“Never mind me.” Hal made a gesture of self-depreciation. “It isn’t your fault because you can’t find it in your heart to love me.” He forced a smile, proudly trying to conceal his own desolation of spirit.
Her eyes remorsefully fixed on him the smile did not deceive Marjorie. Hal’s tensity of feature informed her of the weight of the blow she had just dealt him.
“Please, please, Hal, forgive me!” she begged with a sudden excess of pained humility.
“Forgive you? For what?” Hal bent a fond questioning glance on Marjorie’s troubled face.
“For – for – not loving you,” she faltered. “It hurts me dreadfully to know that I must be the one to make you unhappy. Forgive me for seeming to be so hard and unsympathetic about love. I’ve never thought of it for myself. It has always seemed vague and far away; like something not a part of my life. I know the love between Connie and Laurie is wonderful. I can appreciate their devotion to each other. I have the greatest impersonal reverence for love and lovers. But for me life means endeavor and the glory of achievement.”
The voice of ambitious, inspirited youth sang in her tones, half appealing though they were. Came an embarrassed stillness between them. Hal’s face, strong, even stern in its self-repression was turned partly away from her. The bleakness of his suffering young soul peered forth from his deep blue eyes as he stared steadily across the dimpling sun-touched waves.
“Nothing matters in life but love. To love and to be loved in return,” he said slowly, but with a kind of fatalistic decision. “You’ll love someone, someday, even though you can’t love me.” The shadow on Marjorie’s face deepened as she listened. It was almost as though in a flash of second sight Hal were telling her a fortune she did not care to hear. “When love truly comes to you, then you’ll understand what you can’t understand now,” he ended.
“I don’t want love to come to me. I don’t wish to understand it,” Marjorie made sad protest. “Since it isn’t in my heart to love you, I should never wish to love any one else. You’re the finest, gentlest, truest boy I’ve ever known, Hal, or ever expect to know.”
Hal’s half averted face was suddenly turned toward Marjorie. Across it flashed a rare sweet smile which lived long afterward in her memory. “It’s as I told you last night, Marjorie Dean. You haven’t grown up.” Tender amusement had mercifully broken into and lightened his gloom. “You only think you have,” he said. Marjorie’s naive avowal had brought with it a faint stirring of new hope.
“Yes, Hal, I’ve grown up,” Marjorie began seriously. “It’s not – ”
“You’ll never really grow up until love finds the way to your heart,” Hal interrupted with gentle positiveness. “I hope when it does it will be love for me. I can’t give you up, dear. I’m going to call you ‘dear’ this once. I’d rather have your friendship than the love of any other girl in the world. I’m going to wait for you to grow up.”
CHAPTER V. – A WARM RECEPTION
“Hamilton! Hamilton!” Marjorie Dean smiled to herself. Her expressive brown eyes grew brighter as the lusty call echoed through the car. One hand tightened about the leather handle of her traveling bag with the impatience of one who was longing to be free of the limited confines of the car. She peered alertly out of the open window at the familiar railway platform which lay deserted in the warm glory of a mid-summer sun. How strange it seemed to see the good old platform so bare and empty!
“Not a sign of Robin,” was her disappointed reflection. “What’s happened to her, I wonder? I’m evidently first here after all. She can’t have arrived yet or she would surely be out on the platform watching for me.”
The three or four persons, whose destination was also Hamilton were now moving down the aisle toward the car’s upper door. Marjorie did not follow the orderly little line of passengers. She turned and hurried to the opposite end of the car impatient to be out of the train. She was glad to be the only one to leave the car from that end.
“Oh-h-h.” She drew a half sighing breath of sheer loneliness. “What a dismal old place!”
She ran lightly down the car steps, eluding the brakeman’s helping hand, and came to an abrupt stop on the deserted platform. She stood still, casting a faintly disconsolate glance about her. It was hard, indeed, to believe that this empty space with the warm friendly sunshine streaming down upon it was Hamilton station, endeared to her by the memory of many happy meetings and cheerful goodbyes on the part of student friends.
“What had I better do?” was her next thought. “What a goose I was not to tear Jeremiah from the beach and bring her with me. Robin’s missing from the picture. That means I’ll have to be on the watch for her. How I’d like to walk in on Miss Remson at Wayland Hall this afternoon! Wouldn’t she be surprised, though?”
Marjorie cast a meditative glance toward the staid drowsy town of Hamilton. Robina Page, her classmate and partner of the good little firm of “Page and Dean,” as their chums liked to call them, had written that she would meet Marjorie at the station. From her handbag Marjorie extracted Robin’s latest letter to her. She glanced it over hurriedly. Yes; it read: “Friday afternoon, July 25th. I’ll be at the station to meet the three-twenty train. Don’t dare disappoint me.”
“It looks as though I’d be the one to meet the trains,” she murmured under her breath. Always quick to decide she made the choice between waiting patiently in the station building for the next train Robin could arrive on, or seeking the grateful coolness of the Ivy, in favor of the dainty tea shop. The train Robin might be on would not arrive until five-thirty.
Picking up her traveling bag which she had momentarily deposited on the platform Marjorie moved briskly toward the flight of worn stone steps leading to the station yard.
“If Robin shouldn’t be on the five-thirty train I suppose I’d best go to the Congress Hotel and stay there until tomorrow. If I should go on to the campus alone, I’d miss seeing her; that is, if she should arrive tonight. I’ll fairly absorb time tables and meet all the trains tonight except the very late ones,” was Marjorie’s energetic resolve as she swung buoyantly along the smooth wide stone walk. The brief moment of depression which she had felt at sight of the empty station platform had now vanished. She was again her sunny self, animated and bubbling over with the desire for action.
She was so intent upon her own affairs she quite failed to see three laughing faces frame themselves suddenly in a screened window of the station. Almost instantaneous with their appearance they were withdrawn. Their owners made a noiseless, speedy exit from the waiting room and flitted through the open doorway which led to a square of green lawn behind the building bounded by cinder drives.
Giggling softly as they ran the stealthy trio gathered in a compact little group at a rear corner of the building which Marjorie must pass on her way across the yard to the street.
“I’ll relieve you of that bag, lady,” croaked a harsh, menacing voice. The bag was snatched from Marjorie’s hand in a twinkling.
“Hands up!” ordered a second voice, only a shade less menacing than that of the first bandit.
“Boo, boo-oo, woo-oo-oo!” roared a third outlaw. The final “oo” ended in a sound suspiciously like a chuckle.
Completely surrounded by an apparently merciless and lawless three Marjorie had not attempted to retrieve the traveling bag. Instead she had pounced upon the smallest of the bandits with a gurgle of surprised delight.
“Vera Mason, you perfect darling! Where did you come from, Midget, dear?” Marjorie laughingly quoted as she warmly kissed tiny Vera.
“Out of the everywhere into the here,” Vera carelessly waved an indefinite hand and smiled up at Marjorie in her charming, warm-hearted fashion.
“And you, Leila Greatheart! So you’ve turned highwayman! I am pretty sure that I am the first victim. Very likely you planned with your partners in crime to practice