The flying landscape outside the window fascinated her at first and after awhile her fellow travellers claimed her attention, and proved far more interesting than even that. Miss Eliza could have no possible objection to her niece watching them if she sat very still.

There were not very many passengers when Arethusa got on; one or two men in the other end of the car, and several women and babies. But as the tram rushed ever nearer to Lewisburg, the passengers increased in number.

A group climbed on at one of the way stations, and took a seat just opposite Arethusa across the aisle, and they particularly attracted her. It was composed of a woman who reminded her very strongly of Miss Letitia in the round chubbiness of her face and her comfortable untidiness, although she was undoubtedly much younger, and her two children. The sex of one of them Arethusa was unable to determine just at first, for it was so small that the cut of its blue raiment might have served for either boy or girl; but the other one was unmistakably of a feminine persuasion. This child had the lightest hair and eyebrows the watcher across the aisle had ever seen, and the very palest of blue eyes. So light were the eyebrows that only a close inspection later on convinced Arethusa that there were any there at all.

These travellers had a great deal of baggage, several boxes and a large telescope, as well as a huge satchel. The handle of the telescope had been broken off at some stage of its career, and this deficiency had been remedied by inserting under the leather straps still remaining, a coat hanger covered with bright red silk ribbon gathered on and tied at the hook with gay little bows.

The children were very restless; they did much moving about, climbing in and out of the seat. The mother seemed to find it necessary to admonish her offspring with frequency, and Arethusa discovered in this way that the little girl's name was "Helen Louise" and the being in the straight up-and-down blue garment was a boy infant who answered to the name of Peter.

At a Junction farther down the line, a Man got on. And as the car was pretty full by this time, he took the seat just opposite Arethusa; that seat which Timothy had gallantly turned over for her.

He buried himself immediately in a paper he carried, but when his neighbor's liquid laugh rang out at some ridiculous antic of Peter's, he dropped his paper and regarded her mobile face with interest.

He was rather a nice looking man, quietly dressed in well cut clothes and he had an air of good living about him that was quite attractive. To any experienced traveller, the neat looking leather cases with the brass locks, which he carried, would have been quite sufficient to have immediately told his occupation. He travelled for a notions house, out of Cincinnati, with a territory covering most of the small towns in three states. It was a boring business, and offered very little as diversion on the side; but he hoped before very long to be much better placed. He liked girls, and the one before him was one of the prettiest he had ever seen.

They rode facing one another for about five miles, and he watched Arethusa, without her actually realizing she was being watched. Then she laughed gayly at Peter once more, as his mother all but saved his life when he pitched head first off the seat, and her eager grey eyes caught a glimpse of the brown eyes across from her, smiling in sympathy.

"Isn't he the funniest little boy!" exclaimed Arethusa, involuntarily, to the sympathy.

"He is," replied the Man kindly, then he added, after a bit, "Are you travelling alone, or do you belong with the funny little boy?"

"No, sir,... Yes, sir!" replied Arethusa, suddenly covered with a shy confusion.

"Which is which?" asked the Man, laughing, and he showed attractive white teeth.

The friendliness of his brown eyes and his laugh reassured Arethusa of her momentary feeling of alarm when he had spoken. Her exclamation had not really expected a reply, and she had been quite startled when the sympathetic eyes to which she had addressed herself had been discovered to have this voice belonging to them.

She blushed, and dropped her head. Then she raised it again, after a moment, and he was still smiling at her in the same friendly fashion, so Arethusa found courage to look at him. To her rose-colored view of the inmates of the best of all possible worlds, he seemed in that look to be a very nice man. It is true that Miss Eliza had warned her with emphasis against strange men, but the Man across from her could not be said to come anywhere near the descriptions of the Ogres against which Arethusa had been so warned. Arethusa had not had her Red-Riding-Hood Experience as yet, and it was her habit to trust.

They rode for a few moments silently, and then Peter did what had been inevitable for some time that he would do, he pitched head first out into the aisle.

"Oh!" exclaimed Arethusa, and she jumped clear out of her seat at the loud and high-pitched wail with which he made known his distress.

"That's too bad," said the Man. "But I've been afraid he was going to do that very thing."

"So have I," answered Arethusa confidentially.

And in a very short while, she was talking away as if she had known her new acquaintance all her life, with all the dimples and excitement and gestures that belonged to Arethusa. But what harm to talk to such a Nice, Kind Man? Miss Eliza had not known that she would meet this sort of Man, she was sure. She could not possibly object to a little Friendly Conversation with someone in the very same seat.

And he listened, truly interested, as Arethusa's enthusiasm began to make up for the while it had been pent, in all she told him of the coming Visit and the magnificent expectations she had of that Visit, and of Ross and Elinor.

But the motherly looking woman across the aisle had been watching Arethusa for some time also. And when Peter's sobs had ceased, and she looked up once more from her family cares to see Arethusa conversing so animatedly with her chance acquaintance, she decided at once to interfere. She had heart enough to—at least—attempt the management of any affairs coming under her notice which did not seem to her to be running just as they should.

She bustled over and loomed above Arethusa and her Friendly Man.

"Know this man, dearie?" she demanded peremptorily.

"Why ... no ... I...."

Arethusa almost added, "Aunt 'Titia." For the tone of voice and the little term of endearment and the woman herself were all rather bewilderingly like her aunt.

"Well, I don't reckon you ought to be talking to him then," and she turned to the man, a self-elected champion of a lone maiden, and stared at him as authoritatively as she had spoken to Arethusa. "You're plenty old enough to know better'n this. And you'd better get out of that seat mighty quick, or I'll call the conductor. And you a nice-looking man, too!"

The man turned as red as a well-cooked beet, clear down into his immaculate collar. He wasted no time in expostulation or protest that Arethusa's champion was interfering in something which was none of her immediate business, but he gathered up his neat leather cases and fled to the smoker for safety. He had meant no sort of harm, and he was so embarrassed that he was hours recovering from the experience.

After he had disappeared down the aisle, Arethusa's defender moved her family and most of her baggage across the way, depositing her remarkably decorated telescope in the space between the two seats which had faced each other for Arethusa's adventure, before the astonished Arethusa was thoroughly aware of just what was happening.

"You sit there, Helen Louise," admonished this substitute for the Nice Man to her daughter, indicating the end of the telescope, "and if our friend wants to come back, I reckon he'll have to fall over you. That was a horrid man," she added to Arethusa: "it's the likes of him makes it disagreeable for girls to be travelling by themselves."

"Oh, no," protested Arethusa.

"Yes, he were," replied Helen Louise's mother in a positive way that indicated superior wisdom on such matters.

Arethusa bowed to the superior wisdom and the positive tone, through long habit of her experience with Miss Eliza when she used such a tone.

"But he looked like a Nice Man," she said, though feebly.

"It's most always the nicest looking ones is the worst at heart. I'm raising up Helen Louise to steer clear of anything in pants she ain't been introduced to first by somebody she knows. It's safest."

This speech had a somewhat familiar sound, though perhaps couched differently. Arethusa had a moment of terrified remembrance of Certain Instructions. She looked down at the bulwark of Helen Louise and the telescope between her and the aisle, and she suddenly felt grateful to Helen Louise's mother.

"Thank you," she said, with fervent sincerity, "thank you, ma'am, just ever so much. I never do remember anything Aunt 'Liza tells me, she says."

"You ain't got no real call to thank me," was the placid reply. "I'd be doing the same for any girl as good-looking as you be; and I'd be hoping somebody'd do the same for my Helen Louise. It seems like it's always most easiest for young folks to keep right on forgetting just what they ought to be remembering."

"I know," said Arethusa apologetically. "But this is the first time I ever traveled anywhere, and...."

Mrs. Cherry (for such was the name of Arethusa's latest friend) rescued her small son from his repeated attempts to plunge through the glass in the car window, before she turned around to continue the conversation.

"I should have said you had. You don't look so awfully citified, now I come to think, but I should have certainly said you'd travelled. Who's your Aunt 'Liza, you spoke about awhile back? Ain't you got no Ma?"

Mrs. Cherry was genuinely friendly, and she was safely feminine, so Arethusa once more launched into a glowing description of what wonders the future held in store, and to Mrs. Cherry's interested questioning, told what the past had been like, Timothy and all.

"You certainly have got lots of folks to care about you," was the comment, when the narrator finally paused for breath. "And you ain't never seen your Pa? Well! Well! Helen Louise and Peter and me we're going to the city to meet Helen Louise's Pa. He's got work there and we're going to live there now."

Helen Louise smiled all over herself at this mention of her father, a toothless smile, but of unmistakable joy, and Arethusa's heart went out to her immediately. Here, very evidently, was another girl-child whose affections were centered largely in a male parent.

"Helen Louise favors her Pa considerable. And they're the biggest geese together!"

Helen Louise's silvery treble piped up. "Papa and me just play and play!" She gave herself something like an anticipatory hug. "Gee, but I'm going to be glad to see him! I ain't seen him for a whole year now!"

"Helen Louise, don't you be telling Miss Worth'ton no story now!" warned her mother. Names had been exchanged. "She ain't seen him for more'n a month reely, but I reckon it does seem 'most a year to her."

Peter now joined his voice to the conversation for the first time, "Ma, I'm hungry."

"Bless us! But it might be dinner time, now, mightn't it. Have you got a watch, Miss Worth'ton?"

