"He is not old. He is no older than papa, and you don't call him old," Ina retorted, resentfully.

"I don't call him old for a father, but I would for--"

"Well, he isn't a--yet."

"Ina, you ought to tell me."

"Well, I'm going to marry Major Arms, so there!"

"Oh, Ina!"

The two girls stood staring at each other for a moment, then they ran to each other. "Oh, Charlotte! oh, Charlotte!" sobbed Ina, convulsively.

"Oh, Ina! oh, honey!"

"I'm going to, Charlotte. Oh, I am going to!"

"Ina, do you, do you--"

"What?"

"Love that old Major Arms?" Charlotte spoke out, in a tone of almost horror.

"I don't know. Oh, I don't know," sobbed Ina.

"Ina, you don't love--Mr. Eastman better?"

"No, I don't," replied Ina, in a tone of utter conviction.

"Charlotte, do you know what would happen if I married Mr. Eastman?

Do you?"

"No, I don't."

"All my life long I would be at war with the butcher and baker, just as--just as we always are."

"Ina Carroll, you aren't getting married just for that? Oh, that is dreadful!"

"No, I am not," said Ina. "You call Major Arms old, and you don't see--you don't see how a girl can ever fall in love with him, but--I think he's splendid. Yes, I do. You can laugh, Charlotte, but I do.

And it is a good deal to marry a man you can honestly say you think is splendid! But you can do a thing, for a very good, even a n.o.ble reason, and all the time know there is another reason not quite so n.o.ble, that you can't help but take some comfort in. And that is the way I do with this. Charlotte, poor papa does just the best he can, and there never was a man like him; Major Arms isn't anything in comparison with papa. I never thought he was, but there is one thing I am very tired of in this world, and I can't help thinking with a good deal of pleasure that when I am married I will be free from it."

"What is that, honey?" The two girls had sat down on Ina's window-seat, and were nestling close together, with their arms around each other's waist, and the two streams of dark hair intermingling.

"I am heartily tired," said Ina, in a tone of impatient scorn, "of this everlasting annoyance to which we are subjected from the people who want us to pay them money for the necessaries of life. We must have a certain amount of things in order to live at all, and if people must have the money for them, I want them to have it, and not have to endure such continual persecution."

"Ina," said Charlotte, in a piteous, low voice, "do you think papa is very poor?"

"Yes, honey, I am afraid he is very poor."

Charlotte began to weep softly against her sister's shoulder.

"Don't cry, honey," soothed Ina. "You can come and stay with me a great deal, you know."

"Ina Carroll, do you think I would leave papa?" demanded Charlotte, suddenly erect. "Do you think--I would? You can, if you want to, but I will not."

"It costs something to support us, dear," said Ina. "Don't be angry, precious."

"I will never have another new dress in all my life," said Charlotte.

"I won't eat anything. I tell you I never will leave papa, Ina Carroll."

Chapter XIV

It was about a week later when Anderson, going into the drug store one evening, found young Eastman in the line in front of the soda-fountain. A girl in white was with him, and Anderson thought at first glance that she was Charlotte Carroll, as a matter of course--he had so accustomed himself to think of the two in union by this time. Then he looked again and saw that the girl was much larger and fair-haired, and recognized her as Bessy Van Dorn, William Van Dorn's daughter. The girl's semi-German parentage showed in her complexion and high-bosomed, matronly figure, although she was so young. She had a large but charming face, full of the sweetest placidity; her eyes, as blue as the sky, looked out upon the world with amiable a.s.sent to all its conditions. It required no acuteness to predict this as an ideal spouse for a man of a nervous and irritable temperament; that there was in her nature that which could supply cushioned fulnesses to all the exactions of his. She sat on a high stool and sipped her ice-cream soda with simple absorption in the pleasant sensation. She paid no attention whatever to her escort beside her, who took his soda with his eyes fixed on her. Her chin overlapping in pink curves like a rose, was sunken in the lace at her neck as she sipped. She did not sit straight, but rested in her corsets with an awkward la.s.situde of enjoyment. It was a very warm night, but she paid no attention to that. She was without a hat, and the beads of perspiration stood all over her pink forehead, and her thin white muslin clung to her plump neck and arms. There was something almost indecent about the girl's enjoyment of her soda.

