When he had gone, his handsome, eager face laughing back at them from the rear platform of his train, Robert Black found himself following Cary with an involuntary “God bless and keep you safe, Cary Ray!” the more fervent that it was unuttered. Suddenly his heart was very anxious for this audacious and lovable fellow. How would he come through? Yet it was not of Cary’s life that he was thinking.
Determinedly he took his place beside Jane. The party had dismissed their taxicab, now that the rush for the train was over, and were walking back. It was no time to allow circumstances or other people to come between them.
“Oh, how I wish,” breathed Jane, “that I could go this very night. I want so much to get away before--you do.”
“And I’m wanting to go before you! If you go first I shall see you off. If I go first, will you do the same for me?”
“Not if I can help it. But even if they are, it will make no difference. I shall want to look last at--you.”
“Did you think,” admitted Jane, smiling, “that I could possibly stay away?”
Mrs. Hodder, housekeeper to the manse, stood trembling in the study doorway, a telegram in her hand. Yes, Mrs. Hodder was trembling. Robert Black would never know how like a mother she felt toward him. A lonely, more than middle-aged woman can’t bake and brew and sew on buttons and generally look after a bachelor of any sort without coming to have a strong interest in him--normally a maternal one. And when the bachelor is one who treats her with the consideration and friendliness this man had always shown Henrietta Hodder, small wonder if she comes to have a proprietary interest in him little short of that belonging to actual kinship.
Black jumped up from his desk. It was Saturday night, and his sermon was still in preparation. This was unusual with him, but everything that could happen had happened, this week, to consume his time and delay him. Everybody, it seemed to him, in his parish, had needed his services for some crisis or other. He was tired of body and jaded of spirit, and he was extremely discontent with the outlines for the sermon which he had with difficulty dragged out of his unwilling mind. And now, in the twinkling of an eye, everything was changed.