HOMEWARD BOUND
“Rose Blythe, if you don’t sit still, I’ll go out on the platform. You
give me the fidgets!”
Margy Blythe regarded the back of her animated younger sister with a
frowning gaze. It was half an hour since they had left the Pennsylvania
Station in New York, outward bound on Long Island, and during that time
Margy was quite sure Rose had not been still for a moment. Vivid and
lovely was Rose with the bobbed golden hair and the hat that matched the
blue of her eyes. To be sure, she wore a heavy winter coat, with the fur
collar drawn well up about her piquant chin, but this in no wise hid her
prettiness. Small wonder that, with bounding health and all the
enthusiasms of youth, Rose found it hard to sit quietly and demurely in
her seat, as any well-behaved young person should do. Besides—they were
homeward bound!
“Don’t lecture me to-day, Margy Blythe,” said the younger girl. She half
turned in her seat and wrinkled an impertinent nose at her sister. “I
shan’t sit still if I don’t feel like it. Besides, Joe said I could do
anything I wanted to-day. Didn’t you, Mr. Strainer Man?”
She looked coaxingly at the young fellow in the seat beside her. The
latter grinned good-naturedly.
“Anything you say, Posie,” he agreed.
Lloyd Roberts, sitting beside Margy, chuckled enjoyably.
“Got him where you want him, eh, Rose?” he teased the girl in the blue
hat. “To hear that boy talk you would never guess that he had toted
pianos on his stalwart shoulders—”
“How many?” giggled Rose, as she dipped down in the candy box that Joe
Morris had thoughtfully provided. “You talk as if he were an elephant or
something. Here, Joe, have a candy!”
“You wound my feelings, then offer me a bribe,” complained Joe.
“I notice you took the biggest one in the box, just the same,” retorted
Rose unfeelingly. “Anyway,” she added, as she passed the box of sweets
back to Margy and Lloyd, “Joe never moved pianos, as you very well know.
All he ever did was to stand around and boss the men who did the real
work. Didn’t you, Strainer Man?”
“Now, you make me feel like a loafer!” protested Joe, mournfully
munching on his candy.
“Poor Strainer Man!” murmured Rose, flashing him an impudent side
glance. “Is him very much abused?”
Joe regarded her, one eyebrow quizzically upraised.
“I wish you would leave off calling me that fool name,” he said.
“‘Strainer Man.’ Makes me feel like a tin can peddler!”
“I can’t help it. Really, Joe!” Rose assured him earnestly. “Why, every
time I think of you, I see you just as you looked the first day we moved
into the flat, standing there, with our old leaky strainer in your hand,
holding it so tenderly—oh, please excuse me, Joe. I didn’t mean to
laugh—truly I didn’t——”
While the two in the seat behind joined in Rose’s infectious merriment,
Joe Morris regarded his tormentor with severity.
“Young lady, some day I am going to forget that you are nearly grown
up,” he threatened, “and chastise you, as you deserve!”
“Oh, Joe,” said Rose, instantly serious and regarding him with mournful
eyes, “I could forgive the threat, but never that phrase, ‘nearly grown
up.’ I had so flattered myself it was ‘quite’.”
“You flattered yourself, all right!” Joe assured her, with emphasis, and
then it was her turn to feign offense and gaze abstractedly from the
window.
Behind them Lloyd Roberts turned to Margy with a chuckle.
“Rose and Joe are better than a circus,” he said. “Life is never dull
when they are around to stage a good scrap.”
Margy smiled and nodded.
“Quite a contrast to—those two.” She gestured toward an absorbed young
couple in a seat directly across the aisle from them. The two were deep
in a conversation that seemed to render them oblivious of everything and
everybody about them. “I don’t believe they ever quarrel about
anything.”
“They seem to understand each other pretty well,” agreed Lloyd. “For all
Hugh is a lawyer and prides himself upon being practical, I shouldn’t
wonder if there is a good deal of the artist about him.”
“There’s a good deal of everything nice about Hugh,” returned Margy, and
Lloyd looked surprised at her warmth.
“Like him as much as all that?” he asked. Margy met his teasing gaze
frankly.
“Doesn’t everybody like Hugh?” she asked.
“I do, for one,” returned the young fellow, and lapsed into silence.
Meanwhile, the two under discussion were aroused from their absorbing
conversation by the stopping of the train at a station.
Helen Blythe looked up, caught Margy’s gaze upon her and smiled.
“We’ll soon be there, now,” she said, and though Margy could not catch
the words, she understood by the motion of her lips, and nodded.