Hardly a man in the shop but was watching her. Anderson gazed at her also, but with covert disgust and a resentment which was absurd. He scowled at the young fellow with her. He felt like a father whose daughter has been flouted by the man of her choice. "What the devil does the boy mean, taking soda here with that Van Dorn girl?" he asked himself. He felt like a reckoning with him, and chafed at the impossibility of it. When the couple rose to go Anderson met the young man's salutation with such a surly response and such a stern glance that he fairly started. The men stared as the two went out, their shoulders touching as they pa.s.sed through the door. The girl was round-shouldered from careless standing, but she moved with a palpitating grace of yielding, and the smooth, fair braids which bound her head shone like silver.

"Guess that's a go," a man said, with a chuckle; "a narrower door would have suited them just as well."

"Mighty good-looking girl," said Amidon.

"Healthy girl," said another. "If more young fellows had the horse-sense to marry girls like that, I'd give up medicine and go on a ranch." The Banbridge doctor said that. He was rather young, and had been in the village about five years. He had taken the practice of an old physician, a distant relative who had died six months before. Dr. Wilson was called a remarkably able man in his profession. He had been having several prescriptions filled, and kept several waiting. He was a large man with a coa.r.s.ely handsome physique and a brutal humor with women. He was not liked personally, but the people rather bragged about their great physician and were proud when he was called to the towns round about.

"There's no getting Dr. Wilson, for a certainty, he has such an enormous practice!" they said, with pride.

"That girl is as handsome and healthy as an Alderney cow," he added, now, and the men laughed.

"She's a stunner," said Amidon.

Anderson went out abruptly without waiting to make his purchase. He felt as repelled as only a man of his temperament can feel. No woman could equal his sense of utter disgust, first with the quite innocent girl herself, next with the young physician for his insistence upon the subject. His wrath against young Eastman, his unreasoning and ridiculous wrath, swelled high as he dwelt upon the outrage of his desertion of a girl like his little Charlotte, that little creature of fire and dew, for this full-blown rose of a woman--the outrage to her and to himself. When he got home, his mother inquired anxiously what the matter was.

"Nothing, dear," he replied, brusquely.

"You look as if something worried you," said she. She had been taking a little evening toddle on her tiny, slippered feet out in the old-fashioned flower-garden beside the house, and she had a little bunch of sweet herbs, which she dearly loved, in her hand. She fastened a sprig of thyme in his coat as she stood talking to him, and the insistent odor seemed as real as a presence when he breathed.

"nothing has gone wrong with your business, has there?" she inquired, lovingly.

"No, mother," he replied, and moved away from her gently, with the fragrance of the thyme strong in his consciousness.

His mother put her sweet nosegay in water. Then she went to bed, and Anderson sat on the stoop. Young Eastman and the Van Dorn girl pa.s.sed after he sat there, and he thought with a loving pa.s.sion of protection of poor little Charlotte alone at home. "I'll warrant the poor child is watching for that good-for-nothing scoundrel this minute," he told himself. He would have liked to knock young Eastman down; it would have delighted his soul to kick him; he would have given a good deal to have had him at the top of the steps.

The weather was intensely warm. He heard his mother fling her bedroom blinds wide open to catch all the air. The sky was clear, but all along the northwest horizon was a play of lightning from a far-distant storm.

Anderson lit another cigar. The night seemed to grow more and more oppressive. When a breath of wind came, it was like a hot breath of some fierce sentiency. A disagreeable odor from something was also borne upon it. The odors of the flowers seemed in abeyance. The play of blue-and-rosy light along the northwest horizon continued.

Anderson got a certain pleasure from watching it. Nature's spectacularity diverted him, as if he had been a child, from his own affairs, which seemed to give him a dull pain. Between the flashes he asked himself why.

"It is just right," he told himself; "just what I desired. Why do I feel this way?"

Presently he decided with self-deception that it was because of the recent scene in the drug store. He remembered quite distinctly the young man's gaze at the stout, blue-eyed girl. "What right had the fellow to look at another girl after that fashion?" he said to himself. Then it struck him suddenly as being perhaps impossible for him ever to look at Charlotte in just that fashion. He thought with a thrill of indignant pride that there was a maiden who would have the best of love as her right. Then sitting there he heard a quick tread and a trill of whistle as meaningless as that of a robin, and young Eastman himself came alongside. He stopped before the gate.