Ariel Custer (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill

that she had forgotten to offer to pay her share of the meal. She couldn’t quite remember when he had paid the check, they had been talking so earnestly. Her cheeks grew hot over the omission. When she thought of it, it was rather awful of her to accept a dinner from an utter stranger. What must he think of her when he got away and thought over the evening! Yet he had said he would come again, and she must wait until thenor no, she had his address. She might send it to him, only how did she know how much to send? Well, she could find that out very likely by going to that room for another meal and examining the menu card.

      She sat in Miss Darcy’s big armchair and watched the crowds come and go; watched the ladies climbing into the high chairs nearby to have their shoes cleaned; watched the tired women with babies in their arms, the giddy ones with too much powder on their noses, the cross men who were waiting for their womenfolks. It was like a great panorama to her country-trained eyes. She had traveled a little with her father and mother while she was quite young, but the last five years had been spent very quietly with her grandmother in the old home, and it almost dazed her to be thus suddenly dropped down into the noise and bustle of city life.

      When she remembered that she was a stranger in a strange city without a job or a friend, and only a little over fifty dollars in cash between herself and starvation, she was appalled. Yet she was not alone, for her Lord was with her, and hadn’t He proved already that His messengers were all along the way? Sometimes they didn’t even seem to know they were His messengers. Who knew but she was sent to tell that young man about knowing God? He had seemed interested. Then, as was her custom to pray about everything at all times, she closed her eyes for a moment and prayed: “Dear Savior, help him to see and understand.”

      Miss Darcy stood beside her for an instant and watched the sweet, tired face with the closed eyes, the loveliness of outline, the purity of expression, and her heart went out to the lonely girl. Then she touched her gently on the shoulder, and Ariel opened her eyes and realized that here was another of God’s messengers on duty close at hand.

      CHAPTER V

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      Out in the darkness the suburban train sped through the night, stopping at every little station to let off a few late stragglers who did not get home to the evening meal. In the last seat of the last car, with his cap pulled unsociably far over his eyes, sat Judson Granniss, going over the occurrences of the evening.

      Strange that he should have been the one to pick up that girl! He remembered feeling annoyed when she fell just in front of him, for he had been running for his train. He had wanted especially to get that train that he might get at a bit of work he had promised to do for one of the businessmen in Glenside, going over his accounts for him. It would mean several extra dollars in his pocket, and he wanted the money. But he had missed the train and thought nothing about it until now. The accounts and the dollars seemed a small matter beside the evening he had spent.

      Now that he thought it over, it all seemed such a foreign experience for him to have a girl, alone, and he taking her to dinner, and anxious to do it! A stranger, and he going out of his way to find her perplexities when he already had enough of his own! Why hadn’t he handed her over to the police or an ambulance and run for his train? Why hadn’t he hunted up Miss Darcy at the start and at least got the seven ten home? Why had he lingered, and even been reluctant to come away now?

      Well, she was a wonderful girl. There was no question about that. Now here was a girl one could like. Why didn’t his mother get hold of a girl like that instead of Helena Boggs? He would like to have his mother meet this girl from Virginia and see what a real girl was like. How he would have liked to be able to say to the girl in her perplexity: “Come home to my mother. She’ll make it all right and show you what to do. She’ll welcome you and help you.” But he couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. He let his thoughts fancy for a minute what would have happened if he had attempted to bring home a girl he had picked up in the street for his mother to tend. And she would have known the circumstances almost before they got into the house. Trust his mother for that. She would have extracted it from them by a torturous method all her own, swift and cruel as death. He could remember the time he brought home a little lost puppy in a storm when he was a small child. Harriet Granniss had held her skirts away and waited only to decide on the social status of the little shivering beast, then she took the tongs and, holding him at arm’s length, thrust him out again into the night and the storm while her pleading son stood helpless before her wrath. He could remember the look of disgust upon her face as she slammed the door. And it would have been the same with Ariel; delicate Ariel with her cameo-face and her star-eyes. She would have been swiftly thrust into the blackness of a dark, strange world. Yet his mother was a good church member, a professed follower of that God that Ariel knew; a believer, so she declared, in the holy scriptures by which Ariel lived! How could the two things be possible? Both followers of the same Christ, yet with such varying results?

      He thought over the assured words of the girl, and into his heart there came a yearning to know a God like the one she owned.

      He thought of Emily Dillon. She was another one who believed and read the Bible. He had come upon her reading it at different times through the years, a little timid about being caught at it, yet very true to it and reverent about it. Suddenly he wondered if maybe it was that which made the difference in her life. He tried to think if there were more he knew who were guided by that Book, but could not be sure of any whom he knew well enough to judge.

      He did not go directly home but tried to find the man who wanted to employ someone in his office. He found him at last but only to hear that the position had been filled that morning, and he went home quite disappointed and trying to think how he might help to find Ariel a position. Somehow he could not bear to think of her having to return to Virginia. He wanted to get acquainted with her, to know if she was really as wonderful as she seemed.

      Harriet was terribly upset at his late homecoming. She had had Helena Boggs to supper, and there was steak and mushrooms she told him; and her purring voice berated him as she aired her grievances. She was like a hen scolding a chicken. It got on Jud’s nerves terribly. He finally went up to his room without telling his mother where he had been, which was an offense he knew he would have to answer for sooner or later. Harriet usually managed to get out of people just what they had done so that she might deal out adequate punishment.

      But tonight for some reason her son was not nearly so vulnerable as usual. His mind was wholly absorbed in trying to think up a job for Ariel Custer, and all too well he knew his mother’s ability to pierce his strongest reticence, so he took himself away to his own room and locked his door.

      Poor Harriet. She lay awake and wept her bitter tears about that boy. She never had understood what a wonderful boy he was, nor what a nagging, mistaken, bitter, domineering woman she was and she probably never would till the great day of Judgment and Understanding revealed it to her but she suffered intensely in her bitter way in every fiber of her big intolerant soul and body.

      So she lay awake and planned for her son’s good. Planned how Helena Boggs and she could make him over into the very amiable and pliant Judson Granniss that she had always wanted him to be, and confidently expected him to turn out to be someday, somehow, just because he was her son and she loved him.

      * * * * *

      In his small iron bed in a tiny hall bedroom in a house not two blocks away, Dick Smalley wakened after a restless sleep and began to plan for Harriet Granniss’s good. He figured that she needed a lesson. She had thrown a stone at his dog, Stubby, and driven him from a perfectly good bone that he had got for him at the market with five cents of his newspaper money. She had taken the bone, which the dog had dropped when the stone hit him, and thrown it into her garbage pail! It wasn’t her bone! She had no right! He had paid for that bone! Stubby wasn’t doing her any harm, just quietly eating it in her backyard to get away from that pest of a terrier that lived next door. He would have gone away if she had told him. He was only a dog. He didn’t know she minded. But she didn’t tell him to go. He knew, for he was delivering a paper at the side door of Harriet Granniss’s next-door