Arethusa reached down into her waistband and drew forth Miss Eliza's parting gift. Which was a watch that had seen Miss Eliza faithfully through more than one decade, a large and handsomely chased affair of gold on a long ribbon of black gros-grain.

"The child will need a watch," said Miss Eliza.

Arethusa fully appreciated the parting gift, and she reverenced the old-fashioned timepiece fully as much as had its former owner.

What though it was a trifle heavy in her hand as she held it to read the dial! Was it not an actual watch and gold at that, and did not its tiny hands count off the moments of each one of the twenty-four hours for her to note as they flew by? And was not all of its wonder her very own now?

"A quarter to one," she announced proudly.

"Well, well, you don't say so! No wonder he's hungry! You'll be having some lunch with us, Miss Worth'ton, won't you now?"

But Arethusa refused this cordial invitation. She could not possibly eat a mouthful. Food would have stuck in her throat right on top of the big lump of excitement that was already there. And besides the drawback of this decided inability to swallow, she had not the slightest sensation of hunger that would have tempted her to try to eat.

"I had some lunch of my own," she shyly offered the neatly tied-up box; "Aunt 'Liza makes awfully nice jam and things and Mandy said she was going to fix me some fried chicken. But I don't want a bit of it. Wouldn't Helen Louise and Peter like to have it?"

Helen Louise's pale blue eyes glistened at this mention of fried chicken. Her own lunch contained no such appetizing delicacy. She had helped to tie it up, and she knew just what was in it. This was far superior in every way. She pulled at her mother's dress in eagerness, and Mrs. Cherry reached down and slapped her.

"Don't you act like you never had nothing in your life to eat," she said sharply.

Then Helen Louise's eyes began to glisten with tears. Arethusa felt very sorry for her. She had seemed so like a kindred spirit in her plainly manifested father worship. So Arethusa opened the dainty little packet of chicken and sandwiches and spread it temptingly on Helen Louise's lap with her own hands.

"Here," she said, "you may have it, Helen Louise. But you'll give Peter some? Do," she added quickly.

For Peter's large round eyes were regarding with a greediness unmistakable the munificence of food that had been so generously bestowed upon his sister.

"Well, I will say this," remarked Mrs. Cherry, as she divided Arethusa's contribution into equal portions between her offspring, after the donor had succeeded in convincing her that she honestly wanted none of it. "I will say this for my children. They might be acting like hoodlums over this here food, but they ain't never seen none just like it before," She bit into one of Mandy's beaten biscuit sandwiches with the pink ham in between, herself, with relish. "Your aunt must have a mighty good cook. She cert'inly must!"

Watching the little Cherry's devour her lunch and the garrulity of their mother consumed so much time for Arethusa, that almost before she knew it the little wave of excitement denoting the nearing of a journey's end swept through the car. The conductor passed by and gathered the little slips of stiff paper from the men's hats; every passenger began his or her peculiar preparations for leaving the train.

Mrs. Cherry began gathering up her boxes and parcels. Helen Louise was sent to the water cooler to wet a handkerchief and then her face and Peter's were vigorously scrubbed. At any other time, Mrs. Cherry would have dragged both children to the cooler, but she was not taking any chances with pretty, unprotected Arethusa. No one else should have that seat of hers.

The baggageman came through the car; calling as he went, "Anybaggageyouwantdeliveredinthe-city, car-ri-age or omnibus."

It gave Arethusa a most delightful little thrill all down her spine to hear him. She was not exactly sure he was the person to give her check to, but decided it would be best to obey the letter of the law this time. Miss Eliza had mentioned no baggageman, but she had been most explicit in her directions to Arethusa that she give that check to no one but her father.

She rescued her hat from its paper protection and put it on her tumbled hair, from which some of the precious hairpins had fallen during the excitement of the journey; unfolded her coat and donned it; drew on the cotton gloves and clutched her purse and satchel once more as when she had started, and with the death grip Miss Eliza had adjured for fear of those pickpockets with which railway stations are always infested, and Arethusa was Ready. And she was ready with a palpitating heart, for the brakeman had accommodatingly called, "Lewisburg," right in her very own ear, as if he wished her to be quite sure this was the right place to leave her seat.

Mrs. Cherry had been very busy with her progeny and her paraphernalia and impedimenta of various sorts—it was marvelous how she managed to gather them all together with only two hands—and she was ready also. But even in the midst of this sleight of hand performance, she did not forget her self-constituted guardianship of Arethusa.

"Sure you're going to know your Pa?" she enquired. "Don't you want me to be waiting and help you hunt for him?"

No, Arethusa was very, very sure she would know him. She did not need any help to find him.

And then with one last shrieking grind of the wheels, the train stopped in the shed at Lewisburg, and Arethusa, all injunctions to sit still for a half hour forgotten as if they had never been, immediately began with her fellow passengers a movement towards the door. But so slow was this movement that her impatient heart thought she would never, never be out of that car.

Helen Louise's quick eyes spied, through the car window, her father, among the crowd on the platform and she gave a joyful shout. But it was a shout, which although loud and very near, Arethusa never even heard. Her own eyes, star-like and intent, were busy searching that same crowd for her own father.



CHAPTER XI

Just as the music room was primarily Elinor's retreat, so was the library the place which Ross loved best.

It was a long, narrow room; two square rooms had been thrown together to make it, and it was lined, on the longest walls to about half the distance from the ceiling, with low, deep, unglassed book-cases full of books on a bewildering variety of subjects, haphazardly arranged; some of them well worn as to bindings as if much read. A brick fireplace of generous proportions with a high, narrow mantel shelf of brownish red marble occupied most of one of the other, and narrower, walls. A log fire burned there fitfully now, throwing little dancing gleams on the brass andirons and the dark polished floor just in front. All the chairs in the room were broad and deep and enticingly comfortable. An enormous davenport stood at one side of the fireplace, and there was a long, heavy table of carved mahogany directly in front of the hearth. The few rugs in the room were all in dull, subdued tones that melted into the floor unobtrusively.

Here, in the library, Ross spent his days in the arduous labor with which he kept body and soul together; the translation of various bits of the literature of Southern Europe into English. Ross was quite a student in his way and a good deal of a linguist.

But he was not working just at this moment.

At the enormous desk between the two long windows at the end of the room opposite the fireplace, he was reading a detective story and playing with a bronze paper cutter at the same time, banging it up and down on the desk.

Ross loved detective stories as much as any boy who has ever thrilled over them, and Elinor loved to watch him read them. She stood still in the doorway for a moment and watched him now. She could tell by his changing expression just when the story he was reading was sad, just when it was merry, just when the meaning was hard to understand, and just when he began to dislike the way things were working out, almost as well as if he read it aloud to her.

The paper cutter poised in the air for just a second, and his eyebrows drew together in a little puzzled frown. Evidently, things were going badly. Then the paper cutter came down on the desk with a swoop, and his whole face lighted.

Elinor crossed the room with her swift, graceful movement, and kissed him lightly on the tiny bald spot on the very top of his head, which he insisted was being widened by "financial worries."

"Ross, Clay is waiting."

He gave her an absentminded squeezing of the hand nearest him by way of answer without lifting his eyes from his book.

She leaned over and covered the page with one hand.

"Oh, come now," he remonstrated, "that's not a bit fair! That's the most interesting place for pages and pages!"

"That may be, you infant, but you must stop right there. Clay is waiting for you."

"What for, please? I don't remember telling him I wanted him!"

"Ross Worthington! Have you actually forgotten Arethusa is coming this afternoon!"

Ross returned, with the most commendable suddenness, from the Long Island country place, scene of his sojourn for the last few hours where a most fearful and intricately involved crime had been committed, to things which were happening in Lewisburg.

"Ye gods! And I had!"

"You ought to be ashamed to admit it!"

"I don't see why you say that," his air was one of mild protest. "You remembered her, didn't you? And that's what a wife's for, anyway, one of the things, to remember what her husband ought to. What's the use of having one if...."

But Elinor hurried him into the hall without allowing him to finish this speech, thrust his coat and hat forcibly upon him, and propelled him on toward the open front door, and then on down the steps.

"Wait a minute here," Ross came back from halfway to the automobile, "Aren't you going?" For it had penetrated his consciousness that she had not come any farther than the top step.

"No."

"Why not?"

She blushed a trifle. "I ... I thought I wouldn't."

All her shyness was up in arms.

It was very probably going to be hard enough at best, this first meeting with Arethusa, without staging it before a crowd of prying eyes in a railroad station. In spite of all her longing to see and know the girl, and her loving preparation, now that the moment was actually come, Elinor's shyness intruded and kept her at home.

Ross understood (it was one of the very nicest things about him, his understanding) but as he was feeling a bit the same way himself, he would have liked the bulwark of her presence. Two shy folk to back each other up are in not nearly so bad a fix as the one who goes it alone. So he stood hesitatingly in the middle of the front walk, slowly drawing on his gloves. Perhaps Elinor would change her mind.

"You'll be late," she warned.

But still he hesitated. "How in the dickens am I going to know the child? I haven't the remotest idea what she's like. I may miss her altogether. I think I need you."

His statement of not knowing what Arethusa was like was perfectly true, for in none of her letters had Miss Eliza once mentioned Arethusa's personal appearance and Elinor had never thought to ask about it.

