Patricia E-Book

Grace Livingston Hill

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Patricia Prentiss had nowhere to turn. John Worth had always been her friend and protected her from the advances of rich, spoiled Thornton Bellingham. But John has disappeared and she’s being forced into a marriage with a man she can hardly stand. Then Thornton arranges a gala party, setting the stage for forcing Patricia to agree to the wedding and announce their engagement. Will John make it in time to save Patricia from her undesirable fate once more?

Leseprobe

Grace Livingston Hill

PATRICIA

Copyright

First published in 1939

Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris

Chapter 1

There were lilies of the valley, a rich mass of them, growing inside the hedge, lifting their delicate waxen bells among the deep green of their sheath-like leaves. John Worth made sure of this before he lifted the latch of the wrought-iron gate and stepped within.

It was not easy to see the flowers from the street, for the hedge had grown so tall it was far above his head, though he was full six feet. The hedge was thick and firm, an impervious wall of green. One had to stand close to the gate and look carefully to find the fairy bells among the green.

He noticed as he paused to close the gate behind him that the grass had been diligently cut around them. Or was that his imagination? He stopped and picked a single stem, with the perfect exquisite flowers strung like pearls on a thread of jade, and held it shielded in the palm of his hand as he passed on up the path toward the mansion.

It was early for an evening visit, not yet eight o’clock. He realized this with sudden acuteness as he drew near the house, which was as yet hidden by thick foliage. He had had his reasons for not adhering strictly to the social custom of the big town where he had been raised. Mainly, his time was short, and he wanted to make sure of the evening if possible before anyone forestalled him. But now that he was here, he wondered if he had been wise?

A drifting sound of voices from the house, the purr of a costly motor gliding up the driveway beyond the line of hemlocks, a girl’s laughter ringing out harshly from one of the upper balconies struck him like successive blows. He had not thought of possible guests! It would have been better to have waited for the darkness!

Yet he would not turn back now.

The pavement curved around a fountain playing softly in silver spray above a marble-rimmed pool where cool lilies, white and pink, floated exquisitely. Marble benches stood beneath the copper beeches and high pines that sheltered the spot; and beyond, the path curved again to the low rising steps of the terrace.

Suddenly the house looked down upon him as some great personage well established upon his throne might look upon an intruder!

Two girls in diaphanous evening gowns of jade and coral were leaning upon the iron grillwork of a frail balcony just outside the second-story window. They looked like flowers against the rugged gray of the stone masonry.

Another laugh rang out with a more perceptible note of hardness as they turned to go back into the room. They had not noticed his approach.

Something cold and alien seemed to blow across his face. Involuntarily he pressed the little flower he held as if it had been a talisman, but he went steadily on up the steps to the terrace until he stood before the door. His shoulders were erect, his step as firm as if he had been accustomed to tread that way and to stand before such portals daily.

As he waited to be admitted, his lips took on a stern set, and his eyes were as if he were going into battle.

The door swung open silently. He turned to realize that a man in uniform was standing before him questioningly. His lips seemed stiff as he spoke her name.

The servant looked him over appraisingly.

“Miss Patricia is giving a dinner tonight,” he explained with a questioning lift of one eyebrow. “Is—Mr.—?” He consulted the card Worth had laid on the silver tray. “Is Mr. Worth one of the invited guests?”

Something desperate flamed in John Worth’s face.

“No, I’m not, but I must see her!” he said firmly.

“Perhaps, later in the evening,” suggested the servant delicately, “I might inquire if it will be convenient—?”

A sick wave of despair surged over the young man. Later in the evening! Might as well give it up now! “No!” he said determinedly. “Wait!”

He brought out his fountain pen and, reaching for his card, wrote a few infinitesimal words on its back.

“Take that to her!” he said briefly.

He was led to a small reception room. The heavy velvet curtains at the doorway were drawn aside giving a vista of the dim lovely distance; a pillared aisle almost like a cathedral, with rooms opening beyond; a noble staircase dividing halfway up and leading either side to a gallery screened by Moorish lattice; below the gallery a large fireplace in which logs were burning brightly, for the spring evening was cool.

