“What do you mean? Do you want to kill some one?”
“You lemme me be! I wasn’t doin’ nawthin’ to you,” returned the boy, who was cruelly deserted by his companions in crime.
But Trixy gave him a good shake while she had the chance. Gloria was becoming alarmed lest they be late for school, but it seemed that Trixy was only living in the present moment and that meant punishment for the boy who threw stones.
“Why did you do it?” she demanded, looking at the boy with a glare calculated to inspire terror.
“Well, her old folks is robbers,” he insisted doggedly. “My dad says so.”
“Who is your dad? What does he know about the Towers?”
“Don’t you know?” queried the youngster. “Thought everybody knowed about that.”
“About what?”
“Trixy, we have got to get this car,” yelled Gloria, who was too far away to hear what Trixy was saying to her victim.
The scuffle ceased. Trixy took her hand from the boy’s shoulder and he instantly sprang away like some animal released from a cage. She looked after him for a single moment, then turned back to Gloria.
“If we run we can make it,” said Gloria, and run they did, never stopping until they were safely upon the road, with only a few steps between them and the car preparing to move off.
“I gave it to him,” panted Trixy. “Those youngsters need corporal punishment personally administered.”
“Who are they?” Gloria asked, cautiously. “Their father is a mason. He did a lot of work around here on speculation, I heard dad say. I just remembered the name and I know it belongs to those hoodlums,” replied Trixy. She was still rather breathless.
The thought that this mason might have done work on the Towers’ new home flashed across Gloria’s mind, but she did not give utterance to it. Of course, the mechanics might not have been all paid up, but that wouid surely not have provoked such bitterness.
This was the moment for Gloria to enlist the confidence of her companion. But the cars were so rackety, the people getting on and off so disturbing, and altogether it seemed quite impossible to go into the difficulties under these annoying conditions.
“Trixy,” she said rather seriously, “since I have been out here I have felt sort of dazed. You see, I intended to go to boarding school—”
“Oh, yes, I know,” interrupted Trixy with the kindliest smile.
Gloria was astounded. She had not supposed any of the girls knew.
“And,” she continued, “not going, I hate to—well, I sort of hated to make all the long explanations to my girl friends at home.”
“I don’t blame you one bit,” again assisted Trixy. “Girls are loves, but the best of us just eat up sensation. Even the girls around here gobble up their share of it,” she added mysteriously.
“You mean about me?”
“About any one, you, me, or any one else,” replied Trixy. “But I’ll tell you, Glo,” she continued, “just don’t give them any satisfaction. Keep them guessing. That’s the way to make them feel your importance.”
This was welcome advice to Gloria. She really saw nothing to do but to keep the curious ones “guessing,” for, as a matter of fact, she was still guessing herself.
There was little time for further confidence, but the wedge had been driven in and the subject was bound to be renewed at the first opportunity.
Gloria felt more and more keenly now that she would positively have to fight this irritating suspicion.
“Anything but disgrace,” she found herself reflecting over and over again. She recalled how she had pitied folks who could not pay their bills, and how she had at one time coaxed Jane to lend the Stanleys ten dollars to satisfy a very urgent claim being pressed by Tommy’s store.
She felt like a culprit all the afternoon, and decided she would in some way have to put a carefully framed question to her Aunt Hattie that very evening.
But Mrs. Towers was in such splendid spirits when Gloria sought her opportunity!
“A letter from your father, Glory,” she announced beaming with pleasure. “And the postmark’s Honolulu. So he must have landed there.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to get a letter,” Gloria could not help admitting. “You don’t mind, auntie, if I read it all alone first?”
“Certainly not, my dear. It’s a lot better that way. You just run up to your room. I’ve made it up—”
“Oh, thanks. But why did you bother?”
“I was fixing Hazel’s things back and it didn’t take a minute,” declared the aunt, affably.
At the door of her room Gloria exclaimed: “Oh, how lovely!” The cause of her delight was a bouquet of cosmos and she saw a little card stuck where she could not have avoided seeing it.
“Oh,” she actually squealed. “From my own home, from Barbend, and from Tommy! Now wasn’t that perfectly lovely of him?”
She pressed her face into the bed of blooms and breathed the air they brought with them. Tommy had not known she was really staying at Sandford unless, indeed, the news had somehow spread.
