A Girl of Virginia. Lucy M. Thruston
her watchfulness, her half-jealous disapproval of Frank Lawson which made things go so badly, or perhaps the jar began before that when Frances in the professor's study announced there would be company and she would bring them in there to spend the evening.
"Why don't you take them in the parlor?" protested the professor.
"It's cold!"
"You can have a fire."
"Yes, but 't would be cold anyhow; the air would feel as if it had been on storage."
"Daughter!"
"And it would look so proper and prim, there would be no papers lying around, and I—I should have to talk so hard," she wound up by tucking her bare arm under the professor's; and he, looking on her winsome face and soft white neck and shoulders, forgot there was a question and only smiled at her.
"You, know, father, you needn't talk; you can read—"
"Read!"
"Well," she confided, cuddling close to him, "they do talk such nonsense, you know, if you've got them off to yourself. I can't stand it—you needn't laugh!" She rubbed her cheek along the worn broadcloth of his coat—the professor gave little heed to his clothes—"You wouldn't like it either."
The professor's laugh rang through the house, but there was a heartache under the laughter; his little comrade daughter was a woman grown, and these questions of womanhood, slight as they were, puzzled him. And so it was the guest was ushered into the room on the left, instead of the one on the right, which was properly given over to the gods of company.
The guest gave a start when he saw the shimmer of Frances' white gown and the gleam of her bare neck and shoulders, and he looked quickly at her father, but the professor was in ordinary attire. The young stranger had to learn later that it was merely a local custom, and to wonder while he learned why the women did not freeze going so clad on a winter's evening in the wide, high ceilinged, and cold brick houses.
He recovered himself quickly and came forward with jaunty assurance, but the professor's careless hospitality and the demeanor of his hostess left little of it when the evening was over. He felt his vaunted ease ebbing from him and he was amazed that he should so feel it. Even at the table he was angrily critical. Had it been his mother's board, the damask and lace had been strewn with flowers, and its tinted shades of candles shone here and there, and soft shod waiters come and gone, were a guest bidden to a meal; here the electric light from the single shaded bulb swinging overhead shone on spotless damask, where it shone at all between the multitudinous dishes—chicken and ham, rolls and biscuit and "batter-bread," pickles and preserves, cake, and, with its tremulous crest of white, floating island shining with a yellow gleam in its glass dish all before him at one serving.
Still, the young man being healthy and blessed with hunger, and seeing that his hosts were hungry folk likewise, forgot all comparisons in the urging of their hospitality, and not only followed their example, but set the pace. Susan was fairly mollified.
"Knows good vittels when he sees 'em," she muttered in the recess of the pantry as she eyed his ruddy cheeks and broad shoulders through the half-opened door.
But, the easy hospitality of the supper over, Lawson's discomfiture began again. In the morning he would have sworn it was happiness to sit before the glowing fire which the chill evenings of the mountains demanded, and to have Frances Holloway so near that one could watch the color flicker in her clear cheek and catch each tone of her round low voice and note the curve of white shoulders and dimpled arm.
Instead he felt himself growing steadily angry. Made conversation and an effort which showed itself at being entertaining and faintly expressed regrets at an early departure, were not in his line. What he opened his room door on, was more so.
"Hello, Lawson, waiting for you!"
Three young men had the light oak table drawn up before them. The books from it were flung on the foot of the narrow white-iron bed: the table-cover hung on the brass foot-rod.
One of the men leaned back in Lawson's Morris chair, another was seated a-straddle the only other chair the room contained, his chin resting on the high back. A third was on the trunk pulled close to the table.
"Room!" he cried, pointing to the vacant half.
"Throw some coal on, Frank, it's chilly. By George, you look cold yourself."
"Cold! I'm frozen!" Lawson's laugh was not the most pleasant thing to hear.
"Where have you been? Land alive, look at him!"
"Shut up!" Lawson flung his Prince Albert over the books, crushing the chrysanthemum he had fastened in his button-hole so carefully earlier in the evening.
"Game?" he queried.
"I should say so, trot 'em out!" There was a box of cigars on the mantel. He lit one, the rest were already smoking.
"Helped ourselves, you see!"
"Anything else?"
"Listen to him!"
"That's the stuff, set it here!" The cards were shuffled away for the bottle and glasses. The window curtains were drawn tightly, the door was closed and the portière hung in stiff folds across it; the coal snapped in the grate and the young men settled down for the evening.
But Frances was not winding up her own affairs so nearly to her mind. The professor had lain down his book as soon as the guest departed. "Daughter," he began uneasily, "I didn't know you knew Mr. Lawson."
Frances looked at him in astonishment. "Why—how—" she stammered.
"Somehow, he's different from most of the students here," her father went on, putting his half-framed opinion into words; "he's older and he looks a man of the world, and he's not over studious," he added a little sarcastically.
Frances after her first start was listening quietly to his broken speech.
"These older men," the professor went on, "if they don't come for good hard work, they—they are the most troublesome kind we have to deal with. The young fellows, now, they have their faults, but they are the faults of youth. When these older men graft their knowledge of the world to their students' folly—well—well—" he was silent for a moment.
Frances, without the slightest wish to defend the absent, sat silent likewise.
"He's rich too; his father owns immense lumber tracts in Oregon, and his people live in great style, and—I scarcely know—He's in none of my classes. But, somehow, he doesn't seem—I wonder you invited him."
"I didn't."
"Didn't! Why—"
"Oh, daddy, it sort of happened. I'm not anxious to have it happen any more."
"Well, neither am I, now that I think of it. Going to bed?"
"I'm sleepy as a cat—no! as the Sleeping Beauty!" saucily.
"I believe you always are!" The professor never knew at what hour he crept to bed, but his daughter's sleepy-headedness was a constant jest. He never failed to pause at the threshold of her door and listen to the deep, long breaths of her slumber and to feel warmed to his heart's core to know she was there, his own daughter, the joy of his life.
"Good night!" She leaned over him, rumpling his dark hair. "Why, there's the telephone! What can it be so late?" She was hurrying along the hall.
"Hello!"
The father turned to watch with lazy interest the lithe figure and bright face and bent head, as she stood, red lips pressed together, the receiver at her ear.
"Ah!" she breathed ecstatically into the 'phone.
"Where did you catch him?"
"To-day!"
"To-morrow!"
"Eight o'clock?"
"Yes,