More people were arriving, with a sound of high, strained voices as they greeted those who were just coming down after removing their wraps, and their chatter blended with the soft twang of stringed instruments being put in tune behind a screen of palms.

There was sound and color and an arrogant life there to which he had never belonged.

“There’s Thorny!” he heard a voice exclaim.

A general laugh, hard and knowing, followed, like the laugh that had come from the upper gallery multiplied by many voices.

Thorny appeared, tall, slender, confident, well groomed, his perfect teeth like matched pearls flashing gorgeously as he smiled. There was no denying that Thornton Bellingham made a stunning appearance.

John Worth studied him furtively from the shadow of the curtain. He was not much changed. A shadow under the jaded eyes perhaps—fine, dark, restless eyes with long effective lashes.

There were those girls whispering again outside the curtain.

“Yes, Pat’s mother told Aunt Fran! She said Pat had practically promised to announce her engagement tonight!”

What a fool he had been to come!

“Hot stuff, darling, but there won’t be any great thrill about it, will there? We’ve all known it was coming for the last three years! I can’t see why she let it drag out so. Stage stuff, I call it—”

The voices drifted by and mingled with the general buzz and laughter.

John Worth sat still and waited, turning cold to his fingertips with the futility of his errand.

Patricia had been called to the telephone. She had been awaiting the arrival of the last guest, a man whom she had met at the country club that week and who had done some notable flying and got himself into the newspapers. She had arranged to place him by her side at the dinner. Thorny would not like it, of course, but under the circumstances he would make the best of it. She had seated Thorny far down the table at her mother’s side. It was her own dinner and she had arranged all the details.

The traitorous guest was on the telephone. He had been in an accident and his car was wrecked. It happened too far from a telephone to let her know sooner. It was impossible for him now to get there in time for dinner. Might he drop in later in the evening and make his apologies?

She turned from the telephone in dismay.

Rapidly she went over the list of her guests with a wild hope of finding another one who could be placed at her side at the table. But no, there was a reason for the placing of each one of them. She could not change it now. It was going to be most awkward. And there wasn’t anyone else whom she could call upon at this last minute. It was too late! She felt as if the walls of a huge stone prison were slowly closing in around her heart to crush her.

It was just then, as she turned desperately away from the telephone, that the butler approached her apologetically with John Worth’s card in his hand.

“Miss Patricia, there’s a gentleman in the small reception room insisting upon seeing you for just a moment.”

“I cannot possibly see anyone now,” said Patricia firmly. “Didn’t you tell him, Barker?”

“Yes, I did, Miss Patricia. I suggested some other evening, or perhaps later in the evening, but he said no and sent you this. I’ll send him away if you say.”

Patricia, frowning, took the card and read:

“I have never before been in a position to come. May I see you for just a moment about something that may be important to us both? I must leave tonight.”

Wondering, she turned the card over and read John Worth’s name.

Startled, she turned the card back, reread the message, and the frown on her brow relaxed. A soft glow came into her eyes. She was suddenly lifted out of her perplexities and put back into her childhood. In a flash she saw a wooded hillside under a stormy sky, with anemones blowing like frightened children in the grass at her feet. And off in the distance across fields and fences, a small shingled house, weather beaten and gray, and a boy with eyes like a young knight standing in the doorway with his mother, while all around the yard valley-lilies clustered closely, their perfume filling the clean, wet air.

John Worth! After all these years!

A servant was approaching, and her perplexities dropped down upon her once more. Dinner was about to be served and she was lacking a guest!

Then a sudden thought struck her. John Worth! Why not ask him? He wouldn’t likely have a dinner coat, of course, and that would make him conspicuous, but what of that? She remembered him at school often wearing coats that showed too much of his wrists. Thorny would be angry, too, but Thorny’s lips were sealed for this evening at least. Her mother wouldn’t like it either, but what else could she do? The other man had failed her. Anyway, her mother wouldn’t remember who John was, that he used to live in a little frame house on the hillside and bring honey and strawberries and wild grapes to the house to sell sometimes when he was a small boy.

