“Next week,” said Mrs. Allen.
“All right; I’ll put my traps together, and be off. Gainesburg is the cry now,” cried George Edward.
But for once the boy was in luck. Two days after Uncle Frost’s house had received him, Mrs. Allen was reading the following letter:
My Dear Mother:
Hurrah—hurrah—hurrah! Uncle Frost is a brick (beg pardon, mother)! He’s given me a royal, out-and-out invite to go to the White Mountains with the family. Expenses all thrown in, etc., etc. Start on Saturday. Telegraph “yes” please.
Your affectionate Son,
George Edward.
“Yes” was telegraphed over the hills on Thursday, and for two weeks our boy revelled in the bliss of mountain life, with quantities of fun, frolic and adventure thrown in by the way, to return all made over, to Uncle Frost’s, there to meet the ill news travelling fast over the electric wires:
“Your father died suddenly at St. Paul. Come at once.”
Had it come so soon? George Edward looked life in the face this vacation time, accepted his cross, bade good-by to all hopes of ever entering school or college life again, and thanked God for the situation in the drug store that the apothecary around the corner gave him.
His father’s affairs, well looked over, gave no hope of anything but the direst economy for the widow. As for the son, he must go to work, and at once.
“Now we will see if he holds out a saint,” one boy was mean enough to think, seeing George Edward hurry to his place of work every morning bright and early. Other eyes quite as sharp, though far from cruel, were on him. It was an awful ordeal for any boy to pass through; most of all, because of the commonplaceness of the sacrifice he was daily making. Had he marched up to the cannon’s mouth, and courted death to save his mother’s life, this would have been easy compared to the monotonous dead-level existence he was enduring. For to the active boy, alert for an excitement, wide awake for novelty, with every muscle crying out for exercise and change, the close confinement of the small store, and the routine work, were torture indeed. He began to show the effects of such a life, and in three weeks his mother was aghast to find that her boy had grown suddenly thin and pale.
“Why, George Edward,” she cried, “you can’t stay in that store.”