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Updated: July 4, 2025
"Hello, there," called the voice she loathed, and Carder came striding after her. She stood still and faced him. The long lines and deep, clinging fringe of the creamy white shawl draped her in statuesque folds. Carder gasped in admiration. "You look perfectly beautiful!" he exclaimed. The young girl reminded herself that she was working to become a trusty.
Carder, the little I saw of him that day at the hotel, acted so much as if he owned you, that I thought it would be just as well to hear what a lawyer would say; so I went to see Benjamin Barry. He's studying to be a lawyer and he's the young man who has consented to hunt up the Carder farm and take my letter to you.
You are young and beautiful, and I pray that the rest of your life may have in it more happiness than your childhood has known. I have interceded with Carder for Pete several times, winning the poor fellow's devotion. He can't read writing and will not be tempted to open this. I'm sure he will hide it and manage to give it to you secretly if you come to this dreary place. My poor child!
Geraldine seized a dish-towel, and Mrs. Carder, her hands in the suds, cast a troubled glance around at her. "Rufus won't like it," she declared timorously. "Why should you say anything so foolish? What did I come out here for?" The old woman looked around at her with a brief, strange look. "You couldn't get help," went on Geraldine, "and so as I needed a home I came."
The soft-eyed cows, an occasional bird flying overhead, and the intermittent clicking of Pete's lawn-mower as he kept his respectful distance were all peaceful. There was not a tree for a bird to light upon. Even birds fled from the Carder farm. The great elm could have sheltered many, but the feathered creatures seemed not to trust it.
You do give me a turn, Geraldine, talkin' about madmen and guns." The girl sighed. "I haven't had anything but 'turns' ever since I first saw the Carder farm; but it is unkind to draw you into it. Sometimes I wish I had never mentioned Pete to Mr. Barry, yet it seems disloyal to leave the boy there when I owe him so much."
The flat landscape, the broad sky, everything was laid bare to the windows of the yellow office. She felt certain that should the dusty knight reappear, he would be recognized from afar, and that Rufus Carder would circumvent any plan he might have. He would stop at nothing, that she knew.
She met his look with a smile that, directed toward his master, would have sent Rufus into the seventh heaven of complacence. "I have met Pete already," she said, kindly. "He drove us up from the station. I'm glad you are helping Mrs. Carder, Pete. She seems to have too much to do."
Ben Barry leaned forward in his chair and his eyes ceased to twinkle. "Rufus Carder? If it is the one I'm thinking of, he's one of the biggest reprobates in the country." "That's him," returned Miss Upton with conviction. "At first I sized him up as just awkward and countrified; but the way he looked at the child and the way he spoke to her showed he wa'n't any weaklin'." "I should say not.
At last he wore out my patience and the Carder spring ran dry, so far as he was concerned; then, Geraldine" the narrator paused, the girl's dilated eyes were fixed upon him "then, my proud little lady, handsome Dick Melody fell. He began helping himself." "What do you mean helping himself?" The girl leaned forward and her hands tightened until the nails pressed into her flesh.
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