She turned to the servant with sudden determination in her face.

“I’ll see him!” she said. “I’ll be back in a moment. I think the last guest has arrived. Dinner can be served almost immediately.”

The servant bowed and left her, and with a heart wildly beating, like a condemned criminal under expected reprieve, she turned and made her way swiftly through a sun porch to a door at the far end opening into the small reception room where John Worth was waiting. As she entered, she caught the faint fragrance of valley-lilies on the air and wondered. Was it her imagination?

Chapter 2

When Patricia Prentiss was a little girl, there had been a battle royal between her father and mother concerning the school she would attend.

George Prentiss was a kindly, grave man with a great ability to make money and a few old-fashioned ideas to which he clung stubbornly. For the rest he let his wife have her way.

Mainly his old-fashioned ideas were three in number. He did not believe in drinking intoxicating liquors. He had always attended church regularly in the same old church where his father and mother, and their fathers and mothers, had attended church, and he always would—even though the denomination and most of the congregation had abandoned the old plain structure and built a fine new edifice, selling the old one to a small nondenominational group, who were utterly beyond the pale socially. George Prentiss had allied himself with the minority and stayed in the old church, with the nondenominational group.

And finally, he believed that the public school was the only proper place in which to secure an education.

In the matter of liquor, his wife had more or less come off victorious. It was the first battle of their married life, and she claimed that life would be a desert drear if she couldn’t have cocktails at her parties, that people all did it nowadays and she would die of shame if she couldn’t do as others did. It had been a long steady conflict, but gradually she had dominated. Little by little liquor was served at the Prentiss table at social occasions. Usually the head of the house absented himself from the town when he knew what was to be, and he never drank himself when he was forced by circumstances to be present.

In the matter of church attendance, Amelia Prentiss made several decisive gestures in the direction of a fashionable and formal place of worship. George went with her once and balked. It was not his idea of a place to worship God, and he would not go there again. She might do as she liked, but he would continue to worship where he always had worshipped. No amount of argument sufficed to move him, and finally, his wife, not keen on going to church herself, settled down to long restful Sabbath mornings in bed, to be ready for lovely, stately social teas in the late afternoon and Sunday evening musicales.

But when it came to the matter of where to send their only child to school, George rose right up and planted his foot down on principle. No, Patricia should not go to Miss Delicia Greystone’s Select School for Girls. There might be girls’ schools that were worth going to, but this one was not. Patricia should not be trained to be a little empty-headed snob. She should go to a good, honest public school the way her father had done, get a little idea of the way the world was made up of all kinds of people, and not think she was “it.”

It lasted a week, that battle, and cost so much in courage and pain and sleeplessness that George Prentiss resolved he would never fight another, no matter what was involved. But he won. Amelia shed plenty of tears, cast reproach upon him, and even said he had deceived her when he married her. That she thought he was a man of refined feelings and high ambitions, and it seemed he was instead wedded to low, uncultured things. That he was even willing to have his charming angel-child herd among the rabble in the public schools, where she would acquire low tastes, worse language, and the manners of common people. She wept so copiously that several times George Prentiss had to leave the house and walk out in the country to the old farm, which he still owned, to get near to sky and trees and realize that he wasn’t after all the low-lived criminal that Amelia had been trying to make him out.

But when he returned—his spirit rested and his vision cleared by a sight of the sky and the green trees and grass, with a touch of the old home fraught with sweet memories—he would come into the house with his jaw set firmly, reminding his wife of the days when she used to contemplate him from afar and wonder if he wasn’t a bit too set in his ways to make pleasant company for her life.

