“To-morrow,” she went on hurriedly, “I shall hear; someone will call for me. I am all ready—to go. But I will—try, I will explain——”
She put out her hand to forestall his quick protest.
“No; please. I—cannot promise anything—yield anything, until I have arranged the matter. If I succeed——”
“I must have time to think,” she murmured. “I—am not sure of myself.”
He went away, bidding her a brief good-night, his eyes hurt and angry.
Barbara watched his straight, lithe figure, as he strode away from the little circle of her lamp-light into the dripping gloom of the spring night. So had she sent him away from her long ago into the rain and the darkness. Then, as now, she was in honor bound to a lonely task.
She turned to find her newly engaged housekeeper standing behind her in the semi-obscurity of the passage. Martha Cottle was a tall, angular woman with a pallid, uncertain complexion, a long thin nose, and an air of perpetual inquiry.
“Was that the party you expect to work for?” she demanded. “I thought,” she added, with a slightly offended air, “that you’d call me in and introduce me. I was waiting in the dining-room.”
Barbara wondered if the spinster’s large, flat ears had caught any of the conversation, carried on unguardedly on the other side of the door.
She shook her head. “That wasn’t the person,” she said. “Perhaps to-morrow——” She hesitated. “Of course it will be soon.”
Miss Cottle pushed authoritatively into the room where Barbara had been sitting.
“I haven’t had a real good opportunity to talk things over with you,” she said. “If you’re expecting to be called away sudden, perhaps this will be as good a time as any. I want to tell you what I think about that child.”
“I see you’ve spoiled him pretty completely,” pursued Miss Cottle. “But I’ll soon get him in hand.”
“He got into a regular tantrum to-night because I took a book of his to look at. ‘Vallable Inf’mation,’ he calls it. Nearly every word in it is spelled wrong. I wonder at you for permitting anything of the sort. I took the book away from him. Here it is.”
Barbara looked at the woman in a sudden panic of apprehension.
“Oh!” she protested, “you ought not to have done that. The book was a birthday present. It is one of Jimmy’s dearest treasures.”