"You should have told her," he continued, almost reproachfully, "to wear a red carnation or something. I am quite sure I shan't be able to find her. And you're so much smarter than I am. Your woman's intuition is a great thing to have in a search, You better come go 'long."

Elinor came down the walk to where he was and gave him a push. "Do go on, Ross. You really will miss her altogether, if you don't. And I haven't time to dress now, so I can't possibly go. She probably looks like her mother or some member of the family."

"Now, I don't know about that," he answered, still lingering. "She may not at all. I don't look like my mother, and you...."

"Oh, please go on and stop fooling!" Though she laughed, his wife's patience was ebbing. It would be dreadful for Arethusa to come and find no one to meet her. "You always hurry so, Ross, when there's no real necessity for it and won't when there is!"

Ross decided that the moment for actual departure was certainly at hand, so he made haste to the automobile.

Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the shed, toward the iron gates she had to pass through to reach the station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in this comparatively small space than she had ever seen in one company before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers of travelling daughters they had come to meet.

She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along, unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware she had passed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one side of the station.

From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various other relationships (there were some she was quite positive were fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy; for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed to have been met by somebody.

Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose.... she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!

But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.

The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her. And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation, directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts' weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort of protection.

Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!

The Cherry family had been so long in their greetings that they were among the last to pass by the unmet traveller and her pillar. Mrs. Cherry, seeing that the girl was alone, crossed the platform to her, the whole collection of Cherrys trailing in her rear.

"Found your Pa yet, dearie?" she asked cheerfully.

"This is the pretty Miss Worth'ton I was telling you about we saw on the train, Cherry," to her husband, and "This is Helen Louise's Pa," to Arethusa.

Arethusa managed to acknowledge this introduction, but being in such a state of mind as she was, she could not make her acknowledgment very cordial.

Helen Louise was dancing up and down and hanging on to one hand of a man who could have been nothing else but a close relation to the little girl, pale blue eyes and pale eyebrows and all. The daughter certainly favored "her Pa considerable" as her mother had said.

"My Papa," Helen Louise announced happily.

Mrs. Cherry sensed something wrong. She looked at Arethusa more closely. "You ain't found him? Here, Cherry, you take the children and the bundles and put them in the waitin'-room and then come straight back here and we'll help Miss Worth'ton hunt her father."

"I don't want to be put in the waitin'-room!" wailed Helen Louise in protest, "I want to stay with Papa!"

Mrs. Cherry was reproving her and starting her off in the direction of the designated depository, when Arethusa interrupted the proceedings. She did not want Mrs. Cherry, kind as she had been and kind as her intentions still were to continue being, with her just now. If this was a fiasco to her Beautiful Dream she needed a few moments to face it alone. A funny sort of little pride gave her this feeling. She had talked to Mrs. Cherry so glowingly and at such length about her father and her Visit.

But Mr. Cherry, till just now silent, had a suggestion to make. "S'pose," he drawled, "if Miss Worth'ton wants to wait by herself here, Maria, me and you set inside awhile, and then if she finds she reely has missed him somehow, I might help her to look him up, mebbe."

Arethusa considered this a decidedly brilliant idea. It relieved her of present society, which though friendly was irksome, and promised future comfort.

She rewarded the tall, thin father of Helen Louise with a misty smile.

Mrs. Cherry thought it very good, also. Miss Worth'ton wasn't to worry a mite now, not a mite. If her father didn't come for her, the Cherry family would escort her right up to his front door.

So the little procession trailed away and left Arethusa once more alone, and most disconsolate, against her kindly iron pillar.

The station had gradually become deserted, until there were only a few employees pottering about here and there, and one lone man standing talking to the blue-capped man at the gate.

Arethusa's mental picture of her father had been very clear. All this while she had been looking for the handsome youth of the wavy dark hair, eccentrically long, and the graceful Italian military cape. And she had been looking for him without adding a single year to his age, perfectly confident she would know him anywhere.

Ross had really been on time, despite his "fooling." He had arrived before the first passenger left Arethusa's train. And he had waited until every human being had gone before starting to leave himself, so he was the lone man Arethusa saw questioning the gatekeeper.

Elinor's last suggestion that the daughter might resemble her mother had been taken literally, and all these moments Ross's search had been for a tiny, dainty bit of a girl with cornflower eyes. When the crowd had somewhat thinned, he had noticed Arethusa and her prettiness and her height, standing so forlornly by herself, had mentally labeled Miss Letitia's costuming, "a Godey's Ladies' Book relic," and had turned away again to his search for the Dresden china daughter, who did not seem to be anywhere about. Ross was vexed to have been snatched from his book for this fruitless trip to the station. If Miss Eliza had postponed Arethusa's coming once more, she should have written them about it, or telegraphed; for they should surely have been notified.

As he passed Arethusa on his way out he saw that her grey eyes under their long black lashes (he noticed them first because they were such unusually beautiful eyes) were full of shining tears, some of which were beginning to roll, unashamed, down the girl's cheek. A damsel in distress always appealed to Ross, for no knight of the time of tournaments had no more real chivalry in his composition, and so he stopped.

"Could I help you in any way?" he asked courteously. "Are you in trouble?"

Arethusa was just on the point of seeking Mr. Cherry and his promised assistance, when out of the bleak expanse of that awful and lonely platform Providence had sent this other help: a Man with reassuring grey hairs and a smile which she could not possibly mistake for anything but kindness. She seized it gratefully: and there would be no embarrassment of a Mrs. Cherry connected with it. This new Man knew nothing of any Dream that had been shattered. And if he lived in Lewisburg, he most probably knew her father. Her experience with municipalities was that everybody in a town knew everybody else and all their affairs into the bargain. And she was far past remembering Certain Instructions in such a Crisis.

She turned to Ross, a tear-stained face on which her gratitude at his offer struggled with her woes and the Horror of the Situation.

"My ... my fa-ther...." she began brokenly, and then gulped, and stopped.

It sounded very much like a greeting of the man before her, but it was only that her unruly voice refused entirely to respond to her efforts to use it.

Ross's look searched her quickly, up and down. She was as unlike the child he had expected to find as he could have found in a day's long journey; but there could hardly be two sets of fathers and daughters in so similar a predicament in the same station.

"I think you've found him, right here," he said lightly, to down a curious little feeling that suddenly surged through his heart, "if you're Miss Arethusa Worthington, that is. I'm...."

Arethusa waited not for him to finish with a definite announcement of his identity; she needed no further words to convince her of just who he was. And although this was far, far from being what she had always visioned the wonder of their Meeting, she put her whole soul into her side of it.

She flung both arms tight around his neck as if she never intended to let him go; and sobbed violently, salty tears that soaked clear through the expensive tweed of his new suit. But these were not the tears of unhappiness which he had noticed and which had caused him to stop and make his offer of help; they were tears of joy for the sheer relief that his bodily presence gave to his volatile daughter. With the impulsive suddenness of her embrace her hat had flown clear off, but Arethusa recked not, in such a moment, of hats with precious and beautiful turkey feathers, and she lost, of necessity, her careful grip of her purse and satchel.

Ross, for a moment or two, was entirely bereft of coherent thought by the suddenness of her movement. He was nearly strangled by the clinging arms, and a trifle embarrassed besides; for it was not every day that a strange young lady precipitated herself into his arms and sobbed so violently. That it was a daughter whose acquaintance he was making for the very first time, did not altogether deprive the situation of its strangeness.

"Here," he said, when he began to recover somewhat, "here, buck up, child! Buck up. This won't do at all, you know. Let's go home and finish this!"

Arethusa "bucked up."

She drew away from him as suddenly as she had grabbed him and blushed hotly all over with a most unusual accession of sudden shyness. And Ross made straight for the waiting automobile without further parley. She followed behind him in silence, but about halfway she stopped and clapped her hand to her head.

"Oh, my hat!" she exclaimed. "And I've lost my purse and satchel!"

Ross turned around and went back to find them.

But the purse was gone beyond any power of their finding it, though hat and satchel were safely retrieved and progress once more resumed.



CHAPTER XII

"This is Miss Arethusa, Clay," said Ross, when the chauffeur jumped down to open the door of the machine and took charge of the ancient handbag.

Clay touched his cap respectfully.

But to the surprise of both men Arethusa's acknowledgement of this introduction was a shy and old-fashioned courtesy Miss Letitia had taught her. She murmured politely, "I'm very glad to meet you," and extended her hand.

Clay very nearly dropped the handbag.

But something in the friendly smiling of the grey eyes that regarded him made Clay himself to smile warmly in return, and Arethusa had made a friend. He grasped the out-stretched fingers lightly, in the spirit in which they had been offered, and said with unmistakable cordiality, "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Arethusa. Home, Mr. Worthington?"

"Home," replied Ross, smiling at him for his kind quickness.

And then Clay slammed the door upon Ross and Arethusa and climbed up in front. Arethusa was just a bit puzzled at first, and then she decided it was the City.

She had had no previous dealings of intimacy with automobiles, the nearest she had ever been to one was to watch them fly past down the Pike. The word "chauffeur" would have conveyed no meaning to her mind, nor have given her any idea of his place in the general scheme of things connected with machines. She had thought the good-looking, well-dressed youth in his natty Norfolk suit and cap was some friend of her father's out for a ride with him, and so it was quite in order that he should be introduced. People often took their friends driving in the country. It was just a bit strange that he should do the driving and not her father, but it did not bother her long; and after a while, she was rather glad that the friend did sit in front.

