Chapter II: Author’s Journal

It lacked ten minutes of car-time, and the omnibus-driver was growing impatient and tired of waiting for his passenger, when a noisy group appeared upon the piazza: Mrs. Squire Russell, pale, languid, drooping as usual, with a profusion of long light curls falling in her eyes, and giving to her faded face the appearance of a poodle dog; Mr. Squire Russell, short, fat, henpecked, but very good-looking withal, and some half dozen little Russells, clinging to and jumping upon the young lady, whom we recognize at once as Dora, our heroine.

“You won’t stay long, even if Mrs. Randall does urge you,” said Mrs. Russell, in a half-complaining tone as she drew together her white wrapper, and leaned wearily against a pillar of the piazza. “You know I can’t do anything with the children, and the hot weather makes me so miserable. I shall expect you in two weeks.”

“Two weeks, Madge! are you crazy?” said the Squire’s good-humored voice. “Dora has not been from home in ages, while you have almost made the tour of the Western Continent. She shall stay as long as she likes, and get some color in her face. She used to be rosier than she is now, and it all comes of her being shut up so close with the children.”

“I think it is very unkind in you, Mr. Russell, to speak as if I was the worst sister in the world, and the most exacting. I am sure Dora don’t think so. Didn’t she go with us to Newport last summer, and wasn’t she more than once called the belle of the Ocean House?”

John gave a queer kind of whistle, while Dora involuntarily drew a long breath as she remembered the dreary time she had passed at the Ocean House, looking after _three_ nurses, six children, and her sister Margaret, whose rooms were on the third floor, and to whom she had acted the part of waiting-maid in general. But her thoughts were suddenly brought back from Newport by Margaret’s next remark:

“You needn’t charge the loss of her roses to me either, John. No one can expect to be young-looking forever, and you must remember Dora has passed the bloom of youth. She’s in her twenty-sixth year.”

“Twenty-sixth year! Thunder! that’s nothing,” and Squire Russell tossed up in the air the little Daisy crawling at his feet, while Johnnie, the ten-year old boy, roared out:

“Aunt Dora ain’t old. She’s real young and pretty, and so Dr. West told Miss Markham that time she counted on her fingers, and said, so spiteful like: ‘Yes, Miss Freeman is full thirty. Why, they’ve been here eleven years, and she must have been nineteen or twenty when she came, for she was quite as big as she is now, and looked as old. Yes, she’s too old for the new minister, Mr. Kelley.’ I was so mad I could have knocked her, and I did throw a brick at her parrot squawking in the yard. Dr. West was as red as fire, and said to her just as he spoke to me once, when he made me hold still to be vaccinated, ‘Miss Freeman is not thirty. She does not look twenty, and is perfectly suitable for Mr. Kelley, if she wants him.’

“‘She don’t,’ says I, ‘for she don’t see him half the time when he calls, nor Dr. Colby either.’

“I was going to spit out a lot more stuff, when Dr. West put his hand to my mouth, and told me to hush up.”

There were roses now on Dora’s cheeks, and they made her positively beautiful as she kissed her sister and the little ones good-by, glancing nervously across the broad, quiet street to where a small, white office was nestled among the trees. But though the blinds were down, the door was not opened, while around the house in the same yard there were no signs of life except at an upper window, where a head, which was unmistakably that of Dr. West’s landlady, Mrs. Markham, was discernible behind the muslin curtain. He was not coming to say good-by, and with a feeling of disappointment Dora walked rapidly to the omnibus, which bore her away from the house where they missed her so much, Squire John looking uncomfortable and desolate, the children growing very cross, and at last crying, every one of them, for auntie; while Margaret took refuge from the turmoil behind one of her nervous headaches, and went to her room, wondering why Dora must select that time of all others to leave her.