She was beginning to be ashamed of her manner, which she knew was displeasing to Paul, and as she addressed herself to Elithe she flashed upon her a smile which made Elithe start, it seemed so familiar. The eyes, too, in their softer expression, had in them a look she had surely seen before. Tom had brought the horses up by this time, and at a sign from Clarice Paul gave his hand to Elithe and assisted her into the carriage. Clarice had played the amiable, and kept the role up as she walked with Paul the few blocks to the Percy cottage on Ocean Avenue. Then her mood changed, and without asking him in, she said, “I suppose I shall see you to-night, unless you feel it your duty to call upon that Miss,—what’s her name? Hansford isn’t it?”
“Girls are queer,” Paul reflected, as he bade her good-bye and went slowly towards home.
His road did not take him directly past Miss Hansford’s cottage, but he could see it from the avenue and knew that Elithe was there, as the carriage was driving away from it. Miss Hansford had fully intended to meet her niece, but for the first time in her life had forgotten to wind her clock, which stopped at three, and the first indication she had that it was time for the boat was when she saw it moving up to the wharf.
“For the land’s sake,” she exclaimed in alarm, glancing at the clock, “if there ain’t the boat, and I not there to meet her! What will she do?”
Then like an inspiration her bones came to her aid and told her somebody would see to her. She did not, however, expect her to be seen to in quite the way she was, and felt not a little surprised and elated when the Ralston carriage stopped before her door and Elithe alighted from it.
CHAPTER XV.
MISS HANSFORD AND ELITHE.
Miss Hansford had had many misgivings with regard to the wisdom of having sent for her niece. She had lived alone so long and her habits were so fixed that she dreaded the thought of a young person singing and whistling and banging doors and slatting her things round. She had tried to guard against some of these habits in her letter to Roger, but there was no knowing what a girl would do, and Lucy Potter’s girl, too. Still she had committed herself and must make the best of it.
“I shall use her well, of course,” she said many times, and as often as she dusted her mantel in the front room where Elithe’s picture was standing she stopped and looked at the face and talked to it until she almost felt that it was the real Elithe whose dark eyes met hers so seriously. “She’s pretty to look at and no mistake, but handsome is that handsome does, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she said more than once, while she busied herself with the room Elithe was to occupy.
It was a low back room with the windows looking out upon an open space and clumps of oak and woods beyond, with no view of the sea. A room she seldom rented and which she at first hesitated about assigning to Elithe.
“I shall want all the t’others for the gentry when the wedding comes off,” she decided, and then went to work to make the back room as attractive as possible.