Lone Point E-Book

Grace Livingston Hill

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Maria Hammond and her sister, Rachel, were as different as could be. Rachel was like bright sunshine everywhere, while Maria, or “Ri,” as her family called her, always took things awry. When the Hammond family had to rent out their spacious home in the city and take a plain summer cottage by the sea, Rachel was delighted. Maria, however, humiliated by her family’s reduced financial status, threw herself fiercely into the role of martyr, determined to make everyone feel her suffering. Then a chance encounter with thoughtful, contemplative Howard Fairfield changed everything. Soon Maria found herself trying to be as good and spiritual as he believed she was… but Lone Point was to bring Maria many struggles before she found the love her lonely heart craved.

Leseprobe

Grace Livingston Hill

LONE POINT

Copyright

First published in 1897

Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris

Chapter 1

Rachel Hammond sat by the open window with her Bible on her knee. The muslin curtains did not blow with the breeze, for there was no breeze that hot morning in June. The air seemed breathless. Rachel had put her pretty room in order, finished all her little morning duties, and now had sat down for a quiet minute with her Bible before she began the day.

Her sister Maria, two years older, sat in the adjoining room, her door open for all possible circulation of air. Indeed, the door between the sisters’ rooms was scarcely ever shut by day or by night. But Maria was trimming a hat instead of reading her Bible. Not that Maria did not read her Bible, for she did, but she never had a set, quiet time for doing it as Rachel had.

The hat was a white sailor and had been very stylish and consequently very expensive earlier in the season, but now the mass of people were supplied with millinery for the summer, and poorer people were enabled by the great reduction in prices to indulge their taste for pretty things. It went very much against the grain with Maria Hammond to have to wait until late for the pretty to buy with careful hand and long-hoarded savings, for until recently she had been used to buying when and what she pleased since she could remember. Maria had taken more bitterly her father’s change of fortune than any of the other members of the family. The others had looked on the bright side of things and cheerfully told each other how good it was that matters were no worse; that the father had not fallen ill physically under the heavy burden that had been placed upon him by the fraud of a trusted partner; that the dear beautiful home where the three children had been born was saved to them, with a little—a very little, it is true, but still a little—with which to keep things going, and best of all, that all the creditors had been fully paid. But Maria could only see the dark side. From a rich man, who was able to do what he pleased, and who intended soon to build a home lovelier even than their present one, and who could afford to place his daughters in the best society, her father had become a poor man. Thus to her the present home had lost even the charms which it had possessed before she looked forward to the finer one.

This present home was by no means an undesirable one. It was located on a quiet, pleasant street where the neighbors were staid and old-fashioned, people of fine old families. It was built of stone in a comfortable manner, with ample room and broad piazzas, vines peeping in the windows in summer, and lawn enough about it to give the feeling of plenty of room. It was in the plainest end of a fashionable suburb, but it was not fashionable. The house had none of the modern twists and turns which art and fashion have decreed shall adorn the modern handsome dwelling, and for this reason Maria despised it and pitied herself for having to live in it. A look of discontent had settled down upon her pretty white forehead which was gradually but surely changing her expression permanently.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Maria, as she jerked a loop of white ribbon into place behind the many cheap white wings she was arranging on her hat. “What’s the use of fussing and fixing up things to wear after all? There won’t be a place to wear them except church, and all the people we know or care about will be out of town by another month. One might as well wear one’s old duds after all.”

Rachel looked up from her Bible, through the open door where she could see her sister at work.

“Oh, yes, there will be plenty of places. Don’t be so disheartened, dear,” she answered brightly. “How pretty that hat will be, ’Ri! It looks just like you.”

“Does it, indeed?” responded the elder sister. “Then my face must be badly snarled up, for this ribbon is. I can’t get the right twist to it any way I put it. I do wish I could afford to take it down to Haskins’ and have it trimmed by our old milliner. It is awfully vexatious to have to do everything one’s self or else go without. But I’d be willing to do it myself if we could only go out of town for a little while, Ray; it’s so horribly plebeian to stay in the city all the year round. Everybody else is going.”

