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Young Evelina, trying to atone for her former indiscretion and establish herself again on her height of maiden reserve in Thomas Merriam's eyes, sat resolutely in the meeting-house of a Sabbath day, with her eyes cast down, and after service she glided swiftly down the aisle and was out of the door before the young minister could much more than descend the pulpit stairs, unless he ran an indecorous race.
She went into the part of the house that she rented from the old Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and walked up and down her room swiftly and feverishly for half an hour. Merriam's photograph stood in a frame on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a smile of exquisite tenderness, and dropped four tears on it. And Merriam only twenty rods away!
He looked after her with a smiling face. She was very pretty. He felt a keen desire to kiss her, and what might transpire at Ruth Merriam's party rose vividly before his eyes. This was just one of the early love affairs, or puppy loves, that held his mind from time to time in the mixture of after events. Patience Barlow was kissed by him in secret ways many times before he found another girl.
Then she clutched at Arthur's arm. "Look at that man back there following us! He looks something like father!" As she spoke she unconsciously quickened her pace; Arthur consciously quickened his. He knew as all of the boys of "the crowd" knew Mr. Merriam's stand on the matter of beaux. "Oh!" cried Missy under her breath. She fancied that the tall figure had now accelerated his gait, also.
When Lila saw her, she was giggling with her head bent down and her napkin over her eyes, while the other girls at that table smiled amused smiles. Lila knew instantly that this poor freshman had done something dreadful, and she was sorry for her. Later that same evening in Miss Merriam's room she told how she had marched in to dinner alone and plumped down at that table among all those seniors.
During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam's conversation, while she took money for checks, would run something like this: "Good morning, Mr.
And young Evelina never at twilight strolled up the road in the direction of Thomas Merriam's home, where she might quite reasonably hope to meet him, since he was wont to go to the store when the evening stage-coach came in with the mail from Boston.
And, after the programme, a reporter from the Cherryvale Beacon came up to father and asked permission to quote certain passages from the Valedictory in his "write-up." That was the proudest moment of Mr. Merriam's entire life. Missy had time for only hurried congratulations from her family. For she must rush off to the annual Alumni banquet.
"I've come back from twenty-three to seventeen," she thought, and pretended that there had never been an Angela di Sereno, that scornful young person who had forbidden the prince to come near her on learning that there was another whom he should have married instead of Millionaire Merriam's daughter.
And as for Evelina, she tended the flowers in the elder Evelina's garden with her poor cousin, whose own love-dreams had been illustrated as it were by the pinks and lilies blooming around them when they had all gone out of her heart, and Thomas Merriam's half-bold, half-imploring eyes looked up at her out of every flower and stung her heart like bees.
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