People who only saw Miss Hansford’s peculiar side said that if she ever had any milk of human kindness it had long since curdled. But these were mistaken. The treatment one received from her depended wholly upon whether they entered the front or back door of her heart,—the kitchen or the parlor. Fortunately for Elithe, she came to the front door and entered the parlor. She was nervous and excited, and had borne about as much as she could bear without breaking down in hysterics, and when she saw her aunt coming to meet her, she ran forward with a cry like a hurt child seeking its mother, and reaching out both hands, exclaimed, “Oh, Auntie, I am so glad to get here, and so tired!”
She put up her lips to be kissed, and in the eyes full of tears Miss Hansford saw a likeness to Roger, the boy she had liked so much and loved still in spite of Lucy Potter and his choice of a religion. This was his child, and there were tears in her own eyes as she kissed the young girl and led her into the house.
“You are all worn out,” she said, as she removed Elithe’s hat and made her sit down and asked if she were hungry.
With the exception of the lemonade Paul had brought her on the boat and a dry sandwich eaten in Springfield, Elithe had taken nothing that day; but she was not hungry. The sandwich still lay like lead in her stomach, and the lemonade was waging warfare with it. All she wanted was a drink of water, which her aunt brought her, and which she drank eagerly, then leaned her head against the cushioned back of the chair, as if all life had gone from her.
“She’s a good deal mussed and pretty dirty,” Miss Hansford thought, as she asked: “Ain’t there something I can get you besides water?—tea, or something? I can make a cup in a minute.”
“No, thanks,” Elithe replied. “Water is the best of anything. If I could have a bath; I believe I am one big dust heap.”
She laughed as she said it, and her smile made her face lovely, with all its fatigue.
“You shall have one,” Miss Hansford answered, with alacrity, thinking of the White Room, in which a dust heap was not desirable. “It’s a kind of a fixed-up affair,” she continued, speaking of her improvised bath tub in a large, low closet back of Elithe’s room, “but it answers very well. I’ll take some hot water up right away.”
Against this Elithe protested, saying she would do it herself.
“You set still, I tell you. You are tuckered out,” Miss Hansford insisted, beginning to take the water up in pails and stopping between times to talk to Elithe and ask about her journey.