“You forget, ’Ri, we don’t live in the city, we live in the suburbs, and plenty of people stay all summer in the suburbs. Some people prefer to take their trips away from home in the winter, you know. Look at the Adamses and Monteiths, they don’t go away at all, and even Mrs. Burbank told me the other day that they didn’t care to take any vacation, they enjoyed their home in the summer so much.”

“Oh, yes, I should think they would. They have a park surrounding them, a great, cool house with plenty of servants, all the guests they want, and are up on a high hill besides, with plenty of shade about. Besides, it’s nonsense for them to talk about not going away. They are hardly at home two weeks in succession all the year around. Mrs. Burbank and Tilly spend a week at a time at Atlantic City every time they sneeze or have a headache, and Mr. and Mrs. Burbank took a trip to California last winter, while Tom and his aunt went to Florida. When they don’t run up to New York or out to Pittsburg for a few days they go up to that sanitarium in the mountains for their health for a month or take a trip to Bermuda. I don’t know that I should care either about going away in the summer if I only knew I could go whenever I pleased, and what is more, knew that everybody else knew it. I tell you, Ray, the hardest thing to bear is to feel that folks are saying we can’t go anywhere now and pitying us! I just can’t stand it,” and Maria threw her half-finished hat on the bed beside her and lay back on one of the snowy pillows in a discouraged attitude.

Rachel by long experience with her sister knew that it was of no use to argue with her, so she tried to cheer her as best she could, sighing a little regretfully as she closed her Bible and came into her sister’s room. She had been reading the verse, “For me to live is Christ,” and she wondered wistfully if she would ever know what that meant, and wished that Maria felt more of the spirit of it, so that her life would not seem so hard to her.

“If you want to go away so much perhaps, we might go to the same place Marvie Parker told me about yesterday,” said Rachel, seating herself on the foot of Maria’s bed and resting her chin thoughtfully in her hand.

“No, thanks!” said Maria promptly and decidedly. “I don’t think I should care for any place where Marvie Parker goes. I don’t see what you find in that girl to attract you, Ray. She is the dowdiest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Her father is nothing but a clerk in his brother-in-law’s store. There are plenty of nice girls for you to go with without choosing her for a friend.”

“But she is nice, ’Ri,” said the younger sister, her eyes flashing bright in her eagerness to defend her friend. “You don’t know her or you wouldn’t talk that way. She is very bright and has read and studied far more than either of us. The whole family are very bright. I never enjoyed myself more in my life than I did the evening I spend with them last week. She has a brother just home from college who is as full of life as can be, and Marvie is the sweetest girl I know, next to you.”

“She may be sweet enough,” answered Maria, ignoring the earnest compliment, “but she is not of the same social standing with you, and it is a great deal wiser and pleasanter not to try to upset the world and drag people out of their spheres.” This with an air and expression of long experience with the world.

“Well, I think you might wait until you have known them before you judge them; but listen. Let me tell you where they are going. It sounds very interesting. The place is an island right between the bay and the ocean, not very wide either, so you get the view of both. Marvie says it is beautiful there, and the sunsets are so gorgeous. It is a real, old-time beach such as you read about, with no boardwalks and no merry-go-rounds, and everybody does as he pleases, and lots of bathing and boating and fishing and sailing. I think it would be delightful. Marvie says there are cottages down there for seventy-five dollars for the season, just think of that! They are not fine, of course, but are comfortable, with big rooms, and lots of corners and shelves and places to fix up. I think I should like it immensely.”

“Now Rachel Weldon Hammond, what in the world do you mean?” said Maria, sitting upright on the bed and looking at her. “Seventy-five dollars for the season! The very idea of our living in a cottage that costs only seventy-five dollars for the season! You must be crazy. Why the cottage the Johnses lived in last year at Atlantic City was twelve hundred, and even the Pattersons paid a thousand. I think you are nothing but a child, in spite of your seventeen years.”