She abandoned herself to Complete Happiness against those marvelously soft cushions in the limousine. She dearly loved to ride, and she did not get near enough of it at the Farm. In fact, motion of any sort had a charm for Arethusa. But she had never felt motion so superlative as this. It was even more exhilarating than the train had been, so swiftly they moved forward, and so silently.

Her momentary shyness with her father began to disappear under the influence of her enjoyment. She glanced around at him from under her long lashes and found him watching her.

His daughter's appearance was proving interestingly mystifying to Ross. Where in the world had she got that red hair and those wonderful Irish eyes? She had not a single feature like her mother. Her tallness, he thought, could be said to have come straight from him. And that ever-changing play of expression across her face,—it was quite fascinating.

Though thus watching her, from the moment they had sat down, Ross was rather at a loss how to begin conversation; he had not entirely recovered from that first embrace. But he could not help, however, replying to her smile, the friendliest possible smile, with which she conveyed to him her delight in the machine.

"So you like to ride?"

"I love it!" she answered, enthusiastically. "This.... It's just like flying!"

Ross liked this unbridled ecstasy; it was decidedly refreshing.

"Ever ridden in one before?"

Arethusa shook her head vigorously.

"But I should certainly have thought automobiles had penetrated to Barnett County!"

"Some people in town have them," Arethusa came quickly to the defence of her county, "but it's nobody I really know. Timothy was going to get one, but his silo blew down and he couldn't this summer; because he put up a concrete one in its place and it cost so much."

"Who is Timothy?"

"Why, Timothy is.... Why, Timothy.... He's just Timothy Jarvis ... Father." She added the "Father" a trifle shyly, it being the very first time she had ever addressed that title to him in person. "Aunt 'Liza wants me to marry him," she continued, as if that ought to explain matters perfectly.

Ross remembered the Jarvises. "I see, but how about you?" He found that shy little "Father" most attractive. He wished she would say it again.

Arethusa laughed. "Why, he's my very best friend and I've known him always and always. Of course I'm not going to marry him! I couldn't marry Timothy ... Father. You have to fall in love with the person you marry!"

"Then it seems I may gather from your remarks," and Ross was most highly entertained by those same remarks, "that you can't possibly fall in love with a person you've known always!"

"It doesn't ever happen in books," said Arethusa, seriously, "and they're supposed to be just like things really are, aren't they? I've read just oceans of love-stories. I just adore them!" she added, with emphasis.

Ross's smile broadened. "But truth, they say, is stranger than fiction," and he was about to add something to Arethusa's further mystification, when the automobile stopped.

It had stopped in front of a huge, brick house, painted grey, with tall, narrow windows indicative of the high ceilings within, and a high, pointed roof of grey and red slate. It was a house which had originally been much smaller, but it had been added to until it was spread out, all over a lot which was unusually wide for a city lot, with huge excrescences of wings on each side.

It was not a handsome house, and the most kindly intentioned critic could never have called it so. Elinor had never been able to do much towards the improvement of the outward appearance, however much she had beautified the interior. But it had been her home since she was too small to remember any other, and she loved it dearly despite its deficiencies from an artistic standpoint outwardly. Ross thought it a hideous pile. He said its only redeeming feature was that it so undoubtedly looked respectable.

But Arethusa could find no fault with it. She admired it unaffectedly as they went up the walk toward it.

"Do you live here, Father?" she asked, breathlessly. She had considered at first the possibility that it might be a hotel. "It's so awfully big! Why, Father, it's every bit as big as our County Court House!" Which was till now the largest building she had ever seen.

She regarded the stately proportions of the facade with awe. Had she not been with her father, she would never have found the courage to lift that shining knocker in the center of the broad paneled door. She would have gone on past this place, she was sure; it seemed so much too large for the family of two she had come to visit.

Elinor's loving impatience had taken her to the library windows more than once to watch for their coming. It seemed so long that Ross had been gone. When the automobile was heard to stop, she rushed to the front door to open it herself, flinging it wide as a hospitable indication of how glad she was to welcome Arethusa. But with her hand still on the door knob, she paused and drew back. This tall, slim child, every bit as tall as she was herself, with her ardent grey eyes, and that mass of tumbled red hair down her back, for Arethusa's various exciting experiences had been hard for the coiffure with which she had started from home, was not the girl Elinor had led herself to expect as Ross's daughter. Arethusa, furthermore, was bareheaded, having forgotten all about her hat and left it in the machine. This, as well as the quaint costume of Miss Letitia's designing, added to Elinor's little feeling of surprise.

And Arethusa stopped short also, just inside the door, and shyness descended upon her once more with this, her first glimpse of the "new wife."

But whatever Elinor's expression might be said to resemble, Arethusa's in return after that first look was one of absolute and unalloyed admiration. In her wildest flights of anticipatory imaginings as to the appearance of her father's wife, founded on that Letter of his that had so positively indicated her beauty, Arethusa had never been able to paint such a picture as she actually saw. For Elinor's young brown eyes, under her white hair, the lovely glow of her skin, and her slender gracefulness clothed in that clinging, fascinatingly smoky-colored gown she wore (a color she much affected), seemed to the beauty worshipper who regarded her to make her the most Altogether Beautiful Human Being that she, Arethusa, had ever gazed upon.

"Well," remarked Ross; he thought the funny little silence had lasted quite long enough, "I hope you two will know each other the next time you happen to meet anywhere!"

Then was Elinor given one of those same disarming smiles with which Arethusa had won her father in the automobile, and anything else but immediate and complete friendship was impossible after such a Smile, however unlike the girl expected the one who had come might be.

Clay had brought in the forgotten hat when he came with the satchel, and he hovered about in the background of the hall until he could communicate to Ross that Miss Arethusa's trunk had not been attended to. Should he go right straight back for it? Clay was somewhat used to the remembering of things which Ross had not remembered; rarely a day passed that he did not have to do something of this kind.

"My trunk!" Arethusa's mind made a complete somersault at this intrusion of so commonplace an article into the happy family greetings and the joy of finding Elinor as dear as she looked. "I ... I forgot all about it!" she faltered.

"It doesn't matter," comforted Elinor, "there's no harm done at all. Just give Clay the check and he'll go see about it!"

The check!

A wild search for it followed immediately. Arethusa had entirely forgotten where it had been put. Down into the very depths of the satchel she dived, to emerge unrewarded. Was it by any chance in that lost purse?

Visions of Miss Eliza rose before her, making more frantic the efforts to locate it. How many times had she said, "Whatever you do, Arethusa, don't you dare lose that trunk check!"

She sank weakly to the floor to lean her head despairingly against the heavy newel post of the stairway.

"What will Aunt 'Liza say?" she cried, with the hopelessness of one already condemned. "Oh, what will she say?"

"It does not need even a clever mind like mine to deduce from my daughter's behaviour that Miss Eliza remains unchanged through the changing years," murmured Ross in Elinor's ear. "Tempus may fugit, but Miss Eliza's disposition stands perfectly still."

Suddenly, Arethusa's hand flew to clasp her throat. She looked up at them with a little laugh, her face clearing as if by magic.

"How awfully stupid of me! I remember now where it is!" She drew the tiny bag on its cord out of the neck of her blouse. "She put it in here, so I wouldn't lose it." Her relief was great and thoroughly genuine. "Whee," she sighed, "just suppose I had lost it!"

It was all too much for Ross. He could scarcely manage to untie that bag for the check, he was so hilarious.

"You needn't laugh that way," said Arethusa defensively. "You don't know what Aunt 'Liza can be like when she's mad! If you did, you wouldn't laugh!"

"But I do," he replied, "I do. That's the reason I laugh. It brings her back to me so plainly."

It had brought her back to Arethusa very plainly also. She remembered some Instructions Miss Eliza had given, which the time had come to carry out.

"I must lie down and rest now," she said to Elinor.

"Are you very tired, dear? We'll go right up to your room."

"No, I'm really not a bit tired," explained Arethusa, as she scrambled to her feet to start upstairs, "not the very weeniest bit. But Aunt 'Liza said I must lie down and rest just as soon as I got here."

Elinor looked a trifle puzzled. "But if you're really not tired...."

"But I must rest. Aunt 'Liza said so."

Arethusa was sure that she had disobeyed Miss Eliza enough for one day, in the forgetting what she had said about strange men and the attitude to be adopted towards them, and she had gone on from that to lose her purse. There was no telling how long Miss Eliza's arm might be, how far her wrath might reach. It was best not to tempt Providence.

She would rest.

"Wait," said Ross as an answer to his wife's bewilderment, "just wait until you know Miss Eliza and all of this will be fully explained."



CHAPTER XIII

A reward of some description was surely due Miss Eliza's niece for her behaviour on this occasion, for no creature ever felt less like even the outward semblance of "resting" than did Arethusa. While regard for the strictest truth will not permit it to be stated that much rest was obtained from her method of carrying out Miss Eliza's command; still, she remained in her room with every appearance of obedience and intervals were spent on the "squshy" green sofa, when she could have talked and talked to Ross and Elinor the entire afternoon without the slightest hint of fatigue.

