Page:The Van Roon (IA thevanroon00snaiiala).pdf/110



June spent a worried and disconsolate night. She had very little sleep. Time and again she listened to the melancholy drip-drip of rain on the eaves just over her head. Never in her life had she felt so wretched. She was horribly lonely, without resources or friends. How she was to live through the endless years of servitude and dependence on the will of others that lay ahead she did not know.

To keep on telling oneself to bear up seemed of little use. She had had to do that each hour of each day since her mother's death. The prospect of being cast upon the world was indeed dispiriting, yet in the end it might turn out better than to sacrifice one's youth upon the altar of such a Moloch as Uncle Si.

As people who sleep ill are apt to do, she fell into a comfortable doze just about the time she ought to be getting up. Thus, to her dismay, she entered upon the trying institution known as Monday morning at a quarter past seven instead of half past six.

"Uncle Si will be growling for his breakfast in another quarter of an hour," was the thought that urged her into her clothes with a frantic haste. One twist she gave and no more, without so much as a glance in the glass, at the mane of brown gold hair, and then she flew downstairs, buttoning the front of her dress.

A fire was burning in the kitchen grate, and upon it slices of bacon were sizzling in a frying-pan; the cloth