On one such occasion she eyed him through the evening meal between scant conversation and finally remarked with the advent of the dessert she knew he liked:

“Well, I’ve made arrangements for Patricia to enter Miss Greystone’s school Monday morning. She’s not to lose her grade by the transfer. In fact, they’ve agreed to guarantee that she will pass as usual in the spring. She is to have dear little Gwendolyn Champney as a seatmate and be in the same grade with Thornton Bellingham. They are giving our child every advantage possible, and I’m quite delighted!” she finished with complacence. “She’ll be free from that awful public school at last!”

Patricia, sitting in front of her untouched dessert, listened aghast, her eyes fixed on her mother’s exalted countenance. Her mother was eating away at the thick meringue on her fat orange custard pie and omitting to watch the expressions on the faces of her husband and child.

Patricia could usually be counted on to behave quietly like a lady and not intrude into the general conversation unless asked a question, but on this occasion she was too deeply stirred to remember her manners, and suddenly her wide lovely blue eyes brimmed with big tears, a look of desperate panic went over her beautiful little face, and she broke forth in an awful and most unwonted rebellion.

“Oh! I don’t want to leave my lovely public school!” she burst out in a scream of fear. “And I won’t go to that silly old Greystone School. I won’t! I won’t! I won’t! I never won’t! They’re all sissies and dummies that go to that school! Oh, Daddy, I can’t go to an old stuck-up school like that and have all my own school laughing at me and saying I couldn’t keep up with my class!”

She finished the end of her sentence by jumping down from her seat and hiding her face in her father’s neck, where she stood and wailed her heart out.

Her father’s arm went comfortingly, firmly around her, and his voice came soothingly into her ear.

“There, there, there! Daddy’s little girl! Of course you shan’t go to that silly old stuck-up school. Of course you’re going to stay in your nice fine healthy public school. Don’t you worry. That’s one thing your daddy will see to, that you stay in the public school where he got his education. Nobody is going to cheat you out of that!”

“And I don’t wanna sit with that old Gwendolyn, ever!” she went on. “She makes faces at me and calls me ‘old publicher.’ I hate her! She copies her zaminations off other girls’ papers, too. Betty Brower told me.”

“Of course you don’t want to sit with her,” thundered her thoroughly provoked father. “Her father’s a crook, and her mother’s a fool—!”

“George!” said his wife angrily. “Just please to remember that you are talking about one of my very closest friends!”

“Well, I’m sorry for you if you can call that painted piece of emptiness a friend!” sneered George Prentiss. “But I’m hoping my daughter will come up in the public school with a little more discernment than you got in that precious private institution where I understood you couldn’t even graduate, my dear! I certainly don’t intend to run any risks with Pat.”

“I certainly wish you would call Patricia by her name! Not by that dreadful boyish nickname, Pat! I despise it!” said Patricia’s mother furiously. “You just encourage uncouthness by calling her that. And she’s coming up with no manners at all in that awful school you insist she shall attend. Her language is simply impossible, calling respectable children dummies and sissies! It is unspeakable! I’m afraid to have her speak in front of my friends lest she’ll say something utterly common.”

“If the friends you’ve been speaking of tonight are the ones you mean, I don’t think they’d know the difference!” said her husband. “That Champney woman grew up in the back country and, to my special knowledge, went to a little red schoolhouse three miles away from her ramshackle home. I know that for a fact, for one of the men in our office went to the same school. And as for the Bellingham dame, I doubt if she ever had very many intellectual advantages, if one can judge by the expressions she uses.”

“George! You are unspeakable! Can’t you realize that a young child ought not to hear her father talk that way?”

“Well, how about her mother? She isn’t a babe in arms, and she’s old enough to realize that the children you are urging upon her as playmates are second rate.”

“Now what do you mean by that, Mr. Prentiss? Who, I ask you, is second rate? Patricia knows better than that. She knows they are superior children. Who, I ask you, are the children who attend Madame’s select dancing class?”

“Dancing class!” snorted the father. “Oh, if you are counting the children whose brains are in their heels and toes, perhaps you might carry your point; but from all I’ve heard Pat say, I don’t think she admires them very much.”

