CHAPTER XXI
THE NEW HOME
That was the beginning of a happier time for Betty Browning.
After having imagined such terrible things about her new home, she found the reality strangely unappalling.
The cottage, set well back from the street, was not pretentious, certainly, but neither was it unbeautiful. It had a good-natured, flat, comfortable look like a fat, jolly, woman who needs only a white apron to make her perfect.
A coat of paint—white paint—thought Betty, would work wonders.
Inside the rooms were pleasant. Bare at first, of course, but the distribution of the furniture brought from the house on Rose Hill soon remedied that.
Betty took a curious delight in putting the new home to rights. If any one had told her two months before that she would actually enjoy swathing herself in an unbecoming gingham apron and doing tasks that then the more superior of her mother’s servants would have scorned, she would have laughed at the joker.
But she did enjoy these things now, not so much for the sake of the tasks themselves as in her anticipation of the smile on her father’s tired face when, in triumph, she brought him in to exclaim over some further proof of her unsuspected housewifely talents.
He never failed to exclaim and, even on the occasions when the roast was overdone or the biscuits underdone, ate on manfully under Betty’s half-proud, half-fearful eye. In thinking of it afterward, Betty was convinced that he would have died of indigestion if need be, rather than disappoint her in the slightest thing!
There were disappointments, of course, and mistakes, some of them ludicrous and some of them almost tragic. But, in all, it was a happy time in which Betty and her father grew very close together and the cottage became a real home.
Meanwhile, time was passing swiftly. Late summer merged into fall, fall into early winter.
As Betty was Mr. Browning’s “right-hand man” at home, so Jane had become his “right-hand man” at the office.
Mrs. Powell had made up the dark blue serge she had found in the trunk—not without many unhappy thoughts of the secret she had discovered there at the same time.
Jane needed a coat, but she would have to wait for that. Meanwhile, the old one, carefully brushed and mended in a place or two where its shabbiness was most glaringly apparent, would have to do.
Mr. Powell’s hands were well at last, and, though he would always be dreadfully scarred and the left hand would always be a trifle stiff, he was able to look for work again.
The business of Martin and Hull had never been reopened. The two old men, without the heart to start again in the business fight, had pocketed their losses and were living in comparative obscurity on the outskirts of the town.
No chance for Mr. Powell there. But there must be other places in town where his services would be needed. With his usual optimism, Mr. Powell started on the dreary round of job hunting.
Mrs. Powell tried to be hopeful, too. With another wage earner in the family to lift the burden from Jane’s shoulders, the girl could have the clothes she needed.
Poor child! What if she could guess that secret hidden in the trunk upstairs! With all her heart, Mrs. Powell prayed that Jane might never know it!
In time the day came when Betty made her first visit to her father’s place of business.
In the talks between father and daughter, business news had crept in, too. Mr. Browning had mentioned Jane’s name occasionally, and Betty had become faintly jealous of this assistant of whom her father spoke in such glowing terms.
Betty longed to know this person, and finally decided that there was no reason why she should not.
It was on a dazzlingly bright day when the nippy tang of fall had given place to more bitter winter weather that Betty finally decided to visit her father’s office.
Her beautiful clothes and personal jewelry Betty had brought with her from the old life. She had found very little use for them since she had become her father’s housekeeper.
Now she took the clothes from her closet almost with a feeling of wonder that she had ever worn those things as a matter-of-course. She selected a beautiful jade-green dress that set off her brilliant fairness to perfection. Then she found the prettiest pair of black suede slippers she had and cobweb thin silk stockings.
She got out her squirrel coat with the silver fox collar. It was a beautiful thing, that coat. Betty thought of the many times she had worn it with her mother, and her heart was sore.
Betty wanted her mother more than she confessed, and many nights she could not sleep for wondering if that mother would ever come to her. There was dad. He needed her, too. Was he to be separated from his wife forever?
On these points Mrs. Browning herself did not enlighten Betty. She wrote often, but her letters were one long reproach to her daughter and the girl received little comfort from them.
That her father had letters too, Betty knew. They often came in the morning mail and Betty put them beside her father’s plate at dinner time, hoping that he would read them then and perhaps tell her something that was in them.
But this her father never did, and when his long silence on the subject of her mother continued Betty began to fear that the separation between the two people she loved best in the world was indeed final and that she would have to choose definitely between them in the end.
Now she fingered the squirrel coat caressingly, thinking of her mother, and at last put it on and pulled a small velvet hat of the same shade as the coat down tight over her ears.
The close-fitting hat hid all but a few distracting tendrils of golden hair. Betty arranged these in a still more becoming fluff about her face and regarded her reflection approvingly.
She was certainly as pretty a girl as one would see in a long winter’s walk, and, to do Betty justice, she knew it.
With a high heart she left the modest little cottage looking like the daughter of a millionaire, and walked downtown. People turned to stare at her as she went, and those who knew her wondered if Clyde Browning had got his money back or made another fortune.
“Certainly, pretty Betty looks like ready money!” observed one admiring youth.
Betty paused before the real estate office upon whose window her father’s name was emblazoned in large gold letters. It seemed a modest place to the girl, and there was resentment in her heart at the thought that her father must work there.
With a toss of her head and a discontented droop to her mouth, Betty turned the knob of the door and entered the office.