Ben looked around suddenly at his mother.
"Have you been to Keefeport to see Geraldine?"
She returned his gaze smiling, and feigned to tremble. "I'm so glad I have, Ben. You look so severe."
"And did you take that magnifying glass?"
"Wasn't I right?" asked Ben with some relief.
"You were. I like the girl. I feel we are going to be friends."
"Well, then, how about her being a clerk for Miss Upton?"
Ben asked the question frowning, and flung himself down beside his mother where she had seated herself on a divan. Why couldn't her blood run as fast as his? Why must she be so cold and deliberate at a crucial time? "Going to be friends!" What an utterly inadequate speech!
"I want to talk to you about that," rejoined his mother. "Will you please go into my study and bring me a letter you'll find on the table?"
Without a word, and still with the dissatisfied line in his forehead, the young man rose and moved away toward the closed door of the sanctum.
He opened it and there was a moment of dead silence. Mrs. Barry could visualize Geraldine as she looked standing there, radiantly expectant, mischievously blissful. The door slammed, and all was silence.
The mother laughed softly over the bit of sewing she had picked up. For a minute she could not see very plainly, but she wiped her eyes and it passed.
Of course Ben wanted to be married at once, and whatever he wanted Geraldine wanted, but Mrs. Barry overruled this.
"I hope you will go back to school, Ben, and get your sheepskin," she said. "I want you to live in the city, too, and leave Geraldine with me. I would like to have some happiness with a daughter before she is engrossed in being your wife. Wait for your wedding until the orchard blooms again."
Ecstatic as Ben was, he could see sense in this; but vacation came first and Geraldine was a belle at Keefeport that summer. Her beauty blossomed, and all the repressed vivacity of her nature came to the surface. Her room at Rockcrest commanded the ocean, and every night before she slept she knelt before her window and gave thanks for a happiness which seemed as illimitable as the waters rolling to the horizon. She yachted, and danced, and canoed, and flew, all that summer. She gained the hearts of the women by her unspoiled modesty and consideration, while Ben was the envy of every bachelor at the resort. Nor did Geraldine forget Miss Upton. Every few days she called at the shop, and the two women there were never tired of admiring and exclaiming over the charming costumes in which Mrs. Barry dressed her child, and many a gift the girl brought to them, never forgetting what she owed to her good fairy.