Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/146

136 had preceded this rainy Sunday morning, Reba had asked herself more than once what could be worse, when she was old and dried, than the haunting thought that she had had a chance to escape bondage but had lacked the courage to grasp it. Oh, she would prove to herself and to Cousin Pattie, and to her grandfather, that she could defy and dare as well as they. She would take the offensive in life, as they had done. She, too, would plan and carry through a campaign against circumstances. She would marry her sailor friend. She would run the great risk. She would marry him before she went home. A man to whom a girl was merely engaged held no prerogative over blood relations in Ridgefield.

As Reba hurried along to meet her lover this rainy Sunday evening she tried to quench with old arguments the doubts and fears that would, in spite of her, spurt out now and then, like little sharp-tongued flames from a fire that isn't yet dead. It wasn't as if she were young, she told herself. She would never meet anybody else, who would care for her. Not in Ridgefield. She never had, and she was growing older every day. Besides it wasn't as if the seafarer's crudities grated on her. They didn't. There was probably a queer, crude, unhewn sort of streak in her. She recalled that the machine-grease that rimmed the fingernails of the freshly-scrubbed hands of the Italian whom she used to watch hadn't spoiled his fascination for her. "Nathaniel Cawthorne!" she whispered to herself once or twice. "Nathaniel Cawthorne! What a queer, unfamiliar name! Nathaniel Cawthorne—Nathaniel Cawthorne!"

He was waiting for her under a huge umbrella,