Ruth Erskine's Son

by Pansy

The end of it was that she tore the sheet across and threw the fragments into her grate. And wrote again:—

"You may well call hers a 'loyal heart,' my friend; she loves with a depth that seems to me unusual in one so young; and she has enthroned you at her heart's very centre. I want to say, just here, that I do not think she overestimates what you have done for her; I believe you have saved her to herself."

Meanwhile, the days that Mrs. Burnham, without any definite planning, had thought might be given to her visit lengthened into weeks, and still she lingered in the East.

Erskine was astonished, was bewildered, was half indignant, yet she set no date for the home-going. One reason for this was the fact that Mr. Roberts's stay abroad, which was to have been very brief, had been much lengthened by unexpected business complications, and his wife was begging her old friend to stay with her until his return. But of course there was no real excuse for this, as she had her children and multitudes of home friends about her. The real reason was that Ruth could not decide to leave Maybelle. The girl clung to her with an ever increasing abandon to the joy of having for her very own one who knew how to be in every sense of the word motherly. Certainly she was nearer real happiness than her confused life had ever been before. From being one whom some of her schoolmates pitied and patronized because she seemed to have no friends of her own except a somewhat doubtful father, she became almost an object of envy.

All of the girls at Madame Sternheim's knew Mrs. Evan Roberts by reputation; and highly exaggerated stories of her house and her friends and her lavish expenditures for certain of them, were afloat in the school. But it chanced that Maybelle was the first one of the school girls who had entered the charmed circle of Mrs. Roberts's friendships.

When it became known that she was being sent for three or four times a week to take dinner with the Roberts family, that she went on Tuesdays to luncheon, that she spent most of her Saturdays and Sundays in the same choice home, interest in her comings and goings became marked. Then, when she began slowly, and almost reluctantly it must be admitted, to choose out some especially lonely or homesick or timid girl to take with her to dine at Mrs. Roberts's, her popularity knew no bounds.

Madame Sternheim, too, during these days was gracious almost beyond recognition. It was not that the good woman had not meant to be gracious always; she had been faithful to her duty as she saw it, and poor Maybelle, who confessed that she had hours of almost hating her, had in reality very much for which to thank her.

But Madame Sternheim was very human indeed, and the daughter of a poor artist father with a questionable past and a doubtful future, whose only friend, apparently, was a very fine young woman, it is true, but a woman without family and with no reasonable way of accounting for her interest in the girl, and nothing to show how soon the interest might cease—for that matter she had already gone away off to China for no reason in particular, unless it was to be well rid of her charge now that the father was gone—was one person, and a girl who had apparently been adopted into the inner circle of Mrs. Roberts's family was quite another; especially now that the poor father had been respectably buried and all doubtful or uncomfortable things could be forgotten. Madame Sternheim was relieved and pleased and hopeful. She liked to have Mrs. Roberts's carriage stand before her door waiting for Maybelle. She liked to say to certain of her patrons:—

"Oh, the coachman is used to waiting; our dear Maybelle is almost certain to be tardy, but then she is so much at home at Mrs. Roberts's house that she can take all sorts of liberties. Oh, yes, she dines there several times a week and often takes some of her classmates with her. Dear Mrs. Roberts welcomes my girls to her home as though she were their elder sister. What a charming woman she is! Really when one comes to know her intimately, one feels that the half has not been told concerning her."

And Maybelle was blossoming under this reign of love. Her cheeks were rounding out a little and taking on a touch of color, and her eyes were growing less sad. She had by no means forgotten her grief nor put aside the thought of her father. On the contrary, she liked nothing better than to talk of him by the hour to a sympathetic listener, while to be allowed to talk about her mother, was to give free vent to the one pent-up passion of her life.