Just then a servant came to announce that a young lady was in the parlor to see Miss Ray, and Rachel with a bright spot on each check went down to find her friend Marvie.

It was not until dinner that evening that the subject was renewed. Maria had spent the afternoon in town hunting among the bargain tables and had come home thoroughly tired. There is something in a disappointing day of shopping which particularly exasperates some people’s nerves. Every subject that came to Maria’s mind seemed to be productive of discomfort. At last something was said about Rachel’s morning caller. Then Maria burst out:

“Was that Marvie Parker here again? I think she is rather running things into the ground. Mamma, do you know what kind of a girl is getting an influence over Rachel? I think the friendship ought to be stopped. She isn’t in our set at all, and Rachel will feel most uncomfortable in a year or two if she makes a special friend of a girl like that, whom she can’t invite nor go with, of course, when she gets old enough to care about things.”

“What is the matter with Miss Parker?” questioned Mr. Hammond, turning his sad gray eyes to his elder daughter’s face. “It does not seem to be a good reason for objecting to her merely because she is not in your set. If she isn’t in, bring her in; that is, if the set is worth her coming. If it isn’t, it might be a good thing for Rachel to have a few friends outside it, in case of an emergency. Miss Parker ought to be a good girl. Her father is a fine man, and I used to know her mother years ago when we were children. The girl ought to be well brought up. What is the matter with her, aside from that senseless notion?”

Maria’s face grew red. She did not like to have her father against her, neither did she feel fully prepared to face his keen eyes or his searching questions. She was on the point of reminding him that she and Rachel were no longer in a position to say who should or should not belong in their set, and that their own footing there might at any time grow insecure, but she remembered just in time to save herself this disgrace and her father the pain of such a remark. Instead she flew at once to some defense of her own statements.

“She may be a good girl, papa, I presume she is,” she replied; “but you will surely acknowledge that she is putting queer notions into Ray’s head. Why this morning she actually confided to me that she would enjoy going to some out-of-the-way place, on an almost desert island, where the Parkers are going to seek solitude for the summer, and live in a shanty at seventy-five dollars for the season. Just think of it! I don’t know where she thought even the seventy-five dollars was to come from, with the railroad fares and all, but she would really like us all to go. Did you ever hear of such an idea!”

Rachel’s fair face had grown rosy red during the conversation. She was an exceedingly sensitive girl, and shrank from being the center of observation, even in her own family, and now as the glance of father, mother, and brother were turned upon her, she could scarcely keep the excited tears from rushing into her eyes. But she tried to smile in answer to her father’s encouraging look as he asked for an explanation.

“Why, papa, I didn’t really say I wanted to do it,” said Rachel, her cheeks flushing redder, “I only said I thought it would be really nice. And of course, I’m perfectly happy where I am. But if we were to do it, I suppose we’d have to in the same way that the Parkers do. They rent their house here, and they get two hundred and fifty dollars for the season for it from some people who have to stay in town on account of business all summer and have to be at their store at seven o’clock; so they couldn’t get in from far away from the city in time. Marvie said her father knew a lot of men who wanted just such homes as ours for the summer, where they could bring their families out of the rows of brick houses. I thought maybe there would be someone who might want our house that way, and it ought to bring more than the Parkers’, because it is larger and has more ground and is on a nicer street. But I didn’t really mean ever to say anything about it, for ’Ri seemed to think it was all so dreadful that I didn’t mention the renting of our house.”

Rachel dropped her burning face from the exclamations which she knew would follow.

“Rent our house!” said Maria aghast. “Whatever can you be thinking about? Are you crazy? I guess we have not quite come to that state of disgrace!”

“My dear child!” exclaimed the mother, not so much in horror as astonishment at the new thought. “How could we have people using our carpets and our dishes?” There came a little distressed pucker between her eyes, showing that the idea was not an impossibility to her after all and she was really considering it.