Hugh Draper, looking at Helen, caught the faraway look in her eyes and
thought he understood.
“Is it going to be a little hard, going home?” he asked gently. “Stir up
old memories—and things like that?”
“Rather,” said Helen, and was silent so long that Hugh began to think he
might have offended her in some way. Presently she turned to him, and,
though her lips were tremulous, her eyes smiled.
“I suppose I shouldn’t miss mother so after all this time,” she said.
“Especially since there isn’t a minute of the day when I don’t feel that
she is with me, guiding me and helping me. But sometimes I would give
everything I have—or am likely to have—just to touch her hand.”
“I know,” said Hugh, understandingly, and there fell a deep silence
between them while the train rushed onward over shining rails bringing
them ever nearer their destination.
The Blythe girls, accompanied by the three young fellows from the city
whom they knew and liked best, were returning “home” for a short visit.
Their destination was Riverdale, a small Long Island town, where they
had lived so happily until the death of their beloved parents, two years
before this story opens.
Since it was now Saturday morning and Margy and Rose must return to the
city in time to take up their work early Monday morning, their stay in
Riverdale must necessarily be short.
The three sisters were to stay with Miss Jessica Jellicoe, a former
neighbor of theirs, while the boys were to put up at the one hotel in
town.
“It isn’t much of a hotel,” Rose had warned them, when they were making
preparations for the trip. “But I don’t imagine you will have to take
many meals there. Dear old Miss Jessica is the soul of hospitality and a
mar-vel-ous cook. Just wait till you taste her flapjacks!”
“Um-yum, I’m for Miss Jellicoe, right from the start!” Joe had
exclaimed, already eating flapjacks in imagination. “She won’t have a
chance to overlook little Joe, not if he knows it!”
The season was late fall and there had already been a heavier fall of
snow than is usual for that time of year. Only two days before there had
been a rather severe snowstorm. The city streets had been quickly
cleared of the fleecy covering, but the fields and roads of the country
were still buried deep beneath it.
There would be good nutting in the woods, and the girls had planned to
spend part of their time gathering the fruit of the trees.
“Maybe Miss Jessica will make us a nut cake, if we shell the nuts for
her,” Helen had suggested, to which the boys had replied in chorus:
“Just watch us!”
Now they were drawing into the station at Riverdale, the dear familiar
station, by whose little stucco, red-roofed waiting room their parents
had stood so many times. Helen could almost see her mother, her slender,
graceful, fair-haired mother, and her jolly, laughing father, waving to
them, welcoming them home.
The train came to a grinding standstill and the vision faded as all such
visions must fade, leaving nothing but a simple little station in a
rural setting, a few, wintry looking persons waiting for the train and a
vista beyond of bare trees and snow-covered houses.
“Which way?” asked Joe Morris. He had made his peace with Rose. The
latter was rosy-cheeked and laughing and seemed ready for whatever fun
might come her way.
“We turn to the right and follow the road,” said Helen, pulling her coat
collar up tight about her throat.
“Then we keep on walking, and when our noses begin to feel frostbitten
we know we are there,” added Rose, the irrepressible. “Joe Morris, if
you drop that box of candy, I will never forgive you. It’s half full
yet.”
“Stop squabbling and come on,” cried Margy, resolutely leading the way
with Lloyd Roberts. “My feet are getting cold.”
“Sure it isn’t your nose?” asked Joe hopefully, and they laughed at him.
“I was thinking of Miss Jessica’s flapjacks,” he explained. “My, but
this weather does give a fellow an appetite!”
“I don’t need the weather to give me one,” laughed Hugh.
“You said it!” Lloyd Roberts agreed fervently. “Mine is of the
ever-blooming variety!”
They passed through the main part of the town, which seemed very busy
and bustling, considering the size of it, and soon found themselves out
upon the open road.
It was a pretty road, and the woods on each side of it were so wild and
picturesque that the boys were tempted to explore them, even before the
sampling of Miss Jellicoe’s flapjacks.
“Ought to get plenty of nuts in these woods for any number of cakes,”
observed Joe, as they turned a sharp bend in the road. “I vote we take a
few handfuls to Miss Jessica, just as a gentle hint——”
“Look at that car!” Rose interrupted excitedly. “Doesn’t it act funny?”
They all agreed that the motor car, sliding and slithering toward them
over the snow-covered road, certainly did “act funny.”
“It’s skidding!” cried Margy, suddenly clutching Lloyd Roberts by the
sleeve. “And that ditch! Look, Lloyd—they are heading straight toward
it!”
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