“I’m not fool enough, no, nor knave enough, to pull the ‘dying father’s wish on you,’” Glenwood Darrow had said, and—“Well, now remember, you haven’t made any deathbed promise!”
He would understand; he must be—understanding. And her mother, pale Effie, would go further; she would not only understand but rejoice. Tears stung suddenly in Glen’s eyes; she wished she could have her there, in the grave and charming room, sitting in the sedate little rocker on the Persian rug, to tell her everything that was to be....
She thought Peter would come to her soon after eight, but she did not want the hour to come too swiftly and she looked often at Janice Jennings’s clock on the mantel in a swiftly mounting panic of happiness. There was a stumbling step on the porch and she sprang up, flushing hotly, and sat down again, laughing at herself. Old Pap Tolliver had never been able to grasp the fact that Gloriana-Virginia was actually and forever gone; he crept over, sometimes, after dark, and huddled in the shadows of the porch with his wheezing and short-breathed harmonica, or the wailing accordion. “She craves to hyar my tune, Glory does,” he apologized. “I won’t pester nobody.”
“There is—a—hap ... pee ... land....”
It was a quavering but very positive assertion, and his listener agreed with him absolutely.
“Far—far—a ... way....”
Ah, there he was wrong! Not so far away—traveling swiftly up the clock! At eight, or between eight and eight-thirty, before nine at the very latest——
But at a quarter after eight that evening the Altonia Mill was blown up, and calling became, for the time, a lost art. Glen stayed at home, though all the rest of the community rushed down, even from The Hill, that abode of the blest, to the blazing building. The telephone rang just as she was leaving the house and she ran back to answer it.
“It’s all right,” said Peter Parker’s voice blithely. “There wasn’t a soul in it. I know, because Heminway and I left ten minutes before it happened (I rather think he—they—counted on my spending a long quiet evening there) and we went all through, and there was nobody. The watchman was gagged and tied, but at a decent distance. He wasn’t hurt. Don’t come down, please. Just—wait for me.”
So she waited, as nearly pale as her rich coloring would ever make possible, and trembling, alternately shuddering with the horror of it, and pulsing with thankfulness at the miracle of his escape, and presently there was another step on the porch and she sprang up again, rosy and starry-eyed, and Janice Jennings walked in, grinning derisively.