“Both of ’em after her,” he thought, “and it’s a toss up which will win. Time will tell. I can’t.”
CHAPTER XIX.
WHAT TIME TOLD.
Four weeks more passed much as the preceding ones had done, and it was the middle of September when as a rule city people return to their homes, and the summer hotels are closed. Mrs. Mason and Mrs. Tracy were anxious to leave but as neither Helen nor Craig were willing to go, they felt obliged to remain, one to watch her son and prevent him from committing himself to what she knew he would regret, and the other to bring about, if possible, what Mrs. Mason so much dreaded. In the second week in September Alice went back to her mountain home and the red schoolhouse which one of her scholars wrote her had been “mopped real clean and had a new blackboard and a new water pail and dipper.” There was a letter also from Aunt Mary, telling of a room refurnished with fresh paper and paint and a single white iron bedstead, with muslin hangings; a pretty bureau, with a long glass and a silver backed brush and hand-mirror,—these last the gift of the school children, who had picked berries on the mountains and sold lilies from the pond to buy them for their teacher, whose return they were anticipating with so much pleasure.
Alice cried over this letter so full of love and thoughtfulness and wondered why she should shrink from a return to the farmhouse and the homely duties awaiting her there. With the sound of Craig Mason’s voice saying to her, “I hope you have no bad news,” she knew why the thought of leaving Ridgefield gave her pain, and scolded herself for it. Craig could never again form any part of her life and she resolutely set herself to work to put from her all thought of him and made her preparations for leaving quickly and quietly, saying to every one that she had had a delightful summer and should not soon forget it. Quite a crowd accompanied her to the station, Craig and his mother, Mrs. Tracy and Helen, Mark and Uncle Zach, and Jeff, who was inconsolable.
“I’ll go to the bad. I know I shall. I feel as if I wanted to pick forty pockets,” he said to Alice, as he bade her good-bye, and then went into the meadows behind some alders and cried.
Helen was very sorry to part with Alice. “I have lost my ballast, and, like Jeff, shall go to destruction sure,” she said, and for days she seemed so sad and depressed that Craig tried every effort to comfort her, taking her for a long drive around the chain of ponds and talking to her of what he thought would interest her most. There had been no Browning readings after that first attempt. “As no one cares for them except ourselves, we may as well give them up, but whenever you feel like it I shall be glad to read for you,” he had said to her, and Helen, while lamenting the non-appreciation of the others, had acquiesced in his decision, and on two or three different occasions, after Alice left, she sat on a low ottoman very close to him and listened patiently for half an hour while he read to her, once from Sordello, once from poems easier to be understood, and last from Pauline, whose opening stanza thrilled them both with as much of real love as either could ever feel for the other. In a voice, full of feeling, Craig read:
“Pauline, mine own, bend o’er me,—thy sweet eyes,
And loosened hair and breathing lips and arms
Drawing me to thee,—these build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear;”