“Now, Mr. Prentiss, you’re utterly mistaken,” said his wife severely. “Patricia, why don’t you speak up and tell the truth! You do love the dear little girls and boys who go to dancing class with you, don’t you, darling?”

“No!” sobbed the child. “Only Betty Brower, and she’s moving away!”

“Well, I certainly am thankful for that! Little low-lived thing! George, you don’t in the least realize what low-lived plebeian tastes Patricia is acquiring. But, darling—” addressing the weeping Patricia again, “you do like that dear little Thornton Bellingham, you know you do, don’t you, darling?”

“No!” said Patricia. “He’s a sissy and a bully!”

“Oh, my dear! You mustn’t talk like that. Remember the pretty box of candy he brought you the other day! And his mamma says it was entirely his own little idea. He asked if he might buy it for you!”

“He ate every piece of peppermint out of it, and all the candied cherries!” sobbed Patricia, remembering a new grievance. “He’s nothing but a little pig!”

The mother turned a cold, disapproving expression toward her husband.

“George, I hope you perceive what an unprofitable conversation you have started!” she said in a haughty tone that promised a fuller explanation later in the evening.

“Unprofitable?” said her husband. “To whom? You? Yes, I can see that. But you’re mistaken about who started it. It was you, I think, that introduced the subject of schools by stating that you had been making arrangements for Pat to go to the Delicious woman’s school, after I told you in very plain language that never should a child of mine darken her doors! I just want to make a single statement and then I’m done with the subject. I still mean what I said about that, and Pat is going to continue to attend the public school! It was good enough for her father, and it is going to stay good enough for his child till she graduates. After that if she wants to take up with some of your tommyrot-highfalutin-schools, she can go her own gait, but she’ll have to earn the money for it herself.”

So Patricia grew up in the public school, much to her mother’s shame, who never ceased to lament and mourn about it and to blame her child loudly for every fault she could find, laying them all to her training among common people.

Patricia herself adored her school, secretly feeling elated that her lines had fallen in such pleasant places. She loved the big schoolyard where every child was wild and free and the rich and the poor partook alike of the joys of all the games. Her mother would have fainted in horror if she had known that her adored infant went hand in hand with two “mill” children of foreign parentage, through the thrills of “Crack the Whip” and “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”! Though once when Mrs. Prentiss was passing the school precincts at recess hour and caught a glimpse of the rough-and-tumble games, she advised her daughter to remain inside the schoolhouse during recess and wait for her exercise until after school.

But Patricia grew up with most democratic ideas concerning other children and sweetly, humbly made herself of no reputation. When the days of dancing school arrived and Patricia’s mother reveled in the cunning dance dresses she bought her, Patricia discovered to her disappointment that not everybody in her beloved class at school had dance dresses and went to Madame Marchand’s dancing school. She began to plan in her loving heart how she could extend the privileges of refinement to the others not so well favored. Once she was discovered by an eagle-eyed teacher down in the corner of the schoolyard teaching Jennie McGlynn how to lift the tips of her faded calico skirt and touch her toes lightly to make a curtsy, and she certainly would have seen to it that Jennie and her kind were supplied with pretty organdy dresses and bright sashes from her own ample store if she had had her way.

But she early learned that her mother disapproved of these less fortunate children, and she was not to bring them home or encourage any friendships whatever with them, and daily the lines of her social world were more and more definitely defined before her rebellious eyes.

At this juncture, desirables from other private schools were introduced into the scheme of things, at parties and social events connected with the dancing school, until Patricia had a fairly wide circle of acquaintances for one so young.

Sometimes she talked them over with her silent father, days when her mother was off playing bridge and her father got home early to read the evening paper. And now and again he would listen and snort when he heard some name of which he did not approve.

“Gwendolyn Champney?” he exclaimed one day, looking up from his paper. “Wherever did you get to know her? She may be all right herself, though I don’t see what chance she stands, for her father’s a crook and her mother’s a fool! It isn’t her fault, of course, but I’d just as soon my daughter didn’t make a special friend of the daughter of a crook!”

