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While she hesitated there was a slight tap at the door and Miss Edith looked in. It was her evening to make the round of inspection. Seeing both girls apparently absorbed in their books, she closed the door and passed on. Five minutes went by, in which Betty kept glancing at Lloyd, almost on the point of speaking. There was another tap at the door, and before either could call Come, Ida opened it and beckoned. With an answering nod as if she understood, Lloyd gathered up her books and joined her in the hall. There was a whispered consultation, then Betty heard them go into Ida's room and close the door.
Feeling that the breach between them was growing wider every hour, and that Lloyd never intended to be friendly with her again, Betty laid her head down on her arms and began to cry. Not since she had lain ill and neglected in the bare little room at the Cuckoo's Nest, the time she had the fever, had she felt so miserable and lonely. Not once in all the time since she had been at Locust had she cried like that, with choking sobs that shook her whole body, and seemed to come from the depths of her poor little aching heart.
She was crying so bitterly that she did not hear Ida's door open again or light footsteps go cautiously down to the end of the hall. Somebody slowly and carefully slipped back the bolt that barred the door leading to the outside stairway. Then the knob turned, and two muffled figures stood outside in the moonlight.
"Hurry!" whispered Ida, catching Lloyd by the hand. Like two shadows they tiptoed down the stairs and across a little open space in the rear of the kitchen, till they reached the cover of heavier shadows, under the protecting trees. Then they ran on as if pursued, keeping close to the high picket fence.
Down in the old apple orchard, in the far corner where the fallen tree lay, they stopped at last, and Ida dropped breathlessly to a seat on the log, and leaned back among the twisted branches.
"There!" she exclaimed, throwing off the heavy golf-cape in which she had muffled herself. "Now I can breathe. Oh, I've been so upset all day, Princess. I felt as if I should choke if I stayed in that old building another minute. Besides, walls do have ears sometimes, and I wouldn't have anybody find out what I am going to tell you for worlds! It would get me into no end of trouble, and aunt would take me out of school again."
She paused a moment, and Lloyd, waiting expectantly, felt the witchery of the moonlighted night stealing over her. She had been Ida's confidante often of late. She knew the history of each friendship represented by each boy's photograph in Ida's collection, and she had found them all interesting, even when told in prosaic daylight. Beyond the shadowy old orchard a row of yellow-leaved maples gleamed a ghostly silver in the moonlight, and from the direction of Clovercroft stole the music of a violin. Some one was playing Schubert's Serenade. It stirred her strangely.
"Will you promise that you'll never tell a living, breathing soul?" asked Ida, finally, in a low voice.
"Of co'se I wouldn't tell," said Lloyd. "You know that perfectly well, Violet."
"Well, I'm engaged ."
"You're what?" exclaimed Lloyd, with such a start of astonishment that she nearly slipped off the log.
"Sh!" whispered Ida. "Somebody'll hear us if you talk so loud."
Feeling as if a chapter of some thrilling romance had suddenly opened before her, Lloyd sat up straight, waiting for the heroine to speak again. The moonlight gave Ida's face an almost unearthly whiteness, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. She had been crying.
"Aunt never wanted me to have anything to do with Edwardo," she began, in a low tone. "That isn't his real name,
but I always call him that. She took me out of the Lexington school because he lived near there. She thought that sending me down here would put an end to our correspondence, but it didn't, of course. We kept on corresponding, just the same. Some way she has found it out. She doesn't know that we are engaged. I don't know what she would be tempted to do if she knew. She is angry enough just about the letters. I had one from her this morning, and I saw one on the table addressed to President Wells, in her handwriting. There is no mistaking it. I am sure she has written to him to watch my mail and intercept his letters. I wouldn't have her get hold of them for anything, because she scorns anything like sentiment. She seems to think it is something wicked for young people to care for each other, and Edwardo's letters simply breathe devotion in every word."
The faint strains of the distant violin swelled louder as Ida held out her hand from which she had taken all the rings but one. She turned her white fingers in the moonlight, to show the glimmer of a pearl.
"He has told me so many times that that is what my life seems like to him," she said, with a sob in her voice, " a pearl. I know he has been awfully wild and fast, but when he tells me that only my influence over him can make him the man I want him to be, and that if it were not for my love and prayers he wouldn't care what became of him, or what he did, do you blame me for disregarding aunt's wishes? Don't you think it is cruel of her to interfere?"