evade the difficulties?

Suppose that Stephen, in a fit of pique, should ask somebody else to share the new cottage?

As this dreadful possibility came into view, Rose’s sobs actually frightened the birds and the squirrels. She paced back and forth under the trees, wondering how[Pg 121] she could have been engaged to a man for eight months and know so little about him as she seemed to know about Stephen Waterman to-day. Who would have believed he could be so autocratic, so severe, so unapproachable! Who could have foreseen that she, Rose Wiley, would ever be given up to another man,—handed over as coolly as if she had been a bale of cotton? She wanted to return Claude Merrill’s love because it was the only way out of the tangle; but at the moment she almost hated him for making so much trouble, for hurting Stephen, for abasing her in her own eyes, and, above all, for giving her rustic lover the chance of impersonating an injured emperor.

[Pg 121]

It did not simplify the situation to have Mite Shapley come in during the evening and run upstairs, uninvited, to sit on the toot of her bed and chatter.

Rose had closed her blinds and lay in the dark, pleading a headache.[Pg 122]

[Pg 122]

Mite was in high feather. She had met Claude Merrill going to the station that afternoon. He was much too early for the train, which the station agent reported to be behind time, so he had asked her to take a drive. She didn’t know how it happened, for he looked at his watch every now and then; but, anyway, they got to laughing and “carrying on,” and when they came back to the station the train had gone. Wasn’t that the greatest joke of the season? What did Rose suppose they did next?

Rose didn’t know and didn’t care; her head ached too badly.

Well, they had driven to Wareham, and Claude had hired a livery team there, and had been taken into Portland with his trunk, and she had brought Mrs. Brooks’s horse back to Edgewood. Wasn’t that ridiculous? And hadn’t she cut out Rose where she least expected?

Rose was distinctly apathetic, and Mite[Pg 123] Shapley departed after a very brief call, leaving behind her an entirely new train of thought.

[Pg 123]

If Claude Merrill were so love-blighted that he could only by 

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