Patricia would listen and study her father thoughtfully and consider her world. She adored her father, and as she grew in wisdom, she began to realize that Daddy’s ways and Mother’s ways were far apart; for the most part she felt that Daddy’s ways were better. But even at that stage of the game she was far too wise to let her mother know how she felt.

Very often on Sunday morning Patricia went with her father to church, to the little old-fashioned plain church where a plain worshipful people gathered. The minister was a young man with a kindly smile and a way of making holy things exceedingly plain and easy to be understood. So Patricia, listening and watching her father from time to time, grew up with a sort of God-consciousness and thought her small thoughts as in the sunlight of His knowledge.

After a time she also became a member of the Sunday school of that same little “behind-the-times” church, and as long as the hour of its meeting remained in the early morning, she enjoyed its privileges, for her mother rose so late that she did not discover how her child was occupying the morning hours. But when some hapless superintendent finally changed the hour to afternoon, the child found it difficult to attend.

Not that she had learned much beyond the emphasis of God-consciousness, for her teachers had not all been either wise or well taught, but it answered very well for a sacred background as she stepped on into her checkered life, with her quiet, reserved father on the one hand and her aggressively worldly mother on the other hand. She often longed for something, but she didn’t quite know what it might be.

For the first few years, boys didn’t enter into the scheme of things at all for the little girl. They were all “children,” but dancing school and her mother’s constant questioning gradually enlightened her.

“And were the boys nice to you, darling?” her mother would question her when she came home from dancing school. “Did the really nicest ones ask you to dance with them?”

“Who are the nicest ones, Mother?” Patricia would ask solemnly.

“Oh, you dear little silly!” her mother would say. “Surely you know who are the nicest ones. Little gentlemen. Like Thorny Bellingham. He is one of the very nicest, you know. His mother is my very best friend, and they live in the nicest house in town.”

“I don’t think he is nice at all!” Patricia remarked thoughtfully. “He pinches the girls when the teacher isn’t looking, and he trips all the girls that dance with him. I’m sure I hope he doesn’t ask me. I don’t like him. He makes ugly faces at Mary Todd, and I saw him bite her finger one day. He just set his teeth down hard on it and made the blood come, and Mary cried!”

“Who is Mary Todd?” said Patricia’s mother. “Isn’t she quite a common child? I think her mother is a professional dancer or something. I don’t see why they allow her in the class at all. I shall have to speak to Madame about it.”

“Well, I don’t like Thorny, anyway!” said Patricia firmly.

“Oh, but my dear, you mustn’t say that. His mother is your mother’s best friend, and he’s only a child, you know.”

“Well, I’m only a child, too, but I don’t go around biting people,” she said. “I don’t think he is nice at all! I won’t dance with him, either.”

“Oh, my dear! That’s what comes of your going to that common public school!” bemoaned the mother. “It’s just what I thought would happen! I really shall have to speak to your father about it. He must be brought to see his duty and send you to a proper school.”

With a gasp of alarm, Patricia shut her lips and resolved in her child-heart never to say anything more against Thorny Bellingham, and the days went on with Patricia still in the public school.

Chapter 3

Patricia had seen John Worth for the first time when she was just a little girl in the third grade at school.

He had been a tall, slim boy, taller than any of the boys in her grade. He came into the schoolroom and was given a temporary seat just across the aisle and one row ahead of her own. There was a window opposite his seat and his clear profile was sharp against the morning light. She could not help but notice his expression. He had a nice dependable face, for just a boy, with well-cut features and strong, firm lips. He seemed different from the other boys in the room, perhaps a year older and somehow very true and straightforward. Perhaps that was what made his eyes seem to have pleasant lights behind them like the glow of lamps. Once he turned his gaze in her direction and she caught a friendly look on his face, and the lamps seemed to blaze out with quick radiance. There was cheerful interest in his glance.