Arethusa's delight in her room more than repaid Elinor for any trouble which the fixing of it might have been. Her little gasping "Oh!" when the door was first opened, and the silent, shining-eyed gaze around afterwards were the most genuine and appreciated tribute of admiration she could have given.

She would never have dreamed that the mere gathering together of furniture and pictures and other objects of familiar names which were the commonplaces of everyday life at the Farm could present an appearance so beautiful. When once on the sofa, tucked under a fluffy green coverlid by Elinor's kind hands, she could not stay for long. A hundred times did she bob up to examine various fascinating objects that attracted her attention as her eager regard explored while she lay there, "resting."

The bath-room delighted her beyond any power of her expression. It was a far more wonderful piece of work as a bath-room than the one at Timothy's house which she had deeply envied him ever since it had been put in. That hot and cold water should run together for one's cleansing without the trouble of fetching them in heavy buckets from a far-away kitchen, had seemed to Arethusa the acme of luxury when she had first glimpsed the new bath-room at Timothy's.

There was but one faucet at the Farm, and that was in the kitchen, by the sink. Miss Eliza had made this one concession to modernity because she could not help but see that it saved a lot of bother in very cold weather. The plumbing arrangements, however, were of the most primitive. She scorned the suggestion that a bath-room be added; an effete idea.

Arethusa made up her mind immediately to write Timothy of the glories of her washing paraphernalia as being far superior to his. It was so far superior, in fact, that there were things in that region of white tile and flashing nickel whose specific use she failed to see. There was nothing just like it at Timothy's.

She decided also, after a rather longer interval than usual spent on the sofa, to take a bath this very afternoon; now, before supper time. But the dainty little silver clock on her mantel was chiming half-past six before she had finished her toilet; she had spent so long and luxurious a time in that wonderful porcelain tub. And there was so much to be admired all around her.

Her hair, to her great sorrow, she could not make stay up on top of her head at all, and she was forced to leave it plaited down her back as of old. She was vaguely dissatisfied with the youthful look it gave her, so arranged, but it could not be helped. She had lost most of her hairpins when it had tumbled down, and Miss Eliza had provided but the one set.

She wondered why there had been no call of "Arethusa!" as when she was late to supper at the Farm; for she must be late, very late. Six o'clock was the supper hour at home. She hastily slipped on the skirt to the blue suit and the pongee waist, without stopping to bother with anything in her trunk, which had been opened and placed in her room for her. How dreadful to be so late to her first meal!

Arethusa fairly plunged down the front stairs, but once at the bottom, she paused uncertainly. She had no idea where the dining-room was. Then she heard voices not far away and she followed the sound into the library, where she found Ross and Elinor in front of a gloriously burning wood fire. But they were both garbed in what to her inexperienced eyes seemed the most pronounced party garments. Ross had donned a Tuxedo and pinned a tiny, pink rose in his buttonhole. Elinor wore a black gown that was very low in the neck to Arethusa, although in reality it was the most modest of decolletage, and a few of the same pink roses were clustered at her belt.

"I was so afraid I was late," began Arethusa breathlessly, then she stopped short, halfway across the room, when she fully realized the costuming of the pair before the fire.

"Oh, you all are giving a Party and I didn't know anything about it!" she exclaimed.

Ross raised himself just a trifle from the comfortable depths of his chair. "Are you quite rested?" he enquired gravely.

But she scarcely heard that he spoke. "Oh, I just wish I'd known it was a Party!" she repeated. "I wish I'd known!" She glanced down at the plainness of her own attire and then at Elinor's simple evening frock.

Her face clouded. And then a truly dreadful thought intruded itself. Perhaps she was not even expected at this Party; that may have been why she had not been called.

Her troubled grey eyes spelled something of this to Elinor, so she pulled a plump chair a little nearer to her own and patted it invitingly, just as Miss Asenath patted the couch for Arethusa to join her.

"It isn't a party, Arethusa dear," said Elinor. "Come over by us and be sociable and I'll tell you all about it."

She explained to Arethusa that it was just three years ago on the twenty-fifth of October (this very night) that she and Ross had first met each other, at a dinner at the Baronne de Braunecker's in Paris when she had been visiting the Baronne and Ross had come as a guest to the dinner given in her honor.

"I fell in love with her on the spot," interrupted Ross, "and I could hardly wait for morning so I could go back to call on her."

Arethusa flashed her father a brief smile of appreciation for this bit of information and proceeded to grow more and more enraptured with the whole affair as Elinor added to the narrative. They were celebrating the occasion of that meeting this evening, she continued. Ross had sent her the flowers, touching the cluster at her belt, for she had worn pink roses at the Baronne's dinner; and they were to have for this anniversary meal as many things as Elinor had been able to remember they had eaten together at the first one.

Arethusa's eyes sparkled.

What a darling idea! This keeping of the Anniversary of so Memorable an Occasion! Her romantic heart thought it came very near being more thrilling than a Real Party! It was a way of living after her own conception of life!

"But if I had known about it I could have dressed up, too. I have a Party Dress!"

"You have plenty of time to go put it on, if you wish." Elinor smiled for the little air of pride with which the girl had announced her possession. "There's oceans of time for you to change. Dinner isn't until seven."

Arethusa bounded from her chair. "Oh, really ... may I?"

Elinor nodded. "Would you like me to help you?" she added.

But Arethusa was already halfway up the front stairs by the time she had finished her friendly offer.

She dived down into her trunk, recklessly pitching out and aside all those garments Miss Eliza had folded so carefully and placed into it as she had considered Arethusa would be needing them. For the one white dress Miss Letitia had made for parties was far down towards the very bottom of the trunk. It is well that Miss Eliza did not see this unpacking!

Still further down, Arethusa lifted up a box she had put there herself, tucking it in when Miss Eliza had not been present to observe, and from it she drew that length of green ribbon which she loved. Unknown to her aunt, it had travelled all the way from the hollow tree to Lewisburg for Arethusa's adorning.

"I will not!" she said aloud, defiantly, as though Miss Eliza were actually present in person forbidding the tying-on of that decoration, "I will not wear a blue ribbon! I will wear This!"

Then Arethusa, thus arrayed in her best, descended the stairs once more.

She crossed the library towards the two by the fire, this time stepping proudly in a consciousness of clothes, holding her head high. Her cheeks were adorably flushed, and her eyes were almost black under her long dark lashes.

The dress was very becoming, even if it were not of the accepted standards for formal evening wear. Miss Letitia had "spre'd herse'f," so Mandy said, on that dress. It was a trifle sheerer than Miss Eliza had at first intended it to be, thanks to Miss Asenath's gentle persuasion; round in the neck and even a bit low, for with fingers that trembled in their excited daring Miss Letitia had cut it down farther than the line Miss Eliza had indicated as modest and becoming. And then there was no way to fill it in.

But "'Thusa had such a pretty neck," said the guilty seamstress to herself; and what did an inch or so matter in the end?

In Arethusa's simple soul, even with her "love of gew-gaws," as Miss Eliza phrased it, there was no smallest room for envy. This white garment of hers had been bought and made for a party dress, and it was the most party "party dress" she had ever possessed; her mother's black gown was plainly a party dress also: therefore, to Arethusa's mind, they were similarly arrayed for an Occasion. She could admire whole-heartedly the soft sweep of the folds of Elinor's gown without one iota of unhappiness because her own frock hung in straight thick gathers with but a ruffle edged with lace at the bottom of the skirt for its trimming.

"I put on my Best Dress," she said happily, "because it was your Anniversary. I know Aunt 'Liza would say I should have put on my blue silk, but it's so dark, and it's not dress-up a bit."

Elinor and Ross exchanged glances, but forebore to smile at the "best dress." Somehow she appealed to them both more at this very moment than she had in any mood shown before.

Ross sprang from his chair and recklessly denuded a large bowl on the big mahogany table of most of its burden of pink roses, and gallantly presented them to his daughter to put in her green belt, so that she might also be wearing the Anniversary Flowers.

"For the Queen Rose in the rosebud garden of girls," he said, with a low, sweeping bow as he presented them, which enraptured Arethusa. And the words had a vaguely familiar sound, as of poetry. Arethusa adored poetry.

Yet the warm-hearted blossoms themselves, thought Ross, were really no more fresh and glowing than the girl whose fluttering fingers strove to tuck them in the ribbon around her waist just as Elinor had her cluster arranged.

"Bless her heart!" said Elinor to herself, as she noted Arethusa's little glance at the flowers she wore and the little effort at imitation. "And she shall have a real party frock to-morrow. The very prettiest I can find!"

When George, the African Butler, an imposing personage of almost unnatural blandness, a few moments later announced dinner as served, to Arethusa's view he appeared to be dressed for the Party also. She was gladder then than ever that she had gone up and changed her dress.

The round dining-table with its gleaming silver and glass, the tall, ivory-colored candles, burning without shades in silver candlesticks, and the huge centerpiece (of the Flowers of the Occasion) was far more of a picture than Arethusa had ever known such an ordinary thing as a dining-table to present. And all around the room were more roses, in bowls and tall vases, until it seemed a veritable bower of them, dimly lighted away from the candle glow by shaded sconces against the walls.

