"I should hope so!" grumbled the discontented youth. "And who is there to escort you back? I'll venture they haven't planned for that!" Then suddenly he bent toward the girl, ostensibly for the purpose of returning to her the letter that had dropped to the floor, and spoke for her ear alone.
"I'll tell you how we will manage that, Maybelle. I will come for you myself, if you will let me. Will you let me?"
A vivid crimson mounted to the very forehead of the fair-faced girl, and she seemed at a loss how to reply; but she certainly had not been troubled by his appeal whatever it was, so the indulgent mother slipped away and left the young people to themselves.
"Am I to tell her, Erskine?" Ruth had asked her son, on the day that she was to go to the station to meet Maybelle. He shook his head.
"No, mamma, no, I will not make it harder for you than is necessary. Yes, I know only too well how surely you would do everything for me if you could; but--I have assumed an obligation, and I do not mean to shirk it in the slightest particular. Do not tell her anything save that you wanted her--that is true, is it not?" he broke off to ask anxiously. "Then, in the evening, when she has had time to become somewhat rested from her journey, send her to me in my library and I will manage the rest."
How he managed it, or what took place during that interview which must have been strangely tragic some of the time, Ruth never fully knew. She asked no questions, and what her son and the girl revealed to her in scraps and detached expressions afterward, suggested a confidence so sacred that even she must not invade it.
She had known by the start and the swift look of pain which swept over Erskine's face when he first met Maybelle at the dinner table, that the girl in her radiant beauty suggested his dead wife. To Ruth there was a strange unlikeness to the face that she had not loved; but her heart was able to understand how Irene had been to one whom she had loved, nay worshipped, as she had her husband, a very different being, living a life solely for him, and leaving a memory that the fair girl could awaken.
Maybelle was all but overwhelmed with astonishment and a sweet timidity when Ruth told her that Erskine wanted to see her for a little while in his library.