cruel to some one, treacherous to something?

The turmoil made such a din in her soul that she could hardly transact the business at her counter. As she stood one morning asking a startled shopper if a bolt of maroon taffeta matched a clipping of magenta satin, she saw Newton Meldrum enter the store. As he went by to the office he saw her, lifted his hat, held it in air while he gazed, then went on.

It occurred to Deborah that he could help her. She could lay the case before him, and he would give her an impartial decision. She waited for him, and when he left the office she beckoned to him and asked him shyly if he would take supper with her and her mother.

"You bet I will!" he said, and stared at her so curiously that she flashed red.

Through the supper, too, he stared at her so hard that she buttered her thumb instead of her salt-rising biscuit. Afterward she led him to the parlor and closed the door on her mother. This was in itself an epoch-making deed. Then she said to Newt: "Better light the longest cigar you have, for I have a long story to tell you. Got a match?"

He had, but he said he hadn't. She fetched one, and was so confused that she lighted it for him. Her hand trembled till he had to steady it with his own big fingers, and he stared at her instead of at the match, whose flickering rays lighted her face eerily.

When she had him settled in a chair–the best patent rocker it was–she told him her story. There is no surer test of character than the problem a mind extracts from a difficulty. As Meldrum watched this simple, starved soul stating its bewilderment he saw that her one concern was what she should do to be truest to other souls. There was no question of her own advantage.

He studied her earnestly, and his eyes were veiled with a kind of smoke of their own behind the scarf of tobacco-fumes. When she had finished she raised her eyes to his in meek appeal and murmured, "And now what ought I to do?"

He gazed at her a long while before he answered, "Do you want to go to Crawford's?"

"Well, I'd get more money and I'd get to see New York, but I don't like to leave Asaph. He says he needs me."

"Do you–do you want to marry Asaph?"

"Oh no! I–I like him awfully much, but I–I'm kind of afraid of him, too. But 

 Prev. P 27/30 next