“And what did you propose to do with father and me, Ray?” asked her brother Winthrop, who was a little older than Maria and in business with his father, struggling to bring back the name and fame which the former firm had lost through the treachery of one of its members. “You know we are obliged to be in town at a set hour every day, as well as some other folks!”

Rachel’s cheeks flushed anew at the implication that she, the quietest member of the household, had taken the family affairs into consideration and assumed to make the plans, but she answered shyly:

“I hadn’t thought it all out, but Mr. Parker and his son go into town every day. Marvie said there was a train leaving the island early enough to get here before nine, I think, and there are special season tickets for businessmen, so it doesn’t cost much, and the store closed early during the summer anyway, doesn’t it? But I didn’t mean to plan. I am happy where I am. I wouldn’t have said a word, only ’Ri was worrying because we had to stay in town all summer, and I thought maybe mother would enjoy the coolness by the shore.”

“She is nothing but an absurd child!” exclaimed her sister. “Papa, surely you are not going to encourage her in such plebeian notions. I’m sure I’d rather die respectably than go away for the summer in such a disgraceful manner.” And she sat back in her chair with a sneer.

“My daughter,” said Mr. Hammond, looking straight at Maria, “I am ashamed if a child of mine has come to the place where she can say such a thing as that. You do not mean it. And as for this ‘notion’ as you are pleased to term it, it is nothing new to me. I have long thought that I could save a good deal and make matters mend in our pecuniary affairs much more quickly if I could rent this house. Indeed, I had an offer last week of four hundred dollars for this place, stable and all, from now till the first of October. The reason I declined the offer was not on account of any such frivolous and unworthy motives as you have expressed, but simply because I knew of no cheaper place where my family could be comfortable while the house was earning the four hundred dollars.”

“I should think not!” put in Maria with red, excited face. It meant a great deal to her, this question of fashion, and what her little world of “they” would think and say. It meant all that she now cared for in life, though she would not have believed it if she had been told that this was true of her. But her father went on in his calm tone:

“Now if the Parkers have found a place for seventy-five dollars where they can be comfortable, I should think we might do so as well. The Parkers are respectable people and used to having the necessaries of life, at least, if not all the luxuries. I should think it might be worth the looking into at least. Don’t you think so, mother?”

And the wife, with a troubled look at her eldest daughter’s face, and a sigh of longing for the cool air of the ocean, assented that she thought they ought to make inquiries, at least.

Maria, with tears of chagrin in her eyes, suddenly left the table, and Rachel, whose tender heart was sorely distressed at having been the cause of the trouble to her sister, went soon to her own room, where for once she found the connecting door between her room and her sister’s closed, and upon softly turning the knob a few minutes later she discovered it was also locked. This was something that had not happened since the two girls were very little and first had rooms to themselves, and Rachel could not keep the tears back. She betook herself to her Bible for comfort and through blinding tears she found it and resolved to try to make Maria happy that summer no matter what happened, seashore or home, heat or cool breezes, pleasure or disagreeableness. And so she slept.

Chapter 2

Maria Hammond was a girl of very determined nature. When she liked or wanted a thing she liked or wanted it intensely, and bent all her energies to get it. What she disliked she was equally persistent in opposing; and when it happened, as it often did in her life, that her plans and desires were frustrated, it took a great struggle of will before she could give up and yield to the inevitable. Even then, should the least chance occur, she would try for her own way again. She insisted that it was not her own way, however, which she desired, but merely to have things right about her, and as they ought to be; and that if the way were another’s and it seemed right to her, she would be just as eager to have it as though it had been her own. With such sophistry did she excuse herself to herself and to others for her persistency and headstrong, stubborn willfulness, and because of a discontented nature, which was always desiring the unattainable, she was constantly in trouble.

