Part 26 (1/2)

”Then you aren't really educated at all?” said the teacher with frank pity. ”What a shame! Education is so important.”

Benis was frankly afraid of her.

”But you need not be,” Desire a.s.sured him. ”She looks up to you. She thinks that, being a professor, you have even more education than she has.”

”G.o.d forbid!” said Benis devoutly.

”Besides, she knows all about you. I found out today that she is an Ontario girl. And she lives--guess where? In Bainbridge!”

Aunt Caroline (they were at dinner) looked up from her roast lamb and remarked ”Impossible.”

”But she does, Aunt. She says so.”

Aunt Caroline fancied that probably the young person was mistaken.

”Certainly,” she said, ”I have never heard of her.”

”She lives,” said Desire, ”on Barker Street and she took her first cla.s.s teacher's certificate at Bainbridge Collegiate Inst.i.tute.”

Aunt Caroline fancied that they gave almost anyone a certificate there.

All one had to do was to pa.s.s the examinations. As to Barker Street--there was a Barker Street, certainly. And this young person might live on it. She, herself, was not acquainted with the neighborhood.

”But she knows you,” Desire persisted. ”She said, 'Oh, is Miss Caroline Campion your Aunt? I remember her from my youth up.'”

”Very impertinent,” said Miss Campion. Her nephew's eyes began to twinkle.

”Oh, everyone knows Aunt Caroline,” he explained. ”But then, everyone knows the Queen of England.”

Aunt Caroline was mollified. ”Of course, in that sense--” She felt able to go on with her roast lamb.

Dr. Rogers, who had listened to this interchange with delight, said now that the young lady had been quite right about her place of residence.

She did live in Bainbridge, on Barker Street. He did not know her personally but her older sister was a patient of his. The mother and father were dead. Very nice, quiet people.

Desire was quite young enough to laugh and to point this with ”Dead ones usually are.”

The school teacher, at another table, heard the laugh and felt a pa.s.sing sense of injustice. It seemed unfair that anyone so obviously without education could feel free to laugh in that satisfying way. It was plain that young Mrs. Spence scarcely realized her sad deficiency.

And it certainly was a little discouraging that the cleverest men almost invariably....

Fort William came and pa.s.sed and in the sparkling suns.h.i.+ne of another morning the train dashed into the wild Superior country where the wealth lies under the rock instead of above it. To Desire, her first glimpse of the Great Lake was like a glimpse of home. The coolness of the air was grateful after prairie heat but, scarcely had she welcomed back the smell of pine and fir, before it, too, was left behind and they swung swiftly into a softer land--a land of rolling fields and fences and farmhouses; of little towns, with tree-lined roads; of streams less noisy and more disciplined; of fat cows drowsy in the growing heat.

”This,” said Aunt Caroline with a breath of proprietary satisfaction, ”is Ontario.”

Desire, always literal, pointed out that according to the map in the time-table, they had been in Ontario for some considerable time.

Aunt Caroline thought that the map was probably mistaken. ”For,” she added with finality, ”it was certainly not the Ontario to which I have been accustomed.”

This settled the matter for any sensible person.

”We are nearly home now,” she went on kindly. ”I hope you are not feeling very nervous, my dear.”