The landlady, shrill-voiced and indignant, was telling the whole story to Myra Kay; and Ivy, with an open letter in her hand, and traces of tears on her little, piquant face stood close by.
She was the first to catch sight of him, and hastened forward to greet him.
“Oh, Ralph, I’m so glad you have come!” she exclaimed, piteously. “What am I to do? What can I do?”
|Have you had bad news from home?” asked Ralph, taking the letter which Ivy held towards him.
“Yes,” she said, in a broken voice. “They have had to move my grandfather to the hospital.”
It was but too clear, as Ralph at once perceived from the letter, that the old Professor was never likely to recover, and that Ivy’s home had ceased to exist. The landlady wrote to demand rent, and since it was impossible to pay this, there would doubtless be a sale of the Professor’s few belongings.
And here was this pretty girl of sixteen, stranded, without a penny in her possession, in a remote Scotch town, where it was impossible to meet with an engagement.
“What am I to do?” she said, lifting her piteous eyes to his with an appeal that moved him more than he quite liked. He wished that he had not guessed her secret on the previous day, and that he could treat her once more in the matter-of-fact-elder-brotherly fashion which he had once adopted. But this was no longer possible; nay, he felt an almost irresistible longing to say to her: “I will take care of you. We will set the world at defiance, and bear our troubles together.”
Fortunately he thought of Evereld, and instantly tried to picture her in the same plight. How would he have felt towards a man who had taken advantage of her poverty and helplessness to place her in a position which must, more or less, have compromised her?
“Don’t worry yourself more than you can help,” he said, kindly. “I will talk things over with the others, and we will manage somehow to get you back to London.”
But discussion threw very little light on the main difficulty of how to raise the necessary money. Every member of the company was desperately poor, and although Myra Kay offered to take charge of Ivy as far as London, she had only just enough money to pay for her own railway ticket. Some intended to go back to Inverness, others were setting out for Edinburgh or Glasgow, and all were grumbling loudly, and anathematising the Skoots who could scarcely have chosen a more inconvenient place than Forres for their flight.