With a sad heart, both at leaving her friends, and because she felt she was abandoning all hope of her watch, she started off early on the morning after the trial, with Ruel as driver, for the Pineville Station where she was to take the cars on a Branch of the Maine Central Railroad, for Boston.
All the young folks except Tom, who unexpectedly declined to go, on the plea of a headache, accompanied Pet to the station, telling her about their “Camp Christmas” of the preceding winter, and waving hats and handkerchiefs until the train rounded a curve and crept out of sight.
Meanwhile Tom languidly rose from his bed, as soon as he heard the laughing wagon-load drive away; went down to breakfast with a sulky face and red eyes, as if he had been up late the night before, or had been crying—and hardly waiting to reply to his uncle’s cheery good-morning, walked off with his hands in his pockets, in the direction of Loon Pond. After an absence of a couple of hours, he returned, looking tired out, and passed the rest of the forenoon in the barn, lying on the hay-mow with a book. But if you had peeped over his shoulder, you would have seen that the pages were upside-down, and that now and then a tear rolled slowly over the boy’s cheeks, while his lips twitched nervously. Tom was evidently, on this bright June day, one of the unhappiest of boys. What could have happened?
CHAPTER IV.
FIRE!
“I WONDER if they are so different!” Pet Sibley found the summer hotel very pleasant. She was fond of gayety and pretty dresses and music; and of these she found a plenty at the “Everglades.” The hotel was within a half-hour’s ride of Boston, but was situated in the very heart of a beautiful, shadowy grove of pines, whose breath made the air sweet all through the long hours of the languid summer day. If the trees were more civilized and conventional in their appearance than the wide-branching, free-tossing pines in Uncle Percival’s upland pastures and hundred-acre wood-lot, Pet was not yet enough waked-up to know the difference; in fact, found it rather nice to be able to stroll about the well-kept grounds of the “Everglades,” without fear of tearing her skirts in the underbrush, or losing her way if she left the path. There was no underbrush here, and it was pretty much all path.
Within a few minutes’ walk, and bordering the grove on the further side, a river wound pleasantly and peacefully through a bright strip of meadow-land. On this river the Sibleys kept a boat, with carpet and cushioned seats—not much like the rough little affair which had tipped Pet over into Loon Pond.
Life at the Everglades flowed softly and calmly, like the river; and on the surface floated, like its radiant lilies, the fair ladies, young and old, who fanned and smiled and danced away the summer, without a thought of the suffering thousands in the hot city, fifteen miles away.
Without a thought? Yes, there were some who thought, and who brought poor and ailing children out to a Country Home near by; but these were few.
Pet Sibley, I am glad to say, was one of those who remembered the narrow streets of the North End, and the swarms of ragged men, women and children who panted, dog-like, on curbstone and doorstep, along the foul streets as the sun went down each night.
The people from the West, Pet learned, were relatives, and though their views of life hardly agreed with her own—if, indeed, she had any views—she found the new-comers very pleasant. On the third day after her return, her cousin Mark, whose home was in Chicago, and with whom already, in the free intimacy of hotel life, she felt well acquainted, had taken her out on the river.