Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/206



so began the time of Miss Caroline among us,—one effect the more of Fate's mad trickery. It was my privilege to be more intimately aware of her concerns than was the town at large. And even to me in those days she carried off the difficulties of her lot with a manner so plausible that it clenched my admiration if it did not win my belief. I knew that she daily bore a burden of ruin and faced a future of perilous uncertainty. I knew that she must have journeyed into our strange land with a real terror, nerved to that course only by a resolve to be no longer a burden upon her impoverished kinsman. Surely it had been like dying a death for her to leave the land of her own people, devastated though it was and vacant of those who had made the world easy for her.

And I was not a little puzzled by the tie that bound her to her one remaining stay. Both she and Clem, I saw, considered her coming to him to be a thing so natural that it should excite no wonder, a thing familiar in the thought and as little to be puzzled about as their own breathing. I saw that her perplexities lay not