He was only there about two hours, writing, taking an examination. Then the teacher called his name. He was sent for from the principal’s office. Patricia watched him as he walked across the room to the door. He walked with a quick, firm tread. He was wearing brown corduroys and a flannel shirt. He had dark brown hair, well cut and a little curly. Patricia knew as she looked at him that he wasn’t a boy to be afraid of. He wouldn’t play tricks on you, nor try to trip you. Not with those lamps behind his eyes.

He didn’t come back again after he went to the principal’s office. Days afterward she heard someone say he was in the fourth grade, and that was upstairs. She scarcely ever saw him.

But she did not forget his face. The other boys she knew were just boys in her mind, careless, thoughtless, childish boys. But this boy had looked as if he had a spirit behind his face, a spirit that thought and weighed things like a man, only he didn’t seem old, nor what they called sissified. He had a merry twinkle in his eyes, and though there was a gentleness about him, she had once seen him in the schoolyard thrashing a big bully who had been tormenting a smaller, younger boy.

The next year she was upstairs herself. Not in his classes, of course, for he was a year ahead of her. But sometimes during study period they sat in the same room, separated by the length of the room. Whenever she happened to notice him, he was hard at work studying, not just sitting there gazing around him and fooling the way so many of the boys did. It made her want to study harder herself to see how hard he was working.

Sometimes John Worth’s class would recite while Patricia’s class was sitting in the back of the room studying, for the school was crowded that year, waiting for the new building that was being constructed.

Patricia would always raise her eyes from her book whenever he recited. She liked his clear accent, the touch of Scottish on his tongue that always claimed attention at once. He had what the little girl afterward learned to call a “scholarly” tone. And he made what he said interesting no matter what the subject. He defined his words and gave his answers in such simple terms that it was clear to them all, even though the study was one that they had not as yet taken up. So Patricia made a point of listening to every word John Worth said, and once after she had been watching him so, he gave a quick puzzled look toward her as he sat down, as if, like words that had been spoken, he had felt her gaze upon him.

It was only the minutest instant that their eyes met, and no one else noticed. But she suddenly saw those lamps that were behind John Worth’s eyes light up, bringing that illumination to his face. Briefly, his lips trembled into a fleeting smile, and her own lips smiled shyly in acknowledgment. Then the boy bent to pick up a paper that had fallen to the floor, and instantly he was back in regular form, his gaze turned toward the teacher. But somehow Patricia felt that she knew John Worth a little from that time, although he had never spoken to her, nor she to him, and he did not look at her again. They were just children.

One morning in the springtime Patricia came into the kitchen in search of her mother, whose voice she could hear. She wanted to ask something about an errand her mother wanted done. But Mrs. Prentiss was quite occupied talking to a boy with a basket of beautiful wild strawberries on his arm. She was picking over the top berries and inspecting them.

“They’re not very large,” she said in a cold, critical voice. The little girl hated to have her mother talk in that standoffish way to people she considered her inferiors. Patricia gave a quick glance toward the boy just as he lifted his gaze to his customer’s face.

“Wild strawberries are not usually very large,” he said earnestly, “but they make up in flavor what they lack in size.” He said it quietly, quite respectfully. And Patricia recognized him at once. It was John Worth! And with quick sympathy and a desire to cover her mother’s coldness, she hurried forward, looking at the boy with a shy smile.

“Oh, hello!” she said in a friendly tone.

Mrs. Prentiss looked up in astonishment.

“Patricia, what are you doing here?” she said severely. “I thought I sent you on an errand.”

The little girl looked up with quick apprehension, scenting the disapproval in her mother’s voice.

“Yes, but I wanted to ask you about it,” she answered quickly. “Oh, Mother, aren’t those perfectly lovely strawberries!” And her beautiful eyes and smiling face turned toward the boy and his basket again.

“Taste them,” offered John Worth, holding out his basket pleasantly.

Eagerly Patricia reached and took a beautiful berry from the top of the heap.