When she went to her room after her stormy speeches at the dinner table the tears of anger, defeat, chagrin, and disappointment swelled into her throat and eyes. Locking her door, she threw herself on her bed in a torrent of weeping. It is true she had attained the years when young ladies are supposed not to weep violently, unless for some great grief of life, and she would not for the world have had any one, even a member of her own family, see her thus; but her nature was uncontrolled that when it burst out upon her in this way she could but give way to it. Moreover, in her eyes very little things often seemed important, and thus it came about that what to another might simply be an annoyance to her became a great and overwhelming grief. It was, as it were, her very life that was in the balance. For what else was life to her but the good opinion of the world? And so Maria lay upon her bed crying for a long time. It was not merely what had occurred at the dinner table which caused her trouble, nor even the prospect of spending the summer in a most unfashionable retreat, though that seemed to her mind very unlikely, even after what had been said by father and mother, “For surely,” thought she, “their reason will see that it would be dreadful, simply dreadful”; but it seemed to her a sort of climax of all the disappointments which had come since her father had lost his money. In consequence, she mourned and cried and pitied herself, and perhaps pitied the rest of the family a little with what heart she had left after her own need was lavishly supplied. By and by she grew more calm, and then there came to her a shadow of her religion to question why it could not help her in this trying time, for she had a religion, this stormy-natured girl, in spite of all her will and her fear of what “they” would say. And with the thought of her religion came the reflection of all she had meant to do to help in the church work during the summer, of the class of delightfully bad little boys she had promised to take in the Sunday-school; of the young people’s meeting she had promised to lead; and of the tennis picnic in the park she was planning for those same young people, which was to close in the dusk of evening with a short prayer meeting under the trees, and which she hoped would do much good. Then she told herself it could not be that she was to be removed to an out-of-the-way place where there would be no possible opportunity for anything of the kind when she had planned to do so much. Thus she magnified her own projected goodness until she seemed a very martyr.

Now such a nature as Maria’s is not one which long remains under a cloud. She began to persuade herself by and by that things could not possibly be as bad as they seemed about to be, and to silence her own uncomfortable conscience, which was beginning to reproach her keenly for the way in which she had spoken to her father and sister. She resolved with a large sigh of conscious martyrdom to go to her father the next morning and tell him she was resigned to being a hermit if it would conduce to his financial comfort. Having thus resolved, and being comforted by the thought that if she pursued such a course her father would by no means be likely to accept her sacrifice, she went to sleep.

Meantime the father and mother had been holding a consultation. Money matters had been coming to a crisis during the last few weeks. Business was very dull at the store. Mr. Hammond hoped if he could tide affairs over until fall that he might be able to weather the gale. He now felt that a serious talk with his wife was necessary, though she was such a frail little woman that he always spared her all he could because she took every burden at twice its weight and went about with her face sad and anxious. The result of this talk, however, was that Mr. Hammond took his breakfast a half-hour earlier than usual in order that he might stop in and speak to his friend Mr. Parker on his way to the office. And so it was that Maria did not get an opportunity to speak to her father until evening.

It was just as the dinner bell rang through the house, and Maria, hastening down the stairs that she might speak to her father as he entered the dining room, heard her mother’s voice speaking to him as she passed the door of the library. She spoke with an anxious sigh: “Yes, it would be very nice and just the thing. I would do it in a minute if it only were not for the girls’ sake. I hate to do it when they are so opposed.”

And her father’s weary tones answered: “It is Maria that is opposed, not both of them, remember, and things are as they are. Maria may come to worse trouble if we do not do this.”

“Yes,” said the mother sadly, “but Maria is the oldest, you know, and just at the age when everything of this sort makes so much difference to her. It might hurt her future life, my dear.”

“Nonsense!” said her father rather sharply, although he felt the truth of what his wife was saying, keenly enough. “If Maria’s future is to be hurt by the fact that her father rented his home to good, respectable people for a few months, and went to a quiet, unfashionable place to stay during that time, I think it had better be hurt. It seems to me that friends who are affected by such things are not worth the having.” But he sighed again as he came down the stairs, his face wearing a careworn expression.

