She took Mr. Blythe with hastening finger tips and drove him in at the very bottom of the pack. It would be a long time before she could take him out again.
Then something possessed her to go into a dark closet and hunt around upon its seldom-visited shelves to find a very old album of photographs, dating back before her travels in Europe with her nomadic Aunt Althea had weaned her from thoughts of home.
She was eighteen then, and was making a visit to the wife of a professor in a university town, where most of these treasures of pictorial art had been accumulated. What faded old things they were, chiefly of undergraduates wearing queer collars and scarfs, with coats that did not fit and hair that was much too long! She had some difficulty in finding the particular cabinet photograph she sought, but it appeared at last, looking straight at her with the fearless gaze of handsome eyes that had once held over hers unwonted power.
“Ten—more, nearly eleven—years ago,” she mused. “He wore his hair like the sweep of a mahogany banister, poor dear; but that was a man.”
John Rufus Atwell was his rather uninteresting name. He was a young widower of twenty-six when he came back to take a post-graduate course at —— from his home in a Western town, where he had left his child with its mother’s people. None of his surroundings or antecedents had appealed in the least to the æsthetic and superfine side of pretty Miss Gwendolyn. But he had fallen in love with her, just like half a dozen more of the youngsters. She had tried to treat him just like them—and had failed. He had given her a first lesson in virile resistance to the exactions of coquettish femininity.
They had parted, though she had always remembered him with something of tender regret. But still the thing would have been impossible—quite impossible! What had become of him since she had not the vaguest idea.
That evening a little note went to Mrs. Payne authorizing her to find out for her friend some one who wanted an unexceptionable chaperon.
Mrs. Payne had good reason to think that industrious intervention in a friend’s affairs is sometimes approved by the Fates. The principal of the new “Bureau of Information Concerning Women’s Needs” expanded with satisfaction on hearing of her errand.
It so happened that one of the earliest applications that had come to them was from a family in a Western State who desired to send their daughter abroad under competent care. She had looked into their references—although that was scarcely needful when it was understood that the father was the distinguished statesman, Honorable John Mordaunt, Senator from ——, whose name was in every newspaper one took up.
Mrs. Payne, reserving her decision as to this proof of infallible respectability, was pleased to be interested in the matter. She next read Mr. Mordaunt’s letter to the principal, and put it down even better pleased.