"Oh, I can't. How can I!" exclaimed Geraldine.
"Certainly, that's all right," said Ben hastily. "Miss Upton is right here. She will take you into the house and make you comfy. Let me put this around you."
He took the crêpe shawl and put it about her shoulders, lifting out the shining gold that fell over the fringes.
"I know it is very old-fashioned and queer," said Geraldine, pulling the wrap over the grass stains and looking up into his eyes with a childlike appeal that made him set his teeth. "It was my mother's and you said 'white.' It was all I had."
Miss Upton had come to Mrs. Barry's to receive her protégée provided Ben could bring her. The two ladies were sitting out under the trees waiting. Miss Mehitable had obeyed Ben, and some days since had given Mrs. Barry the young girl's story, and that lady had received it courteously and with the tempered sympathy which one bestows on the absolutely unknown.
Miss Upton's excitement when she heard the humming of the aeroplane and saw it approaching in the distance baffles description. She had been forcing herself to talk on other subjects, perceiving clearly that her hostess was what our English friends would term fed up on the subject of the girl with the fanciful name; but now she clasped her plump hands and caught her breath.
"Well, she ain't killed, anyway," she said. She longed to rush back to the landing-place, but instinctively felt that such action on the part of a guest would be indecorous. She hoped Mrs. Barry would suggest it, but such a move was evidently far from that lady's thought. She sat in her white silken gown, with sewing in her lap, the picture of unruffled calm.
Miss Upton swallowed and kept her eyes on the approaching plane. "She ain't killed, anyway," she repeated.
"Nor Ben either," remarked Mrs. Barry, drawing the fine needle in and out of her work. "He is of some importance, isn't he?"
"Oh, do you suppose he got her, Mrs. Barry?" gasped Miss Mehitable.
"Ben would be likely to," returned that lady, who had been somewhat tried by her son's preoccupation in the last few days and considered the adventure a rather annoying interlude in their ordered life.
"Why don't she say let's go and see! How can she just set there as cool as a cucumber!" thought Miss Mehitable, squeezing the blood out of her hands.