Mary Minds Her Business Part 18

Mary thought it over.

"If I kissed you, I would love you," she said, and tried to hide her tears no more.

He soothed her then in the immemorial manner, and soon she was tranquil again.

"Good-bye, Wally," she said.

"Good-bye, dear. You'll promise to be here when I come back?"

"I shall be here."

"And you won't let anybody run away with you until I've had another chance?"

"Don't worry."

She watched the light of his car diminish until it vanished over the crest of the hill. A gathering sense of loneliness began to a.s.sail her, but with it was a feeling of freedom and purpose--the feeling that she was being left alone, clear of distraction, to fight her own fight and achieve her own destiny.

Archey Forbes was the next to go. His going marked a curious incident.

He had applied for a commission in the engineers, and his record and training being good, it wasn't long before he received the beckoning summons of Mars.

Upon the morning of the day when he was to leave New Bethel, he went to the factory to say good-bye. The one he wished to see the most, however, was the first one he missed.

"Miss Mary's around the factory somewhere," said a stenographer.

Another spoke up, a dark girl with a touch of pa.s.sion in her smile. "I think Mr. Burdon is looking for her, too."

Archey missed neither the smile nor the tone--and liked neither of them.

"He'll get in trouble yet," he thought, "going out with those girls," and his frown grew as he thought of Burdon's daily contact with Mary.

"I'll see if I can find her," he told himself after he had waited a few minutes; and stepping out into the full beauty of the June morning, he crossed the lawn toward the factory buildings.

On one of the trees a robin sang and watched him with its head atilt. A bee hummed past him and settled on a trellis of roses. In the distance murmured the falls, with their soothing, drowsy note.

"These are the days, when I was a boy, that I used to dream of running away and seeing the world and having great adventures," thought Archey, his frown forgotten. He didn't consciously put it into words, but deep from his mind arose a feeling of the coming true of great dreams--of running away from the humdrum of life, of seeing the world, of taking a part in the greatest adventure ever staged by man.

"What a day!" he breathed, lifting his face to the sun. "Oh, Lord, what a day!"

It was indeed a day--one of those days which seem to have wine in the air--one of those days when old ambitions revive and new ones flower into splendour. Mary, for instance, on her way to the machine shop, was busy with thoughts of a nursery where mothers could bring their children who were too young to go to school.

"Plenty of sun," she thought, "and rompers for them all, and sand piles, and toys, and certified milk, and trained nurses--" And while she dreamed she hummed to herself in approval, and wasn't aware that the air she hummed was the Spanish Cavalier--and wasn't aware that Burdon Woodward was near until she suddenly awoke from her dream and found they were face to face.

He turned and walked with her.

The wine of the day might have been working in Burdon, too, for he hadn't walked far with Mary before he was reminding her more strongly than ever, of Steerforth in David Copperfield--Baffles in the Amateur Cracksman.

Indeed, that morning, listening to his drawl and looking up at the dark handsome face with its touch of recklessness, the a.s.sociation of Mary's ideas widened.

M'sieur Beaucaire, just from the gaming table--Don Juan on the Nevski Prospekt--Buckingham on his way to the Tuileries--they all might have been talking to her, warming her thoughts not so much by what they said as by what they might say, appealing to her like a romance which must, however, be read to the end if you wish to know the full story.

They were going through an empty corridor when it happened. Burdon, drawling away as agreeably as ever, gently closed his fingers around Mary's hand.

"I might have known," she thought in a little panic. "It's my own fault."

But when she tried to pull her hand away, her panic grew.

"No, no," said Burdon, laughing low, his eyes more reckless than ever, "you might tell--if I stopped now. But you'll never tell a soul on earth--if I kiss you."

Even while Mary was struggling, her head held down, she couldn't help thinking, "So that's the way he does it," and felt, I think, as feels the fly who has walked into the parlour. The next moment she heard a sharp voice, "Here--stop that!" and running steps approaching.

"I think it was Archey," she thought, as she made her escape, her knees shaking, her breath coming fast. She knew it was, ten minutes later, when Archey found her in the office--knew it from the way he looked at her and the hesitation of his speech--but it wasn't until they were shaking hands in parting that she saw the cut on his knuckles.

"You've hurt yourself," she said. "Wait; I have some adhesive plaster."

Even then she didn't guess.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know--"

Mary's glance suddenly deepened into tenderness, and when Archey left a few minutes later, he walked as one who trod the clouds, his head among the stars.

An hour pa.s.sed, and Mary looked in Uncle Stanley's office. Burdon's desk was closed as though for the day.

"Where's Burdon?" she asked.

"He wasn't feeling very well," said Uncle Stanley after a long look at his son's desk, "--a sort of headache. I told him he had better go home."

And every morning for the rest of the week, when she saw Uncle Stanley, she gave him such an innocent look and said, "How's Burdon's head this morning? Any better?"

Uncle Stanley began to have the irritable feelings of an old mouse in the hands of a young kitten.

"That's the worst of having women around,"--he scowled to himself--"they are worse than--worse than--worse than--"

Searching for a simile, he thought of a flash of lightning, a steel hoop lying on its side, a hornet's nest--but none of these quite suited him.

He made a helpless gesture.

"Hang 'em, you never know what they're up to next!" said he.

CHAPTER XIX

For that matter, there were times in the next two years when Mary herself hardly knew what she was up to next, for if ever a girl suddenly found herself in deep waters, it was the last of the Spencers. Strangely enough--although I think it is true of many of life's undertakings--it wasn't the big things which bothered her the most.

She soon demonstrated--if it needed any demonstration--that what the women of France and Britain had done, the women of New Bethel could do.

At each call of the draft, more and more men from Spencer & Son obeyed the beckoning finger of Mars, and more and more women presently took their places in the workshops. That was simply a matter of enlarging the training school, of expanding the courses of instruction.