Dear Flossy! what a rarely wise little woman she had become! astonishing them all, not by her sweetness,—they had always been sure of that,—but by her strength and skill as a Christian worker. No young woman left to herself in a dangerous world could have a safer, more helpful friend than Flossy Shipley Roberts. Yet Ruth, even as she thought this comforting thought, remembered that the duty thrust upon her of guarding the hateful secrets of others must prevent her from speaking plainly even to Flossy.
However, she found reticence with Flossy easier than it had been with Irene. Joyfully glad to get possession of her old friend was Mrs. Roberts, and athrob with eagerness to hear all that she had to tell her, and sympathetic about the minutest details; yet in nothing did she show her perfect breeding and rare tact more distinctly than in the questions that she did not ask, concerning things that Ruth did not choose to tell.
She told very little.
"You know, Flossy, I have been planning to come to you for a long, long time."
"I certainly do!" interrupted Flossy, with an air that obliged Ruth to stop and laugh.
"But the reason I am here just at this time is because a protégé of my friend—the young woman who sailed last week for China—has just lost her father and is alone in this great city, so far as relatives or very close friends are concerned, and I am commissioned to try to comfort her."
"And I know, dear Ruth, how certainly you will succeed," was Mrs. Roberts's comment and her only one.
A little later she asked: "Where do you find your charge, Ruth? Is she a young girl, did you say? Delightful! I hope you will let me help? Oh, no, I must not go with you on your first visit, of course. One new face at a time is enough for the poor child to meet."
Ruth blessed her in her heart for the delicate reserve which would not let her question even about the woman who had gone to China. After Irene's baldly put inference she shrank from trying to explain Miss Parker's interest in the girl.
It was on the morning after her arrival in town that Mrs. Burnham sat waiting in the reception room of a dignified, many-storied house, which, she told herself, had everywhere about it the unmistakable boarding-school air.