her mind. She was a pink-and-white blonde, with masses of golden hair rippling back from her forehead, and those dreamy blue eyes of which poets sing, and which have in them a marvelous power to sway the sterner sex by that pleading, confiding expression, which makes a man very tender towards the helpless creature appealing so innocently to him for protection.
The two old ladies did not like Josephine, though they admitted that she was very beautiful and stylish, in her blue muslin and white chip hat with the long feather drooping low behind, too pretty by far and too much of the fine lady, they said, for a daughter of the widow Roxie Fleming, who lived in the brown house on the Common, and sewed for a living when she had no boarders from the city. And then, as the best of women will sometimes do, they picked the girl to pieces, and talked of the scandalous way she had of flirting with every man in town, of her airs and indolence, which they called laziness, and wondered if it were true that poor old Agnes, her half-sister, made the young lady’s bed, and mended her clothes, and waited upon her generally as if she were a princess, and toiled, and worked, and went without herself, that Josey might be clothed in dainty apparel, unbecoming to one in her rank of life. And then they wondered next if it were true, as had been rumored, that she was engaged to that young Forrest from Amherst College, who had boarded at the brown house for a few weeks the previous summer, and been there so often since.
“A well-mannered chap as you would wish to see,” one of them said, “with a civil word for high and low, and a face of which any mother might be proud; only——” and here the speaker lowered her voice, as she continued: “Only he does look a little fast, for no decent-behaved boy of twenty ought to have such a tired, fagged look as he has, and they do say there were some great carousin’s at Widder Fleming’s last summer, which lasted up to midnight, and wine was carried in by Agnes, and hot coffee made as late as eleven, and if you’ll b’leve it”—here the voice was a whisper—“they had a pack of cards, for Miss Murdock saw them with her own eyes, and young Forrest handled them as if used to the business.”
“Cards! That settles it!” was repeated by the second woman, with a shake of the head, which indicated that she knew all she cared to know of Everard Forrest, but her friend, who was evidently better posted in the gossip of the town, went on to add that “people said young Forrest was an only son, and that his father was very rich, and lived in a fine old place somewhere west or south, and had owned negroes in Kentucky before the war, and was a copperhead, and very close and proud, and kept colored help, and would not like it at all if he knew how his son was flirting with Josephine Fleming.”
Then they talked of the expected entertainment at the Village Hall the following night, the proceeds of which were to go toward buying a fire-engine, which the people greatly needed. And Josephine was to figure in most everything, and they presumed she was now waiting for some chap to come on the train.