The two women went to the wire fence, crawled over and got into the Edgley back yard. It was nearly midnight and Maud Welliver had never before been out so late. In the Welliver house her aunt and father sat waiting for her, frightened and nervous. “If she doesn’t come soon I’ll get the police to look for her. I’m afraid something dreadful has happened.”
Maud did not, however, think of her father or of the reception that awaited her in the Welliver house. Other and more sombre thoughts occupied her mind. She had come on that evening to the Edgley house, intending to ask May to go with her on the excursion to the Dewdrop with the two grocers, and that was now an impossibility. One who was loved by a prince, who was secretly betrothed to a prince, would never let herself be seen in the company of a grocer, and, beside May, Maud knew no other woman in Bidwell she felt she could ask to go on the trip, on which she did not feel she could go alone. The whole thing would have to be given up. With a catch in her throat she realized what the trip had meant to her. In Fort Wayne, in the presence of the grocer Hunt, she had felt as she had never felt in the presence of another man. He was old, yes, but there was something in his eyes when he looked at her that made her feel strange inside. He had written that he had something to say to her. Now it could never be said.
In the darkness the two women passed around the Edgley house and came to the front gate, and then Maud gave way to the grief struggling for expression within. May was astonished and tried to comfort her. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. Stepping through the gate she put an arm about Maud Welliver’s shoulders and for a long time the two figures rocked back and forth in the darkness, and then May managed to get her to come to the Edgley front porch and sit beside her. Maud told the story of the proposed trip and of what it had meant to her—spoke of it as a thing of the past, as a hopeless dream that had faded. “I wouldn’t dare ask you to go,” she said.
It was ten minutes later when Maud got up to go home and May was silent, absorbed in her own thoughts. The tale of the prince was forgotten and she thought only of the town, of what it had done to her, what it would do again when the chance offered. The two grocers were both, however, from another place and knew nothing of her. She thought of the long ride to the shore of Sandusky Bay. Maud had conveyed to her some notion of what the trip meant to her. May’s mind raced. “I could not be alone with a man. I wouldn’t dare,” she thought. Maud had said they would go in a surrey and there was something, that could be used now, in the story she had told about the prince. She could insist that, because of the prince, Maud was not to leave her alone with another man, with the strange grocer, not for a moment.
May arose and stood irresolutely by the front door of the Edgley house and watched Maud go through the gate. How her shoulders drooped. “Oh, well, I’ll go. You fix it up. Don’t you tell anyone in the world, but I’ll go,” she said and then, before Maud Welliver could recover from her surprise, and from the glad thrill that ran through her body, May had opened the door and had disappeared into the Edgley house.
Chapter V
THE Dewdrop, where the dance Maud and May were to attend was to be held was, in May Edgley’s day and no doubt is now, a dreary enough place. An east and west trunk line here came down almost to the water’s edge, touching and then swinging off inland again, and on a narrow strip of land between the tracks and the bay several huge ice houses had been built. To the west of the ice houses were four other buildings, buildings less huge but equally stark and unsightly. The shore of the bay, turned beyond the ice houses, leaving the four latter buildings standing at some distance from the railroad, and during ten months of the year they were uninhabited and stared with curtainless windows—that looked like great dead eyes—out over the water.
The buildings had been erected by an ice company, with headquarters at Cleveland, for the housing of its workmen during the ice-cutting season, and the upper floors, reached by outside stairways, had rickety balconies running about the four sides. The balconies served as entry ways to small sleeping rooms each provided with a bunk built against the inner wall and filled with straw.
Still further west was the village of Dewdrop itself, a place of some eight or ten small unpainted frame houses, inhabited by men who combined fishing with small farming, and on the shore before each house a small sailing craft was drawn, during the winter months, far up on the sand out of the reach of storms.