Page:ALifeLineForHarriet.djvu/2

 with a good fresh skin, laughing eyes, and a vibrant voice which was sometimes too loud. She brimmed with vitality, and there was always a crowd around her.

Burton, tall, handsome in a dark, saturnine way, found her so stimulating as a companion that his good resolutions not to engross her vanished into thin air. They went everywhere together. He was a distinguished - looking cavalier, particular about sending the right flowers, and in seeing to it that the girl whom he signaled for his favors should receive all the attention due her.

"Why should I take some girl to a dance who bores me to extinction, merely because she previously bored me by inviting me to dinner? " he would demand petulantly. "Why should you go with Hayes, whose head barely reaches to your chin, when your step and mine suit to perfection, and dancing together is a joy?"

At the end of Burton's second winter in Yarborough, when all the town was tranquilly expecting the announcement of their engagement, he came to Harriet's one evening, stirred out of his usual nonchalance.

"I'm in luck, I suppose," he began sullenly. "I've been offered a better salary in my home town. Leila will like that. You know she graduates in June."

There was no response. With hands which were not quite steady, Harriet was pulling the petals from a rose—Harriet, who liked flowers.

"It will seem strange not to see you. We—we have been together so much. We have been such pals." His voice had a queer note, almost as if he were angry. "I had rather never to have known you than to find it so hard to tell you good-by. It's like a wrench-—like being uprooted." He broke off abruptly. "Good-by. It's the last time. Kiss me once, Hallie, will you?"

She lifted her face to his. On the train he recalled that she had not spoken at all.

When she was alone again, she spoke aloud and saw clearly— and to see clearly was what saved her.

"He was thinking only of himself! He has thought of himself all along! He didn't even realize how lonely I would be without him!"

When Burton married, Yarborough voiced the unanimous opinion that he had "consoled himself pretty soon." Of course, everybody knew that when Harriet had

rejected him, in the spring, he had left town in a huff, without saying good-by to his friends.

Jessie had a cottage on the coast that summer, and Harriet spent three months with her—a lazy summer out of doors, playing with Jessie's bewitching babies. Then home in the autumn—the same home, but amazingly different.

Dotty seemed to have sprung up overnight. She had enjoyed the full run of the house during vacation, and now it was her friends who were everywhere—the Eel's Knees, as they delighted to call themselves. Harriet's set seemed to have dissolved by some mysterious alchemy. The married ones belonged to the younger married set, and those who were left were either engaged or had gone to work.

Harriet was to be a bridesmaid at Susie Neal's wedding, and maid of honor at Meg Dalton's. Dotty was sent off to school—a tearful and protesting Dotty, who begged to stay at home and go as a day scholar to the Gilbert School for Girls, which in her mother's day had been the Young Ladies' Select Seminary.

After her youngest daughter was dispatched, Mrs. Nelson took up the matter with Harriet.

"Dotty will be eighteen next fall, and I don't see how I can insist on her going back to school. Ed Canfield seems very much in earnest. He's eight year'5 older than Dot, and he's begging her to promise to marry him. He was at the station to see her off, and he brought her a huge corsage bouquet of orchids. It was much too old for Dotty — that's why it pleased her so."

"Ed Canfield!" said Harriet slowly. "Dot's so pretty, mother!"

Mrs. Nelson suddenly kissed her, understanding the generosity of Harriet's unspoken thought. She must put no stumbling block in Dot's path. The other two girls had married well, but Ed Canfield was the son of Yarborough's wealthiest citizen, and an attractive fellow as well.

Harriet- could not sit around a home swarming with the Eel's Knees, and with Dotty's probable engagement making her own lack of success the more noticeable, For the first time in her happy, heedless days she faced herself as a social failure.

"Mother!" she cried, bewildered. "Why, I'm going to be an old maid!"