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He took the back stairs, and descending at a pace quite extraordinary for a sick man, he was inside the library in less than a minute. It was easy to see that Smedley's alarm had not been altogether ill-founded. A chair was overturned; Virginia was lying face downwards upon the floor in front of the desk. Phineas Duge dropped his cigarette, and fell on his knees by her side.
Smedley paused here a moment, as though she expected an answer, he muttered, "Very praiseworthy, I am sure," in a slightly bored tone. "She has a class in the Sunday-school besides, and now she gives two evenings a week to Mr. Smedley's night school. She is a pattern to all the young ladies of the place, as I do not fail to tell them." Why Mr.
Smedley's room, and she answered, reluctantly, that it was a large, bare-looking apartment, with an ugly paper, and full of medicine chests and work-baskets; nothing very comfortable or tasteful in its arrangements. I knew it; I could have told her so without seeing it. Miss Ruth's was very different; it was perfectly crowded with pretty things, and yet not too many of them.
She could be a little sarcastic sometimes when Mrs. Smedley's name was implied. In her inmost heart she had no more love than I for the bustling lady. "She is going to stay with her niece at Newport, and so her poor little subaltern, Carrie, cannot be absent from her post. One day I mean to give a piece of my mind to that good lady," finished Miss Ruth, with a malicious sparkle in her eyes.
Uncorroborated, any statement of Miss Smedley's usually fell on incredulous ears; but here, with the road itself in evidence, she seemed, once, in a way, to have strayed into truth. Rome! It was fascinating to think that it lay at the other end of this white ribbon that rolled itself off from my feet over the distant downs.
Is it not enough that mother and Miss Lucas have been talking to me, and now you must begin! Do you know how much it costs me to stand firm against you all? You distress me, you wear me out with your talk." "Why cannot we convince you?" I returned, with a sort of despair. "You are mother's daughter, not Mrs. Smedley's: you owe no right of obedience to that woman."
So I nodded at him very gravely, and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of which Leslie Foster talked so much, and said was to be like the Parthenon. Shockingly windy walk: thought my brains would have been blown out.
I mean I say, Marky, do you think I've a chance? I know Smedley's " Railsford's experience in cases of this sort was limited, but he was philosopher enough to know that some distempers need to be taken seriously. "Look here, Arthur," said he gravely, "the best thing you can do is to go straight over to Dr Ponsford's and ask to see him, and tell him exactly how matters stand.
And I declare if some of the queerest lookin' creeters didn't come up to the table and talk to me. There wuz lots of 'em there that I didn't know, folks that come from Zoar, Jim Smedley's old neighborhood. There wuz a long table stretched acrost one end of the settin' room, and I stood behind it some as if I wuz a dry goods merchant or grocery, and some like a preacher.
I confess I love her as though she were a daughter of my own." Fancy being Mrs. Smedley's daughter! Happily, for their own sakes, she had no children. "Augustus feels just the same; he thinks so highly of her. Would you believe it, Mr.
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