Arethusa drew a deep, sharp breath of ecstasy at all this loveliness. She did not want to sit down in the chair George held for her at first, but just to stand and look, and look. At home, they ate at night under an oil lamp hanging by chains from the ceiling, and the supper table at the Farm had never, in all its existence as a supper table, been a fairy scene such as this. But Ross and Elinor were sitting down, and so almost unconsciously Arethusa slid into her own chair, still admiring.

She examined the silver articles at her place with interest. There seemed to be so many for only one person. Why did they put all their silver on the table this way at once? For it surely looked to Arethusa as if that was what had been done. It was very pretty, she admitted, but seemed curious. She made no audible comment, however, remembering that Miss Eliza had said that it was most ill-bred audibly to remark anything as curious seen in another person's house. Their ways might be strangely different, but it was never the part of a lady to allude to the fact.

Arethusa's bouillon gave her no real trouble. It had a familiar appearance and one ate soup with a spoon, even at the Farm. She selected the spoon among that brave array that invited selection spread so accommodatingly before her, which seemed to her to best fit the cup in size; and conscious now of the lack of that lunch she could not eat, for she was very hungry, she ate every bit of this first course with relish, even lifting the cup as she noticed Elinor do once very daintily, to drain it of its last drop. She longed for more, but it is never polite to ask for a second helping, when a guest.

The bouillon drunk, and the gold and white cups removed, came George bearing a large silver platter whereon reposed what Arethusa at first thought to be flowers of some description. But it seemed queer to cook flowers and serve them for food, as they seemed to be intended.

Arethusa did not like the appearance of those strange, spiky, dark-green things, and it made it very easy to remember one of Miss Eliza's earliest lessons that something must be left for the servants in the kitchen, and never to take everything on a dish, there being only three of these unknown objects on that platter, so she refused with unforced politeness when they came her way.

"Oh, come now," remonstrated Ross, "surely you want an artichoke!"

"Artichoke!" The name made Arethusa giggle.

"Try one," suggested Elinor, "for this is one of the things I happened to remember we had at our first dinner together."

Whereupon she changed her mind, servants or no servants in the kitchen, for Arethusa was Celebrating.

There was no spoon on the platter. There was nothing in the shape of implements to assist this thing over to her plate save a large, wide fork and a pancake turner. At least, it resembled a pancake turner. It was strange to see such use for one, and to help herself to food such as this and in this manner. It proved a bit awkward in the attempt. The artichoke, too, made it more awkward. It behaved like something alive, and hesitated for a second on the tip of the pancake turner, balanced uncertainly; then plunged to ignominy and darkness, under the table. And Arethusa had made the noblest of efforts to manage it!

She looked up quickly in Elinor's direction, braced for the reprimand. Such an occasion would have proved the finest of grist for Miss Eliza's mill; but Elinor merely smiled kindly at the embarrassed guest, and requested George to fetch Miss Arethusa another artichoke.

This one was retrieved in triumph.

But once on her plate, Arethusa eyed it distrustfully. How did she eat it, now that she had it? Did she cut it up before hand, or what? Which one of her many knives and forks did she use for it? Then her quick glance noted how Elinor peeled off a leaf, so she did the same.

"Like it?" from Ross, after her first mouthful.

Arethusa looked doubtfully at the artichoke. Recollections of Miss Eliza as to the criticism of food put before one, made her temporize.

"I know other things I've eaten that I like much better." She was perfectly courteous in manner, but her tone decidedly lacked in enthusiasm. Then she added, hastily, fearing that she might have offended by even this statement, "I may get used to it, if I eat enough of them. Aunt 'Liza says you can acquire tastes." She smiled at Ross apologetically. "I never saw one before, you know."

"You'll do, Arethusa," laughed Ross.

And Elinor smilingly told her that its eating was not at all compulsory, but Arethusa was game. When she celebrated, she celebrated with no half measure, so she finished her artichoke to the last bitter leaf, though she did not like that last leaf any better than she had the first.

But it would be most unfair to chronicle all of Arethusa's vicissitudes and mistakes during the course of that long dinner; her struggles with her strange multitude of table-ware, which had a propensity for disappearing decidedly odd, but to which Ross's own augmented supply might have given her a clue, had she looked more sharply near his plate, and the eating of dishes new to her and not always liked. For, new dishes or not, Arethusa partook with heartiness of everything that came her way; even to the tiny cup of coffee at the very end, with its baby spoon which had so enraptured her as like a doll's, and which had vanished mysteriously before she could use it so that George had had to bring another.

She sighed the sigh of the well-fed when it was all over.

"I feel just like I would burst," she announced, as she pushed back from the table. "We don't have half this much to eat at night at home!"

"Would you," asked Ross, most amused, "like to go to bed and sleep it off? The instinct for which the lower animals are so commended leads them to some such sensible proceeding after over-feeding, I believe."

"Go to bed!" exclaimed Arethusa, indignant at the bare suggestion. "Why, we never think of going to bed at the Farm before nine or half-past; and sometimes, even ten!"

"Ye gods! What hours! I'm surprised at Miss Eliza's permitting it!"

And Arethusa could not possibly tell, from his expression, whether he was joking or not.

He strolled slowly across the hall to the music room, his daughter following, the idea stirring within her brain that this new-found father was inclined to be as much of a tease as Timothy, and that his teasing was a trifle hard to understand. Elinor was going to play for them. She played every night to Ross unless they went out somewhere.

"I can plainly see, Arethusa, my child," Ross added, "plainly see where we're going to prove a most demoralizing influence for Miss Eliza's careful rearing."



CHAPTER XIV

In the morning, Arethusa wrote the letter to Miss Eliza she had been bidden to write as soon as possible after arrival in Lewisburg, giving a sketchy description of her trip and the information that it had been accomplished in safety, without mentioning a single one of the friends made on the train; or that she had almost missed her father; or that she was now minus a purse.

But immediately after this duty was done she wrote another letter; to Miss Asenath this one, and it was overflowing with spirits and exuberant retrospect of all that had happened to her since she left the Farm. Into this effort she put her encounter with the strange man, Mrs. Cherry and Helen Louise and Peter and Mr. Cherry; how nearly she and Ross had missed connection and how terribly she had felt; the loss of her purse, and her fear that the check had been gone also; just how exciting this glorious Visit had already proved.

It was a long letter and a breathless one, with many missing words all down the pages, for Arethusa's mind was working so much faster than she could move her pen that it was quite impossible to get in every syllable. But Miss Asenath would understand.

Arethusa described at length the wonders of this big house where she was a guest, and the superlative Beauty of the room she had been given for her very own. She told of that Anniversary Dinner, and the Artichoke; of all her troubles with the strange food and the bewildering number of knives and forks and spoons. She also told Miss Asenath of Elinor's music.

Elinor made sounds to issue from a piano that Arethusa had never dreamed that instrument was capable of accomplishing. With her slender fingers on those black and ivory keys, the big, black box had sobbed and laughed, and even talked ordinarily at her bidding.

Arethusa left her chair, and crept nearer and nearer to the musician until she was almost on top of the piano bench herself, in her absorbed interest. Her hands clasped over her heart to still the curious little ache the music made her to feel there, with her lips parted slightly and her eyes like big stars; she had scarcely dared breathe. She wished suddenly for Timothy, for Timothy worshipped music. He loved even to hear her, Arethusa, play. And she was sure he had never heard any music such as this.

It was not what Miss Letitia would have called playing "with expression"; it was not as she had tried to teach Arethusa. Elinor's long, white hands just seemed to wander over the keys, as softly aimless as if she had no slightest idea what the next note was to be; they strayed from themes which aroused to an ecstasy into simple melodies that left a haunting sense that they had not been finished. Sometimes the piano scarcely seemed to sound; sometimes it crashed in grand chords, as if the musician's playing had changed with her mood.

And Arethusa had listened, full of vague longings she did not understand, feeling when it ended that it was ended far too soon; and Ross had smoked silently, blowing great, blue wreaths about his head, one after another. There had been no single word from either to break the spell of the music.

Arethusa wrote away, the wrinkles of composition between her brows and her writing becoming more and more ragged as the letter proceeded. Her feet were twined in the rounds of her chair, her arms were spread out all over the top of the big desk with a great display of elbows, and she was ungracefully humped as to back; for when Arethusa wrote, her whole body responded to the effort.

Close beside her lay Boris, Ross's Great Dane, a dignified animal of unusual beauty. Ordinarily, he was so indifferent and sometimes so disagreeable to strangers that he was rarely allowed where they were, yet he had adopted Arethusa at sight when first introduced just after breakfast, and he had not left her side since. Most people were frightened nearly speechless when Boris merely opened his mouth to yawn; but he had not frightened Arethusa. She had voted him the most wonderful dog she had ever seen, and pleased Ross immensely by her lack of fear.

Every now and then when she stopped in her writing to open her cramped fingers for a moment and gaze admiringly around the room, she would stoop and pat Boris. And she would stroke him wherever her hand happened to fall, and he did not seem to resent it in the least, which was something most unusual.

Ross was in the library, sprawled on the big davenport, and watching the girl and the dog with keen delight in the picture they made. He had never known Boris to make friends thus suddenly, in all the six years he had owned him; even Elinor was a bit afraid of the splendid creature.

Elinor had been in the library also most of the morning, talking to Ross while Arethusa performed a Duty; but she had been called out to the telephone. When she came back, her first words were for Arethusa.

"I have an invitation for you."

