“Uncle Jacob, I want to go home,” she said, wearily.
“Bless you, child! you shall go wherever you like,” he said, in surprise, and regarding her anxiously.
“I want to go where you and I can be by ourselves, and where I cannot do any mischief,” she said, with a sob of pain, and he knew beyond a doubt that Ralph Meredith had proposed and been rejected.
“Mischief! tut, tut, little one! What has made you so unhappy? Have you sent our young friend away in sorrow?”
Star nodded her head in reply; she could not find voice to answer him.
“He is a fine young man—he is a worthy young man,” Mr. Rosevelt said, gently.
“Oh, I know it, Uncle Jacob; but—my heart is dead, and it can never live again. Don’t blame me, please—you know all about it, and you know that I could not help it and be true to him and myself,” she returned, in deep distress.
“You have done everything to make me happy,” she went on, a little more calmly, “and I thought I was beginning to be content and to enjoy life once more; but I cannot endure many scenes like what transpired to-night. Let us go home, where I can go to work again, and in my duties there forget, if possible, the misery of the past, which I have been made to live over again to-night.”
“We will leave Newport to-morrow, if you wish,” Mr. Rosevelt said, after a little thought; “but we will not go back to New York just yet—we will spend two or three weeks in sightseeing first. We will go to the White Mountains, from there to Montreal, then down the St. Lawrence and the lake to Niagara, and then home. That will give us a change and a nice little trip, besides a knowledge of something of the country. It is a long time since I went over that ground, and I think I should enjoy the journey, if the idea pleases you.”
He was not going to let her go back to New York and bury herself at home, where she would brood over her trouble and grow pale, thin, and hollow-eyed again; so he put it in the form of a favor to himself.