“I thought it all over last night, and if she will do it, I think I see my way clear, and I am almost sure she will, for, really, I never knew a more unselfish girl in my life.”
“I dare say,” her husband said, regarding her with an amused air. “Perhaps I might agree with you if you will enlighten me as to which of the patterns of domestic unselfishness you have in mind. Did she reign in your household since my knowledge of it began?”
“Oh, I am not speaking of hired help,” Ruth said, and a vivid flush brightened her cheeks. “I was thinking of my sister. It is her help I have in mind.”
“Susan!” he exclaimed, and then was suddenly silent. His face showed that, after all, she had surprised him.
There was much talk about it after that, and the discussion finally ended in their taking passage in the mail-wagon, about which Judge Burnham had spoken the day before, and jogging together to the train. There was so much to be done that Ruth had not the patience to wait until another day, besides their departure would give the Ferris family a chance to hasten their movements. On the way to the cars Judge Burnham mentally resolved that his first leisure moments should be spent in selecting horses and a driver, since he was to become a country gentleman. Whether he would or not, it became him to look out for conveniences.
Seated again in the train, and made comfortable by her watchful husband, Ruth took time to smile over the variety of experiences through which she had gone during the less than twenty-four hours since she sat there before. It seemed to her that she had lived a little life-time, and learned a great deal, and it seemed a wonderful thing that she was actually going to Susan Erskine with a petition for help. Who could have supposed that she, Ruth Erskine, would ever have reached such a period in her history that she would turn to her as the only a available source of supply and comfort. A great deal of thinking can be done in one night, and Ruth had lain awake and gone over her ground with steady gaze and a determined heart. It surprised her that things had not looked plainer to her before. “Why couldn’t I have seen this way, yesterday, before I left home?” she asked herself, but the wonder was that she had seen it thus early.
Very much surprised were the Erskine household to see their bride of less than twenty-four hours’ standing appear while they still lingered over their breakfast-table!
“We live in the country, you know,” was Ruth’s composed explanation of the early advent. “Country people are up hours before town people have stirred; I always knew that.”
“Land alive!” said Mrs. Judge Erskine, and then for a whole minute she was silent. She confided to Ruth, long afterward, that for about five minutes her “heart was in her mouth,” for she surely thought they had quarrelled and parted!
“Though I thought at the time,” she explained, “that if you had got sick of it a’ready you wouldn’t have come back together, and have walked into the dining-room in that friendly fashion. But, then, I remembered that you never did things like anybody else in this world, and if you had made up your mind to come back home again, and leave your husband, you would be sure to pick out a way of doing it that no other mortal would ever have thought of!”