Part 5 (2/2)

She got through the day somehow, struggling against thoughts that would persist in creeping into her mind and stirring up emotions that she was determined to hold in check. Work, she knew, was her only salvation.

If she sat idle, thinking, the tears would come in spite of her, and a horrible, choky feeling in her throat. She set her teeth and thumped away at her machine, grimly vowing that Jack Barrow nor any other man should make her heart ache for long.

And so she got through the week. Sat.u.r.day evening came, and she went home, dreading Sunday's idleness, with its memories. The people at Mrs. Stout's establishment, she plainly saw, were growing a trifle shy of her. She had never been on terms of intimacy with any of them during her stay there, hence their att.i.tude troubled little after the first supersensitiveness wore off. But her own friends, girls with whom she had played in the pinafore-and-pigtail stages of her youth, young men who had paid court to her until Jack Barrow monopolized her--she did not know how they stood. She had seen none of them since Bush launched his last bolt. Barrow she had pa.s.sed on the street just once, and when he lifted his hat distantly, she looked straight ahead, and ignored him. Whether she hurt him as much as she did herself by the cut direct would be hard to say.

On Sat.u.r.day evenings and Sunday afternoons ordinarily from two to a dozen girl friends called her up at the boarding-house, or dropped in by ones and twos to chat a while, tease her about Jack, or plan some mild frivolity. Hazel went home, wondering if they, too, would stand aloof.

When Sunday noon arrived, and the phone had failed to call her once, and not one of all her friends had dropped in, Hazel twisted her chair so that she could stare at the image of herself in the mirror.

”You're in a fair way to become a pariah, it seems,” she said bitterly.

”What have you done, I wonder, that you've lost your lover, and that Alice and May and Hortense and all the rest of them keep away from you?

Nothing--not a thing--except that your looks attracted a man, and the man threw stones when he couldn't have his way. Oh, well, what's the difference? You've got two good hands, and you're not afraid of work.”

She walked out to Granville Park after luncheon, and found a seat on a shaded bench beside the lake. People pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed--couples, youngsters, old people, children. It made her lonely beyond measure.

She had never been isolated among her own kind before. She could not remember a time when she had gone to Granville Park by herself. But she was learning fast to stand on her own feet.

A group of young people came sauntering along the path. Hazel looked up as they neared her, chattering to each other. Maud Steele and Bud Wells, and--why, she knew every one of the party. They were swinging an empty picnic basket, and laughing at everything and nothing. Hazel caught her breath as they came abreast, not over ten feet away. The three young men raised their hats self-consciously.

”h.e.l.lo, Hazel!” the girl said.

But they pa.s.sed on. It seemed to Hazel that they quickened their pace a trifle. It made her grit her teeth in resentful anger. Ten minutes later she left the park and caught a car home. Once in her room she broke down.

”Oh, I'll go mad if I stay here and this sort of thing goes on!” she cried forlornly.

A sudden thought struck her.

”Why _should_ I stay here?” she said aloud. ”Why? What's to keep me here? I can make my living anywhere.”

”But, no,” she a.s.serted pa.s.sionately, ”I won't run away. That would be running away, and I haven't anything to be ashamed of. I will _not_ run.”

Still the idea kept recurring to her. It promised relief from the hurt of averted faces and coolness where she had a right to expect sympathy and friends.h.i.+p. She had never been more than two hundred miles from Granville in her life. But she knew that a vast, rich land spread south and west. She was human and thoroughly feminine; loneliness appalled her, and she had never suffered as Granville at large was making her suffer.

The legal notice of the bequest was mailed to her. She tore up the letter and threw it in the fire as if it were some poisonous thing.

The idea of accepting his money stirred her to a perfect frenzy. That was piling it up.

All during the next week she worked at her machine in the office of the furniture company, keeping strictly to herself, doing her work impa.s.sively, efficiently, betraying no sign of the feelings that sometimes rose up, the despairing protest and angry rebellion against the dubious position she was in through no fault of her own. She swore she would not leave Granville, and it galled her to stay. It was a losing fight, and she knew it even if she did not admit the fact. If she could have poured the whole miserable tale into some sympathetic ear she would have felt better, and each day would have seemed less hard. But there was no such ear. Her friends kept away.

Sat.u.r.day of the second week her pay envelope contained a brief notice that the firm no longer required her services. There was no explanation, only perfunctory regrets; and, truth to tell, Hazel cared little to know the real cause. Any one of a number of reasons might have been sufficient. But she realized how those who knew her would take it, what cause they would ascribe. It did not matter, though.

The very worst, she reasoned, could not be so bad as what had already happened--could be no more disagreeable than the things she had endured in the past two weeks. Losing a position was a trifle. But it set her thinking again.

”It doesn't seem to be a case of flight,” she reflected on her way home, ”so much as a case of being frozen out, compelled to go. I can't stay here and be idle. I have to work in order to live. Well, I'm not gone yet.”

She stopped at a news stand and bought the evening papers. Up in the top rack of the stand the big heads of an a.s.sorted lot of Western papers caught her eye. She bought two or three on the impulse of the moment, without any definite purpose except to look them over out of mere curiosity. With these tucked under her arm, she turned into the boarding-house gate, ran up the steps, and, upon opening the door, her ears were gladdened by the first friendly voice she had heard--it seemed to her--in ages, a voice withal that she had least expected to hear. A short, plump woman rushed out of the parlor, and precipitated herself bodily upon Hazel.

”Kitty Ryan! Where in the wide, wide world did you come from?” Hazel cried.

<script>