Before Margaret and Tory reached them, he had placed Kara in his motor car and they were driving away.
Tory toiled up the long, hot street, her arms filled with packages, her face flushed.
How different the atmosphere from the cool green shade of Beechwood Forest!
At the end of the street upon a rise of ground stood the Old Gray House. This had been Katherine Moore's name for the house, accepted and used by the town of Westhaven. To-day it appeared what it actually was: the village orphan asylum.
No longer could Kara's optimism conceal reality from Victoria Drew.
The house showed blistered and bare of paint. The open space of yard, green and fresh in the springtime, when she and Kara oftentimes sat outdoors to dream and plan, was now baked brown and sere.
The children playing in the yard behind the tall iron fence looked tired and cross, a little like prisoners to Tory's present state of mind.
She had come in from camp early in the day and had spent several hours at home with her uncle, Mr. Richard Fenton. Their own house was empty save for his presence. Miss Victoria had gone for a month's holiday to the sea.
After a talk with her uncle and an hour's shopping, she was now on her way to call upon Kara.
She saw a mental picture of Kara's small room on the top floor of the Gray House. How proud Kara had been because she need share her room with no one!
And what a place to be shut up in when one was ill!
For Kara's sake Tory had endeavored to view this room with Kara's eyes. Kara loved it and the old Gray House that had sheltered her since babyhood, her refuge when apparently deserted by the parents she had never known.
Victoria Drew was an artist. This did not mean that necessarily she was possessed of an artist's talent, but of the artist's temperament. Besides, had she not lived with her artist father wandering about the most beautiful countries in Europe[A] until her arrival in Westhaven the winter before?
If this temperament oftentimes allowed Tory to color humdrumness with rose, it also gave her a sensitive distaste to what other people might not feel so intensely.
With half a dozen of the children in the yard of the Gray House, Tory now stopped to talk a few moments. Never before could she recall wanting to see Kara so much and so little at the same time.