“I’d ask you to stop—” began Olive.
“I’m going to stop,” said Zelda—“to see you quite on your threshold. Zan stands without hitching, usually. I’ll take my chances.”
Harrison is only a street in miniature. It lies not far from the heart of town, but so hidden away and with so little communication with the outer world that the uninitiated have difficulty in finding it. It is only a block long, and breathes an air of inadvertence,—of having strayed away from the noise of the city to establish for itself an abode of peace. A poet—the poet that all the people love—wrote a song about it that made it the most famous street in Mariona. The houses there are chiefly one-story-and-a-half cottages, and in one of these, which was saved from intrusive eyes in summer by a double line of hollyhocks, and which had at its back door at seasonable times a charming old-fashioned garden, lived Olive Merriam and her mother.
Olive threw open the door and Zelda stepped into a sitting-room—the house had no hall—where a coal fire burned cozily in a grate. The room ran the length of the house; the woodwork was white; the floor was pine, stained a dull red and covered with rugs made of old carpet. A student lamp with a green shade stood on a table in the center of the room. There were magazines and books on the table, and shelves in the corners held other books. An elderly woman looked up from the paper she had been reading as the door opened. A cane lay on the floor beside her and told the story of the lines of pain in her face.
“Mother, this is Zelda Dameron. She has brought me home,” said Olive.
“She didn’t want me to at all, but I made her let me,” said Zelda, crossing the room and taking Mrs. Merriam’s hand.
The woman bent her eyes—they were blue like Olive’s—upon the girl with a grave questioning.
“You are Margaret’s daughter—you are Ezra Dameron’s daughter,” she said.
“Yes; and I didn’t know about you at all until I found Olive to-day. And I didn’t know that any Merriams anywhere lived in a house like this. Why, it’s a home!”
Olive had brought a chair for Zelda, and stood watching her mother anxiously.