“No!” screamed her mother. “Don’t taste those berries, Patricia! They haven’t been washed yet!”

But the berry was already inside the little girl’s mouth and her pretty red lips had closed over the sweet morsel.

“Patricia! You are a naughty girl!” stormed her mother angrily. “Didn’t you hear me tell you not to taste them? You can’t tell who picked them, and they say pickers always have horribly dirty hands. Now perhaps you’ve caught some terribly lowdown disease! Go to the door and spit that berry out, quick!”

The little girl, with a grieved look toward her mother, went over toward the door, her heart filled with shame. But the boy spoke quietly, almost as if he were an older person.

“They are quite clean,” he said. “I picked them myself this morning, and I washed my hands very carefully before I went out.” There was a sound of protection for her in the boy’s voice, and Patricia swallowed the berry instead of spitting it out, though her mother was too annoyed to notice that.

“Be still!” she said to the young huckster. “It is not your place to answer back! Patricia, go up to your room and stay there till I come!” And then to the boy again: “I don’t think I care for any berries this morning. I prefer to do my buying from hucksters who are not impertinent.”

The boy’s face flushed, and the lamps in his eyes winked, almost went out, and then blazed up again. The boy straightened up to his full height and lifted his head with dignity, young though he was.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not mean to be impertinent. I wanted you to know that the berries were all right, but I will not trouble you by coming again.”

“Wait!” said Mrs. Prentiss sharply. “I didn’t say you were not to come again. On the contrary, I think I would like some of those berries every day while they last. I remember that they make unusually fine jam, wild strawberries. Perhaps you may leave those today, too. I think I could use them after all. But remember, I won’t stand for any answering back!”

Patricia, going slowly up the stairs with tears running down her cheeks, heard it all, for the kitchen door was not closed tightly. It made her feel ashamed. She wanted to rush back and tell her mother that she was talking to one of the finest boys in the public school, but she knew that would only add fuel to the flame of anger already started, so she went sadly up to her room.

A few minutes later her mother came, having delayed to discuss honey, when he could bring it, and the possibility of getting fresh peas and Seckel pears in their season. Though if she had noticed the set of the boy’s shoulders as he left the kitchen door, she might have had her doubts as to whether he would ever return again.

“Well,” she said as she breezed into her little daughter’s room, “you certainly are doing credit to your public school training! Coming out into the kitchen and addressing a little hoodlum from the back country with that elegant expression ‘Hello!’ I certainly am ashamed of you, and I shall have to speak to your father about this. Haven’t you learned yet that you mustn’t speak to strange boys? Had you ever seen him before that you dared to address him so informally right before your mother? A young scapegrace with bare feet? I ask you, had you ever seen him before?”

“Oh yes,” said Patricia. “I see him in school, though he’s not in my grade. I only see him once in a great while. But he’s not from the back country, Mother; he’s considered one of the best scholars in his grade.”

“Well, I’m sorry for his grade, then. That speaks well for your school that they allow a barefoot boy to come to school!”

“Oh, he is not barefoot when he comes to school,” protested the child. “He wears nice shoes like any of the boys.”

“And so that’s a specimen of the public school children, is it!” went on Mrs. Prentiss, ignoring her daughter’s explanation. “Well, I certainly shall make your father understand how you are mixing with common people and saying ‘Hello’ to them as if you were a child of the street.”

Patricia’s lip trembled.

“But Mother, Gloria says ‘Hello’ all the time. All the girls do. Even the girls in dancing school, I mean. It’s what they say now. It’s considered what they call smart and up-to-date!”

“Be still, Patricia! Don’t you take to answering back. I suppose you learned that in your precious school, too, where your huckster-playmate learned it. Upon my word, we are coming to a pretty pass, hobnobbing with farm children!”

“Well, but I don’t!” said Patricia earnestly. “I never spoke a word to him before. I just see him in study hour, across the room, and of course he’s seen me and heard my name when I was reciting. I thought it wouldn’t be polite not to speak to him in my own house.”