She kissed a big red cosmos and then turned to her father’s letter. It seemed almost too precious to read. She held it close to her heart, breathed deeply, and if one had not known how totally unaffected Gloria Doane actually was, she might have been suspected of acting. After almost reverent deliberation she read the foreign marked missive. The first concern was naturally for herself. How she was enjoying school? She gasped a little and passed that question. Then her dad wanted to know if she was really very well and gaining in weight and not getting any taller?
“Don’t you dare grow any bigger,” he cautioned. “I can’t have my girl growing up to be too big for me to handle.”
Instinctively she pressed the page to her lips, “Darling Dad!” she breathed. “I don’t care if I was disappointed and if things aren’t just—” she paused. The call of those urchins came back like a black shadow. “But don’t you dream bad dreams, dad,” she meditated. “For your little tom-boy is going to fight the big game right to the end.”
The promise of a pretty silk dress from the Philippines, contained in the letter, brought a thrill to Gloria, “for then I can prove to every one just where my dad is travelling,” she reflected.
The letter finished for the third time, and read in full to her aunt for the final consideration, Gloria again determined to summon courage and ask about those children.
“Is this house all plaster?” she began, adroitly.
“Oh no. It’s concrete,” replied the aunt rather proudly.
“Who builds that sort of house, a mason?”
“Yes. We had quite a raft of them—”
“That Gorman out Crystal Spring way is one of the big masons, isn’t he? Did he do this work?” Gloria almost choked trying to say all that without showing suspicion.
“Gorman?” repeated her aunt incredulously. “Well, I should think not.” (Gloria sighed with relief) “Why do you ask about him?” queried the aunt, sharply.
“Oh, his children go to Sandford School in the lower grade, of course, and I heard some one say the father was a mason. The children look quite forlorn,” she ended, as if her interest were purely sympathetic.
“Well, he didn’t do any work on this house,” said her aunt decisively.
Back in her room a little later she was still uttering sighs of relief.
“Oh, I am so glad,” she pondered. “It isn’t this house after all. I suppose the children are just of that little rebellious mob who always hate dressed up folks.”
But somehow this did not seem a reasonable line of argument. First, they had called after her in the morning, then out at the Spring they had attempted to hit her with stones! Even little rebels would hardly do all that without some real or fancied reasons.
Tommy’s flowers were like a lovely party. Every bloom represented the whole life of the fair flower. How it had budded, how the rain had helped it, how the frost had threatened it— Gloria could see every bush of the tall graceful cosmos, as she sat there thinking. She must write to Tommy. And to Millie. It had been cowardly of her not to have done so before.
Then she remembered Trixy’s remarks about the young man in her house. What a comfort it had been to have such tenants! Weyland Smith, the real estate agent with whom Gloria’s father had placed his business, had written in glowing terms about those Hardys.
Once started on the letter writing the interest in her task carried her completely away. And she was surprised how simple it was when she actually undertook it. She told Millie she was having a good time at Sandford School and had decided not to go to boarding for another term at least.
“I can get a lot of good training here,” she injected, “and when I start at the seminary I won’t feel such a greenie.”
She told Tom he would be glad to hear she had escaped boarding school “for a time at least,” and she was getting along finely in the new work. “It’s lots harder than Barbend, Tom,” she stated, “but when I have learned what they give in this grade, I will feel I can hold my own among the swells.” Her thanks for his flowers were unmistakable in their sincerity.
Now, why had she ever feared to write anything so simple as all that?
It was the milk man who had brought out the bundle of flowers, he who brought the milk from Mrs. Higgins, and now that Gloria recalled it, she did remember his speaking to her the other day when he came late and she was out early.
“That’s how Tom found out,” she exclaimed, putting a little snapshot of herself and Trixy in Tom’s letter, and another in Millie’s. “I might have known he would recognize me.”
Then she planned to send something to Tom or his mother.
“I’ll ask Aunt Hattie for a few of her potted slips,” she decided. “She has such rare plants and I am sure she could spare a few.”
So next morning when Jed Stillwell left the milk bottle he took back a basket of plants, all carefully packed so as not to bend or break a single leaf.
Intercourse with Barbend was again “going on.”