Maria’s heart beat fast and the tears came into her eyes. She had not realized that she was making her loved father so much trouble. Her impulsive nature at once forgot all about any personal sacrifices, and rushing up to her father, she drew him into the door of the sitting room they were passing, and throwing her arms about his neck, begged him to forgive her for all she had said, and not to mind her in the least in anything he wished to do, that she would try to be as helpful as she could.

And so, it came about after all that it was through Maria that the Hammond home was rented to a family who would pay well for four months’ use of it, and the Hammonds themselves migrated to the seashore. It must not be supposed that Maria was changed all in a moment. She had many evenings of weeping over the inevitable, but the memory of her father’s weary face and her mother’s anxious tones was sufficient to keep her from demurring any further to the family plans, and it was only to her sister Rachel and her brother Winthrop that she permitted herself to grumble. Winthrop had long ago said that his sisters were well named: Rachel was like a ray of bright sunlight everywhere, always cheery, never cross, while Maria, or ’Ri, as they all called her, “always took things awry and kept a wry face much of the time.”

“I say ’Ri, do let up a little, can’t you?” said her brother one day when Maria had finished one of her sarcastic speeches about their summer outing. “It’s too late now to give up, so you’d better make the best of it. Where’s the Christian fortitude I hear most church-members talk so much about? Can’t you summon up a little bit to help you through this vale of tears? I’m sure you’ve taken every grain of pleasure out of this summer that it might possibly have contained for Rachel and me, so do be satisfied, for you surely can’t wish father and mother to suffer.”

This somewhat caustic speech from her usually good-natured brother sent Maria to her room weeping. The days had been very hard for her even before this. She had endured, in imagination, the heavy trial of coming home to find her room treasures spoiled by ruthless alien hands. She had pleaded that certain necessary articles—necessary to the thorough furnishing of the house—be put away under lock and key, but had been made to understand that this could not be. She suffered a great deal while clearing out her bureau drawers and closet and all her little private “cubby-holes,” realizing how in a few days these places would be filled with some other girl’s belongings, and she felt that when she returned she never could feel the same toward the home-corners again after strangers had called them their own. She had also been obliged to help in packing cushions and cretonne draperies that could be well spared from the home, with curtains, pictures, screens, and a few such things as were considered essential to make the summer cottage, to which they were going, habitable.

This had also gone much against the grain. To think of having to spend one’s summer amid things that were merely fit to put in a bedroom! It was humiliating. If they were to have a cottage, why couldn’t they at least have it look comfortable, cheery, and furnished with taste? Maria was the artist of the family, and so had been called upon to select the draperies they should take, but when her mother found that Maria’s choice would be to carry silk-chenille portiéres and satin embroidered sofa pillows and a plush hand-painted screen, she was obliged to do the selecting herself, or quietly put it into Rachel’s hands, for Rachel had been down to the little beach cottage. Her friend, Marvie Parker, had invited her for over a Sunday, and her father thought this would be a good opportunity for some member of the family to judge of the fitness of the cottage for their abode. It is true Rachel had hitherto been considered the child of the family, but her judgment was usually good, and her father and mother felt her to be a much more unprejudiced judge than her sister would have been, for Rachel would tell not only the best but also the worst, which Maria would not have seen at all, had she desired to go as much as her sister did. So Rachel had accepted the invitation, much to the chagrin of Maria, who told her that if she did this she would open the way for the Parkers to be entirely too intimate with them for the summer, a thing she, for one, did not intend to countenance. But Rachel, having the consent of father and mother, went and enjoyed her two days immensely, coming home with glowing accounts of all the pleasures in store for them, as well as an accurate description of the cottages for rent. They were rough, she admitted; not finished inside except for a high facing of heavy manilla paper. The ceilings were high, reaching indeed to the peak of the roof, and thus giving the rooms a lofty appearance. She felt sure that Maria could make of the parlor or sitting room, or whatever they chose to call it, a perfect summer bower, and the rooms, though few, were all large, indeed quite spacious for a place so cheap. It was all on one floor, with a wide piazza for hammocks and a view of sea and bay. But when Maria—a slight interest awakened for the moment—began to select silk and velour portiéres, Rachel laughed and then looked troubled. She saw endless difficulties in making her sister understand.