"For me!" Arethusa's pen dropped abruptly in the middle of her page to make a large and sprawling splash of ink.

"Yes, for you. That was Mrs. Chestnut on the telephone. I had told her you were coming to visit us, and so she called up to invite you to the dinner-dance she is giving Friday night, if you were here."

"Oh, would that be a Party, a Real Party?" The excited scribe abandoned her letter altogether, and followed Elinor over by the fire-place, nearer to Ross and the davenport, "Isn't that a Party?"

"I should say it was!"

"I've never been to a Party," apologetically explained Arethusa, "and I've wanted to go to one ever since I can remember. Aunt 'Senath said there would be parties in the City, and that I might be invited! But...." some of the glow began to fade, "I don't know Mrs. Chestnut, Mother."

"That doesn't make any difference this time, Arethusa dear, because she's one of my best friends. And all her parties are wonderful, so if you've really never been to any at all, you're starting in in the right way to enjoy them," said Elinor, and Arethusa glowed once more. "I had hardly dared hope she would invite you," she continued, "because I supposed her list was made up long ago. It's for Emily, her daughter. You'll like Emily; she's just about your age, and she's coming out this winter. It's to be at the Boden Hotel, I think she said. But she's going to send an escort for you."

What richness of prospect!

Yet with her joy, Arethusa puzzled for a moment over some of the obscurer items of her mother's speech.

"Why doesn't she have her party at home instead of a hotel," she enquired, "and what is Emily coming out of?"

"Your mother used the wrong words, Arethusa," volunteered Ross from the davenport; "she means to say that Mrs. Chestnut's daughter is on exhibition after some years of careful preparation by her mother for just this event and will be gladly presented to the man offering to take her off her mother's weary hands. Said mother will be fearfully disappointed, if, after all this trouble and expense, no man should offer. And as to her not having the party at her home, she thinks far too much of her furniture and Persian rugs and pale pink walls to allow her daughter's callow young friends to romp around among them for a whole evening."

Arethusa looked at him uncertainly, but his expression was one of perfect seriousness. It was even a trifle sad.

"Is she really like that, Father?"

"Really like that," replied Ross sorrowfully.

"Then," announced Arethusa with decision, and her red mouth pursed disapprovingly, "I don't believe that I want to go to her party!"

Elinor struggled between exasperation and a desire to laugh.

"Mrs. Chestnut is lovely, Arethusa, and so is her daughter. They only have the dance at the hotel because their own house is too small for so many people at once. Everyone has their large parties there nowadays. If you are going to believe everything your father says, you'll be having a very hard time. And if he keeps on talking this way, I'll have to send him out. You mustn't pay so much attention to him."

"Nice, wifely speech, that," observed Ross.

But Arethusa had glimpsed the laughter in his quizzical dark eyes. She realized now he had been teasing, so she turned clear away from him to give all her attention to Elinor, who could be more trusted.

"Do you know how to dance, dear?" asked Elinor.

"Some," replied Arethusa, "Timothy taught me down in the barn. Aunt 'Liza says dancing is very wicked," (Miss Eliza had a truly deep and honest horror of round dances). "But Timothy says it isn't a bit wrong, and I just love it! She doesn't know," added almost confidentially, "that Timothy ever showed me how."

"'Tis just as well, I suppose," murmured Ross.

Arethusa had proved an apt pupil to Timothy's friendly instructions when he had come home from college and passed on his acquirements in the art terpsichorean. The lessons had taken place in the central, biggest space in the barn, as she had said, with Timothy humming an accompaniment until breathless, and then she taking up the tune in her turn. This little taste of the joys of dancing had made her long for more. She failed to see how anything that made for such pure and unadulterated delight could be so wicked as Miss Eliza insisted that it was.

"I'm glad you know something about it," said Elinor, really relieved. "I was afraid perhaps you didn't, and you would hardly have the time to learn. And, Arethusa dearest," tactfully feeling her way, fearing to spoil the girl's innocent happiness in the garment, "was that white dress you wore last night your very best?"

"Yes, ma'am." The eager face lighted still more. "And it's the lowest necked dress I ever did have, and it has the shortest sleeves! They're nearly up to my elbow. Aunt 'Liza didn't want it made that way, so low, nor so thin, either; because she said I wouldn't be able to wear my underwear with it, and she's afraid it's dangerous for me to take it off. But I rolled it up last night and in at the neck, and it didn't show very much. Did it?"

Elinor and Ross were almost equally affected by this speech.

"Shades of the summer of seventy-six!" was his rather inappropriate exclamation.

And Elinor's expression seemed to Arethusa to be one of incredulity, so she turned back her shirtwaist cuff to prove her statement, and showed the end of a long, knit sleeve.

"I don't like to wear it a single bit," she said, "but Aunt 'Liza makes me. I have to put it on when we have the first heavy frost and I can't take it off until the tenth of May."

"I am becoming more and more convinced that Miss Eliza's peculiar talents are entirely lost in the place she occupies," replied Ross, with sincerity.

But the white dress, low as its proud owner seemed to consider it, and as thin, and in spite of Miss Letitia's loving effort expended on it for just such occasions as parties, would hardly serve for the Chestnuts' dinner-dance, thought Elinor.

And so, ere very much time were sped, Arethusa discovered Miss Asenath to have been a true prophet. She was to have another Party Frock. She and Elinor started off immediately to get It; but they had to get It ready-made, for there was not near enough time before the Party for a dressmaker's services to have accomplished the sort of Frock that Elinor wanted Arethusa to have.

They went in the automobile, to Arethusa's great delight, and the palatial establishment where it stopped, and which Elinor told her had the prettiest dresses in town to offer in just such emergencies as this, was so enormous a place and so filled to overflowing with scurrying people, that Arethusa wondered if every human being in Lewisburg had not come a-buying this morning, and right in this particular shop. She was not used to stores where she bumped into somebody at every other step. She apologized several times from the front door to the elevator, for such collisions; because her delighted eyes would insist in wandering to the bewilderment of riches displayed on every side, instead of finding her a passage through the crowd. She could not understand how Elinor could pass them all so calmly by, looking so straight ahead. Had she not been afraid of losing her, Arethusa would have stopped, more than once, for a little closer view.

They went up in the elevator to the third floor, and the elevator was another new sensation for Arethusa. There were no elevators within miles of the Farm.

The whole third floor was entirely given over to ready-made garments of every description; cloaks and suits and dresses of every conceivable variety of cloth and color, hanging carelessly over tables and chairs, and neatly displayed inside lighted glass cases, and girls were rushing about carrying still more piled in their arms. There were more clothes then Arethusa had imagined could ever have been made, right here on the one floor of this huge shop.

To the floor-walker who stepped up to greet them, Elinor conveyed her desire to buy a dress for Arethusa; "And I should like Miss Rosa, Mr. Wells, if she's not too busy."

Mr. Wells, bowing grandly from the waist, ushered them into a small room hung all around with mirrors, and disappeared. Then he reappeared in a few moments to announce that Miss Rosa would be with them very shortly, if Mrs. Worthington would be so kind as to wait.

Arethusa was simply overcome by the rapidity with which events moved forward, to carry her with them. Speech was an impossibility. She could only follow Elinor silently.

She sat and gazed about her in the little mirrored room. Her quaint figure was repeated again and again on all sides in a very bewildering way; and she noted that the hat of each Arethusa had somehow got crooked far down over one ear. She straightened it immediately. There were many Elinors in the mirrors also, and Arethusa admired the grace of those reflections with unaffected showing of her admiration. She especially admired the soft sweep of Elinor's long stole of moleskin. There was no more envy in her regard of the difference of their appearance in these many unmistakable evidences of it than there had been when they had both been dressed for the Anniversary the night before. Arethusa rejoiced that Elinor was such a Beautiful Creature; and it was Perfect Bliss to be with her and watch her lovely clothes, without worrying about herself in any way.

Miss Rosa did not keep them waiting long, and at Elinor's request when she did come, she flitted away in a business-like manner that spelled a knowledge of what was wanted, to return bearing an armful of color; pale blues and pinks and lavenders and whites and deeper creams, in the softest of satins and silks and chiffons and lace. Among all this loveliness was glimpsed by Arethusa a fleck of green.

"Mother," this whispered to Elinor, as Miss Rosa in her modish and well-fitting black crepe de chine and her air of knowing what she was about, was just a trifle awe-inspiring, "do you suppose that would be a Green Dress?"

But Miss Rosa heard the whisper. She smiled in a friendly way at Arethusa, for Miss Rosa was a kindly soul, and produced from the very bottom of her pile of beautiful things a Green Frock of the identical shade so beloved by Arethusa.

Arethusa drew in her breath with a sharp, little sound. "Oh, that is the One I want! Oh, Mother, may I have...."

But she had had too long a training by Miss Eliza for it to desert her with too great a suddenness. The dress looked neither sensible nor durable when Miss Rosa held it spread out to plainer view; in fact, it had every possible appearance of being neither. And it was so wonderful a mass of chiffon and silk and lace that Arethusa began to remember sundry lessons in economy also; she feared its cost would prove terrific. She had never seen anything nearly so Wonderful in the shape of a Gown before. Then too, those caustic remarks of so positive a nature concerning green with her red hair, which Miss Eliza had spoken so often in her hearing, began to worm themselves into her consciousness.

