He was only a boy, but he represented the Ralstons. To attend a theatre under their auspices was not so very bad, and the good people absolved their sister from wrongdoing and shook hands heartily with her champion when the services were over. After that Miss Hansford’s devotion to Paul was unbounded, and she watched him lovingly and proudly as he grew to manhood and passed unscathed through college, leaving a record blackened with only a few larks such as any young man of spirit might have, she said, when comparing him with Jack Percy, who was with him in Harvard for a while, and then quietly sent home. Paul’s vacations were mostly spent in Oak City, until he was graduated. He then went abroad with his father and mother for a year, and the house on the Island was closed, except as the rear of it was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Drake, who looked after the premises in the absence of the family. Miss Hansford, who missed him sadly, was anticipating his coming again much as a mother anticipates the return of her son. She did not, however, expect him so soon, as no news had been received of his arrival in New York, and she was surprised and delighted when he came upon her so early and so suddenly,—taking her breath away, she told him, as she led him into the house, looking at him to see if foreign travel had changed him any.
CHAPTER III.
PAUL’S NEWS.
He had grown broader and handsomer and looked a trifle older, with that brown beard on his chin, she thought, but otherwise he was the same Paul as of old, with his sunny smile, his friendly manner and his unmistakable joy at seeing her again. She made him sit down in the best rocking chair,—took his hat, and smoothed his hair caressingly, and forgot that she had not breakfasted and that her rolls were still blackening in the oven.
“How did you get here?” she asked. “Nobody knew you had landed or was on the way even.’
“I should suppose your bones would have warned you of our arrival. I hope they haven’t ceased to do duty,” Paul answered, and then explained that they had changed their plans and sailed from Havre a week earlier than they had intended. Some of their friends were coming on the Ville de Paris and among them Mrs. Percy and Clarice.
The name of Jack Percy was to Miss Hansford much like a red flag to a bull, while that of any member of his family was nearly as bad. Now, however, she only straightened her back a little with an ominous “Ugh,” which Paul did not notice, so absorbed was he in the great good news he had come to tell her. But first he must answer her numberless questions as to what he had seen and where he had been.
“Been everywhere and seen everything, from Queen Victoria to the Khedive of Egypt. Been on the top of Cheops, and inside of him, too,—and up the Nile to Assouan and Philae and Luxor, and seen old Rameses,—frightful looking old cove, too, with his tuft of hair and his one tooth showing,” he said, rattling on about places and people of whom Miss Hansford knew nothing.
Luxor and Assouan and Cheops were not familiar to her, but when he said, “I tell you what, the very prettiest place in all Europe is Monte Carlo,” she was on the alert in a moment. She looked upon Monte Carlo as a pool of iniquity, and she said to the young man, “Paul, you didn’t gamble there!”
Paul answered laughingly, “They don’t call it gambling; they call it play.”
“Well, play, then. You didn’t play? I know you didn’t, for when I heard you was there I wrestled in prayer three times a day that God would keep you unspotted, and he did, didn’t he?”