“They will look incongruous, ’Ri,” she said. “You ought to have gone in my place and then you would know just what to take, for you always know how to make things fit; but really I should think some of that pretty printed burlap we bought to make cozy-corner cushions for our bedrooms would be just the thing.”

“If I had gone,” said Maria severely, “I should probably have brought back such an account as would have made the family understand it was no fit place for us to live in. However, you seem to be having everything your own way this time and I suppose we will take what curtains you say. I wish with all my heart we were not compelled to spend the summer entirely in a burlap atmosphere. I didn’t suppose things would be quite so rough.”

And so had Maria gone on, fighting every step of the way, contesting every inch of the plans that were made, until all who asked her to help were glad to see her go away and leave them to finish alone.

Poor Maria! Don’t be too hard upon her. Her heart was very heavy during these days. She discovered a day or two before they flitted to the shore that the place selected was but a mile from a fashionable summer resort of which she had often heard as being at the very height of refined and aristocratic summer haunts. She also discovered to her dismay that the De Veres of the West End of the city, who were very wealthy and literary and cultured, had taken a cottage there. Now Maria had met the Misses De Vere and their brother some three or four times at various social functions, and she felt that their acquaintance would be worth cultivating. But she knew she should shrink into herself with shame if they discovered her whereabouts and came to see the kind of place in which she was summering. She had really taken quite a liking to those young people, and it was hard for her to think of them as looking down upon her. Why she did not feel that people who would look down upon her because of the house in which she lived were not worth her caring for, is hardly explainable, unless it was because she knew that she should look down upon any one similarly placed, and so judged them by herself. She had listened to a bit of talk between George Parker, Marvie’s brother, and her sister Rachel, wherein he described some of the cottages at Lone Point and told how the Spray View people laughed at them and called them “Lone Point Barracks,” and all sorts of funny names. Maria’s spirit writhed within her as she pictured to herself Roland De Vere driving by their cottage some day and laughing with other strangers about their home. The blood crimsoned her whole face, and she resolved that by no word of hers should the De Veres find out where she was to spend her summer, even though she missed many a pleasant invitation thereby.

One more experience Maria had to complete her wretchedness before they left for Lone Point. She had been with her sister on some last errands prior to their departure from civilization for a time, and just before they took the car for home, stopped at the public library to secure a store of books for summer reading. It was while they were waiting at the desk for their cards to be marked, that Roland De Vere, with his arms full of books, stepped up to them and touched his hat. Maria introduced her sister, of course, and the three walked out together.

“By the way, where do you spend your summer this year?” asked the young man as they paused at the corner to wait for a car.

Maria’s cheeks grew rosy. She never could keep her face from telling tales which she would rather were untold, but she caught at her presence of mind and answered:

“Papa is talking of the seashore somewhere,” rather vaguely, and then looked eagerly to see if the car were not coming.

But Rachel, not noticing her sister’s vague response and not understanding in the least its intention, turned in her eager, girlish way and said:

“Why, yes, we’re going quite near to where you will be, if I have heard aright. Are you not going to Spray View? Your sister told a friend of ours. I hoped I might meet your sisters this summer, I have heard so much about them, and Maria is quite in love with both of them. Our place is only a mile from there, Lone Point; do you know it?”

Maria’s face was crimson now. She motioned violently to the car, which was still half a block away, and telling her sister the car was ready, never even turned her eyes to see what Mr. De Vere was thinking. She had so often rehearsed in her mind how under such circumstances his face would grow astonished, and he would utter a very expressive “Oh!” and turn away, that her imaginings became a reality to her, of which the true scene which followed was not able to efface the impression. So with a vexation and embarrassment that amounted almost to an agony she stepped out into the street with the other waiting passengers, thinking to prevent all further conversation.

