In Tessa’s pocket was a long and wide envelope containing the article that she had sat up last night to write; the lessons gathered from her old year she had told in her simple, quaint, forcible style. The title was as simple as the article: “Making Mistakes.”
“Tessa, you are not brilliant,” Miss Jewett had once remarked, “but you do go right to the spot.”
The fresh air tinged her cheeks, she breathed more freely away from her work and her reveries; there was life and light somewhere, she need not suffocate in the dark.
It was not a long walk into the little city of Dunellen; fifteen minutes of brisk stepping along the planks brought her to the corner that turned into the broad, paved, maple-lined street. As she turned the corner, a lame child in a calico dress and torn hood staggered past her bent with the weight of a heavy basket. She stopped and would have spoken, but the shy eyes were not encouraging.
Two years ago all the world might have knocked at her gate and she would not have heard.
“Will you ride?” She lifted her eyes, with their color deepening, to find Mr. Towne sitting alone in his carriage looking down at her.
“You are going the wrong way.”
“Because I am not going your way?” he asked somewhat sternly.
“I thought that you had gone away,” she said uncomfortably.
“We go on the seventeenth.”