The happy expression, roused by the first sight of this creation, faded quite noticeably.

"What's the matter?" inquired Elinor. "I think that's the dress of all dresses for you, dear. If you like it. Don't you, Miss Rosa?"

Miss Rosa nodded. "Yes, indeed, Miss Worthington has the very hair and eyes for this, and the skin as well."

Then did Arethusa's spirits soar to touch heaven once more. She turned such an illumined face to Elinor as Elinor had never seen; she was all aquiver in her sudden joy.

"Aunt 'Senath was right! Darling Aunt 'Senath was right! She said not everybody would be like Aunt 'Liza; that some people would be sure to think green was all right with my hair! Aunt 'Liza never has let me have anything but blue, and I've wanted a green dress for a thousand years. But this one looks so...." she paused uncertainly, and reddened. She did not like to mention its cost, since Elinor was making her a gift, but Miss Eliza was a good teacher.

"Expensive?" finished Elinor, laughing. "I don't imagine it is. But I'll do the worrying about that. If you want it, you may have it. It rests with you to say."

Arethusa blushed more deeply, but it was a radiant blush, even if embarrassed, for Elinor's words, if intended as words of correction, were not spoken in the tone Arethusa associated with corrections. She fingered at the Green Dress, almost caressingly. To own this Gorgeous Thing for her very own!

"Suppose we try it on," suggested Miss Rosa, amused at Arethusa's naive joy.

Arethusa's coat was off before the kindly suggestion was quite finished, then she looked at Miss Rosa.

Elinor read the hesitating thought. "It's all right," she said. "Miss Rosa must fit it for you, you know."

So Miss Rosa whisked off Arethusa's shirtwaist for her, and her skirt, and even manipulated that uncompromisingly unbeautiful protection which Miss Eliza insisted was all that kept the healthy Arethusa from dying of pneumonia in the winter season, in such a very capable way that it could not possibly show; and slipped the dainty gown over the girl's ruddy head. And it fitted her as if it had been made especially to her measurement.

Arethusa stared into the mirror directly before her, and into the ones all around her, twisting and turning to see every inch of her back, lost in ecstasy at the contemplation of her glorified self in these Wonderful Reflections. Even the heavy black lace shoes, ugly shoes from a country store, which showed so plainly below her green skirt, had no sort of power to spoil for Arethusa the general effect of loveliness.

It was the most Beautiful Dress in the world, she was sure.

The skirt billowed and flowed around her in soft generous folds of pale green chiffon and lace draped over an underskirt of green silk, and caught to it here and there with bunches of tiny flowers in odd, bright colors. The waist had a high, soft girdle of the green silk, and some of the little flowers were sewed around one side of it against the gathers of the skirt; and a tight little bunch of them was right in the middle of her back at the very top of the girdle, from which hung narrow, flowing sash-ends that were tied into the fulness of the skirt with other wee bunches of the flowers. Some of these flowers were nestled about in the lace on the upper part of the waist as if they had grown there, and some caught up the short lace sleeves.

"How do you like it?" asked Elinor. It was really rather a superfluous question.

"I love it!" burst from Arethusa. "I think it is Perfectly Beautiful!" Then she turned around. "But I just know, Mother, that Aunt 'Liza won't like it at all."

"Why, what on earth has Miss Eliza to do with it?"

"You see," seriously, "she has always said just what I should wear, and she tells Aunt 'Titia just how to make them."

"I understand, dear, but you're in Lewisburg now; and ... I can't see possibly how Miss Eliza could have a single objection to make."

But Arethusa knew only too well.

"Couldn't I have a guimpe with it?" she suggested hopefully; "if I had a guimpe, it would look different."

It would indeed!

"A guimpe!" echoed both Elinor and Miss Rosa.

Arethusa nodded, and turned once more to the mirror, "It's the sleeves she wouldn't like," she lifted one to show its lack as a sleeve from Miss Eliza's point of view, "and the neck, besides. It's ever so much lower than my white dress, I always used to wear guimpes with dresses like this. I don't mean just like this," added hastily, for a blunder had been committed, "but when it had sleeves as short, and didn't come up any higher."

"I never heard of such a thing," declared Elinor. "And, Arethusa, I can't believe that even Miss Eliza would make you wear a guimpe with an evening dress!"

But then Elinor did not know Miss Eliza.

And, "Anything on earth that you would do to that dress, Mrs. Worthington, would spoil it," said Miss Rosa, warmly. "It's absolutely perfect just as it is. And I'm almost sure, Miss Arethusa, that your aunt would say so herself if she could see it."

But neither did Miss Rosa know Miss Eliza.

And Arethusa did.

She stepped slowly down from the little platform where she had been standing for the better view all around, and her grey eyes filled rapidly with the bitter tears of disappointment. It was Tragedy to give it up! But if there was to be no guimpe....

Her fumbling fingers were reaching under the flowers at the girdle for the hooks which had fastened her into it, when Elinor stopped her.

Elinor had set her heart on Arethusa having that Green Dress from the first moment of seeing her in it. It seemed to Elinor to suit the girl as if, as Miss Rosa had enthusiastically declared, somebody had sat down before her and studied her "style". Her namesake nymph might have worn the gown just as it was without a single change to make it more airy or more like captured sea-foam in its fluttering draperies. It belonged with Arethusa's hair and her greenish eyes. She would never find another frock, if they looked all day, which would be half so becoming. But there was no slightest use in buying it if this bugbear of Miss Eliza's disapproval would continue to rear its serpent head to Arethusa's further unhappiness.

"Arethusa," she demanded, "don't you think I know every bit as much about clothes as Miss Eliza?"

Arethusa could but smile through the tears she was winking back at the utter ridiculousness of this question. She looked at Elinor's wonderfully made suit and her furs and the dark purple velvet hat she wore that was so attractive against her white hair, and then memory showed her Miss Eliza, trotting about in the sensible and comfortably cut garments she affected the year round.

"More," she declared, with honesty and emphasis.

"And do you imagine for a single instant that I would be letting you wear anything that was not at all right for you to wear?"

Arethusa shook her head decidedly. That was not exactly the point. "But if I only had...." she began, uncertainly.

"Miss Rosa," asked Elinor desperately, "have you such a thing as a guimpe?"

Miss Rosa had, she was sure, somewhere about.

"Would you mind bringing it?"

So the guimpe was brought, a lace guimpe with long, lace sleeves, and a high collared neck of lace.

Arethusa could have cried at the way it made her look. It ruined her Wonderful Frock; even she, inexperienced in such frocks, could tell that with ease. It was a real relief to get it off, and view herself once more as she had been at first arrayed, without it.

"Now don't you see?"

Yes, Arethusa saw.

"And do you suppose," pursued Elinor, "that Miss Eliza, as sensible as you say she is, would want to spoil an already beautiful dress that way?"

No, Arethusa could not believe that even Miss Eliza would want to be so unfeeling to beautiful dresses such as this. She could not help but think, she who had seen it and worn it, both ways, that Miss Eliza would be forced to select, as the prettier, the dress without the guimpe. There was really no choice, thought Arethusa, between them.

She smiled at her many reflections once more, and strutted a bit, back and forth, to watch her draperies float about her.

"I'm rather sorry," remarked Elinor, "that you needed so much convincing that I had any idea what was best."

Arethusa stopped short, and turned in alarm. "Why, Mother...."

But Elinor's merry brown eyes were smiling at her, and Arethusa understood. She swooped upon her joyously, with the danger of damage to the Green Gown in her sudden movement, and hugged her mother swiftly.

"It's just," she exclaimed, "it's just that if you knew Aunt 'Liza you would understand!"

Ross had also said something of the kind, only the day before. So Elinor was beginning to feel a rather respectful interest in Miss Eliza.

Then Arethusa and Elinor, the dress carefully removed and folded into a box that they might take it with them, while Arethusa's jealous eyes watched until the last knot was fast in the string which tied that box, departed happily to a lower floor in search of slippers and stockings to match and complete the costume.

These purchased, and deposited with the dress-box in the automobile, Elinor directed Clay to drive to "Parnell's."

"We'll go get a soda water," she said, "after this trying morning."

"But I don't feel the least bit sick," remonstrated Arethusa, with memories of Miss Letitia's packet of soda tucked into the corner of her satchel.

Elinor explained.

Later, she told Arethusa she was very likely to be needing Miss Letitia's sort, when after her second glass of a beverage of a most seductive taste, she expressed a desire for a third drink of this new and altogether charming "soda water."



CHAPTER XV

Arethusa had not the faintest idea what a "dinner-dance" might be. She knew very well what a dinner was, and she could conceive of the glories of a dance, but as a combination they eluded her. The only picture she could form for herself of such an entertainment was a strange conglomeration of eating and dancing; eating for awhile, and then dancing; and so on, first one and then the other, until time to go home. But whatever the exact nature of it, it would be her Very First Party.

Hitherto, her expeditions into the social world had compassed nothing more shattering to her nervous system than church entertainments and occasional spend-the-days. Miss Eliza was no very great believer in Parties as an influence for good in Arethusa's development.

Arethusa, had she been permitted, would have gone straight to bed and slept soundly and dreamlessly until Friday night, asking only to be waked when it was time that she dress before seeking the scene of festivity. But her preparation for the Event helped to pass the two days that she must wait.