This, however, Mr. De Vere did not notice. He was entirely taken up with talking to Rachel. His face lighted with pleasure and he said: “Know it? I should think I did. It is a delightful little place. I had a good friend there last year. I hope we shall see each other often. You go tomorrow, you say? How pleasant! We go the first of next week, and sooner if mother can get ready. Good afternoon, Miss Rachel; Miss Hammond, good afternoon. I am glad there is a prospect of our seeing one another often this summer.”

He touched his hat; they stepped on the car and were soon speeding away. The car was crowded and the two girls had difficulty at first in finding seats, but as they neared the suburbs the passengers grew fewer, and Maria found opportunity to seat herself beside Rachel, who in blissful unconsciousness of her sister’s state of mind had been letting her eyes dance and her heart rejoice in the innocent pleasures in store in the possibilities of the summer. Maria had been bottled up for nearly twenty minutes and the vials of her wrath had not cooled during the process. She always showed her feelings to their full extent in her face, so Rachel had a sudden and unpleasant awakening from her girlish dreams.

“Rachel Hammond!” said Maria, trying to lower her excited voice so none of their fellow-passengers could hear, “I should think you might learn to keep your mouth shut occasionally. I never introduce you to one of my friends but I regret it bitterly at once. It seems as if you might be old enough now to know how to behave.”

Poor Rachel! Her sensitive face flushed and she roused herself at once to remember what terrible breach of etiquette she had been guilty of, but could think of nothing. She dreaded one of Maria’s tirades beyond almost any experience that came into her life, and was constantly studying to avoid them, and perhaps as a consequence she was the one who had to receive the larger number of them.

“What did I do, ’Ri?” she faltered, and if Maria had not been too angry she would have been touched by the pitiful quiver of the pretty, sensitive lips, and the grieved, troubled look of Rachel’s large eyes.

“What did you do, indeed! You little tattle-tale! You need not tell me you don’t know, for you did it just to annoy me, you know you did, or else from some high and mighty notion that you would rebuke me for not telling everything I knew. You will have to learn that it isn’t necessary to tell all you know in this world in order to avoid telling a falsehood. Why was it necessary for you to explain fully to that elegant Mr. De Vere in what a humiliating state we were to spend our summer? I should think things were being made uncomfortable enough for me already without that being added. I shall simply die of shame if they come over to that horrid little place and find us rusticating in a cowshed. I think you have fully overstepped the mark this time. You have chosen your friends and I have a right to mine. I shall ask papa to let you know hereafter that you are not to interfere with me and my friends.”

Maria had grown angrier as she talked. She had kindled her imagination during the silent ride with fancied scenes of meeting between herself and Fannie De Vere at Spray View, until she scarcely could contain herself. Rachel’s fair face grew almost white at her sister’s words. She tried to explain, but Maria was in no state to be reasonable.

“But, Maria dear,” she pleaded, “I didn’t dream I was saying anything unpleasant to you.”

“Then you must be very blind,” snapped Maria. “You certainly must have seen from the way I answered him that I would have bitten out my tongue sooner than have him know.”

“But I didn’t, ’Ri, indeed; indeed I didn’t dream of such a thing! I was only delighted for your sake, for I thought you would have some company, and he seemed so pleased about it.”

“Oh, yes, he was pleased!” sneered Maria. “He’s too polite to let anything else appear, but he’s probably laughing in his sleeve this minute. You needn’t worry. We shall not see either him or his lovely sisters at all this summer. As soon as he said he was acquainted with Lone Point I knew what to expect. I heard a man from Spray View talk about Lone Point the other day, and they don’t consider the place fit for Spray Viewers to wipe their feet on.”

Poor Rachel quivered under her sister’s upbraidings, until when they reached home she could bear it no more and went to her room to do an unusual thing for her, have it out with her tears. And then she went to her Heavenly Father with her little bruised heart and found comfort.