“Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble getting located,” Mr. Larsen went on with animation, still holding his violin. “I would advise her to keep away from boarding-houses altogether. Among my parishioners there are two German women, a mother and daughter. The daughter is a Swede by marriage, and clings to the Swedish Church. They live near here, and they rent some of their rooms. They have now a large room vacant, and have asked me to recommend some one. They have never taken boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good cook,—at least, I am always glad to take supper with her,—and I think I could persuade her to let this young woman partake of the family table. The daughter, Mrs. Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart Society. I think they might like to have a music student in the house. You speak German, I suppose?” he turned to Thea.
“Oh, no; a few words. I don’t know the grammar,” she murmured.
Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not frozen as they had looked all morning. “If this fellow can help her, it’s not for me to be stand-offish,” he said to himself.
“Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet place, with old-fashioned people?” Mr. Larsen asked. “I shouldn’t think you could find a better place to work, if that’s what you want.”
“I think mother would like to have me with people like that,” Thea replied. “And I’d be glad to settle down most anywhere. I’m losing time.”
“Very well, there’s no time like the present. Let us go to see Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen.”
The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a black-and-white checked traveling-cap that he wore when he rode his high Columbia wheel. The three left the church together.
II
So Thea did not go to a boarding-house after all. When Dr. Archie left Chicago she was comfortably settled with Mrs. Lorch, and her happy reunion with her trunk somewhat consoled her for his departure.
Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail pillars, set in a damp yard full of big lilac bushes. The house, which had been left over from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy and despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a big back yard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor, and a warped walk, two planks wide, which led to the coal bins at the back of the lot. Thea’s room was on the second floor, overlooking this back yard, and she understood that in the winter she must carry up her own coal and kindling from the bin. There was no furnace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen, and that was why the room rent was small. All the rooms were heated by stoves, and the lodgers pumped the water they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the well at the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring herself to have costly improvements made in her house; indeed she had very little money. She preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it, and she thought her way of living good enough for plain people.