ten days subsequent to this reconciliation Ellen, the parlor maid, brought up a card to Cynthia's room. The card bore the name of Mr. Robert Worthington. Cynthia stared at it, and bent it in her fingers, while Ellen explained how the gentleman had begged that she might see him. To tell the truth, Cynthia had wondered more than once why he had not come before, and smiled when she thought of all the assurances of undying devotion she had heard in Washington. After all, she reflected, why should she not see him--once? He might give her news of Brampton and Coniston. Thus willingly deceiving herself, she told Ellen that she would go down: much to the girl's delight, for Cynthia was a favorite in the house.
As she entered the parlor Mr. Worthington was standing in the window. When he turned and saw her he started to come forward in his old impetuous way, and stopped and looked at her in surprise. She herself did not grasp the reason for this.
"Can it be possible," he said, "can it be possible that this is my friend from the country?" And he took her hand with the greatest formality, pressed it the least little bit, and released it. "How do you do, Miss Wetherell? Do you remember me?"
"How do you do--Bob," she answered, laughing in spite of herself at his banter. "You haven't changed, anyway."
"It was Mr. Worthington in Washington," said he. "Now it is 'Bob' and 'Miss Wetherell.' Rank patronage! How did you do it, Cynthia?"
"You are like all men," said Cynthia, "you look at the clothes, and not the woman. They are not very fine clothes; but if they were much finer, they wouldn't change me."
"Then it must be Miss Sadler."
"Miss Sadler would willingly change me--if she could," said Cynthia, a little bitterly. "How did you find out I was at Miss Sadler's?"
"Morton Browne told me yesterday," said Bob. "I felt like punching his head."
"What did he tell you?" she asked with some concern.
"He said that you were here, visiting the Merrills, among other things, and said that you knew me."
The "other things" Mr. Browne had said were interesting, but flippant. He had seen Bob at a college club and declared that he had met a witch of a country girl at the Merrills. He couldn't make her out, because she had refused to see him every time he called again. He had also repeated Cynthia's remark about Bob's father not being quite the biggest man in his part of the country, and ventured the surmise that she was the daughter of a rival mill owner.
"Why didn't you let me know you were in Boston?" said Bob, reproachfully.
"Why should I?" asked Cynthia, and she could not resist adding, "Didn't you find it out when you went to Brampton--to see me?"
"Well," said he, getting fiery red, "the fact is--I didn't go to Brampton."
"I'm glad you were sensible enough to take my advice, though I suppose that didn't make any difference. But--from the way you spoke, I should have thought nothing could have kept you away."
"To tell you the truth," said Bob, "I'd promised to visit a fellow named Broke in my class, who lives in New York. And I couldn't get out of it. His sister, by the way, is in Miss Sadler's. I suppose you know her. But if I'd thought you'd see me, I should have gone to Brampton, anyway. You were so down on me in Washington."
"It was very good of you to take the trouble to come to see me here. There must be a great many girls in Boston you have to visit."
He caught the little note of coolness in her voice. Cynthia was asking herself whether, if Mr. Browne had not seen fit to give a good report of her, he would have come at all. He would have come, certainly. It is to be hoped that Bob Worthington's attitude up to this time toward Cynthia has been sufficiently defined by his conversation and actions. There had been nothing serious about it. But there can be no question that Mr. Browne's openly expressed admiration had enhanced her value in his eyes.
"There's no girl in Boston that I care a rap for," he said.
"I'm relieved to hear it," said Cynthia, with feeling.
"Are you really?"
"Didn't you expect me to be, when you said it?"
He laughed uncomfortably.
"You've learned more than one thing since you've been in the city," he remarked, "I suppose there are a good many fellows who come here all the time."
"Yes, there are," she said demurely.
"Well," he remarked, "you've changed a lot in three months. I always thought that, if you had a chance, there'd be no telling where you'd end up."
"That doesn't sound very complimentary," said Cynthia. She had, indeed, changed. "In what terrible place do you think I'll end up?"
"I suppose you'll marry one of these Boston men."
"Oh," she laughed, "that wouldn't be so terrible, would it?"
"I believe you're engaged to one of 'em now," he remarked, looking very hard at her.
"If you believed that, I don't think you would say it," she answered.
"I can't make you out. You used to be so frank with me, and now you're not at all so. Are you going to Coniston for the holidays?"
Her face fell at the question.
"Oh, Bob," she cried, surprising him utterly by a glimpse of the real Cynthia, "I wish I were--I wish I were! But I don't dare to."
"Don't dare to?"
"If I went, I should' never come back--never. I should stay with Uncle Jethro. He's so lonesome up there, and I'm so lonesome down here, without him. And I promised him faithfully I'd stay a whole winter at school in Boston."
"Cynthia," said Bob, in a strange voice as he leaned toward her, "do you--do you care for him as much as all that?"
"Care for him?" she repeated.
"Care for--for Uncle Jethro?"
"Of course I care for him," she cried, her eyes flashing at the thought. "I love him better than anybody in the world. Certainly no one ever had better reason to care for a person. My father failed when he came to Coniston--he was not meant for business, and Uncle Jethro took care of him all his life, and paid his debts. And he has taken care of me and given me everything that a girl could wish. Very few people know what a fine character Uncle Jethro has," continued Cynthia, carried away as she was by the pent-up flood of feeling within her. "I know what he has done for others, and I should love him for that even if he never had done anything for me."
Bob was silent. He was, in the first place, utterly amazed at this outburst, revealing as it did a depth of passionate feeling in the girl which he had never suspected, and which thrilled him. It was unlike her, for she was usually so self-repressed; and, being unlike her, accentuated both sides of her character the more.
But what was he to say of the defence of Jethro Bass? Bob was not a young man who had pondered much over the problems of life, because these problems had hitherto never touched him. But now he began to perceive, dimly, things that might become the elements of a tragedy, even as Mr. Merrill had perceived them some months before. Could a union endure between so delicate a creature as the girl before him and Jethro Bass? Could Cynthia ever go back to him again, and live with him happily, without seeing many things which before were hidden by reason of her youth and innocence?
Bob had not been nearly four years at college without learning something of the world; and