She reached the brick temple, unlocked the door and entered into the glacial twilight. “I’m glad I’ll never have to sit in this old vault again when other folks are out in the sun!” she said aloud as the familiar chill took her. She looked with abhorrence at the long dingy rows of books, the sheep-nosed Minerva on her black pedestal, and the mild-faced young man in a high stock whose effigy pined above her desk. She meant to take out of the drawer her roll of lace and the library register, and go straight to Miss Hatchard to announce her resignation. But suddenly a great desolation overcame her, and she sat down and laid her face against the desk. Her heart was ravaged by life’s cruelest discovery: the first creature who had come toward her out of the wilderness had brought her anguish instead of joy. She did not cry; tears came hard to her, and the storms of her heart spent themselves inwardly. But as she sat there in her dumb woe she felt her life to be too desolate, too ugly and intolerable.
“What have I ever done to it, that it should hurt me so?” she groaned, and pressed her fists against her lids, which were beginning to swell with weeping.
“I won’t–I won’t go there looking like a horror!” she muttered, springing up and pushing back her hair as if it stifled her. She opened the drawer, dragged out the register, and turned toward the door. As she did so it opened, and the young man from Miss Hatchard’s came in whistling.
Chapter IV
He stopped and lifted his hat with a shy smile. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I thought there was no one here.”
Charity stood before him, barring his way. “You can’t come in. The library ain’t open to the public Wednesdays.”
“I know it’s not; but my cousin gave me her key.”
“Miss Hatchard’s got no right to give her key to other folks, any more’n I have. I’m the librarian and I know the by-laws. This is my library.”
The young man looked profoundly surprised.
“Why, I know it is; I’m so sorry if you mind my coming.”
“I suppose you came to see what more you could say to set her against me? But you needn’t trouble: it’s my library today, but it won’t be this time tomorrow. I’m on the way now to take her back the key and the register.”
Young Harney’s face grew grave, but without betraying the consciousness of guilt she had looked for.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “There must be some mistake. Why should I say things against you to Miss Hatchard–or to anyone?”
The apparent evasiveness of the reply caused Charity’s indignation to overflow. “I don’t know why you should. I could understand Orma Fry’s doing it, because she’s always wanted to get me out of here ever since the first day. I can’t see why, when she’s got her own home, and her father to work for her; nor Ida Targatt, neither, when she got a legacy from her step-brother on’y last year. But anyway we all live in the same place, and when it’s a place like North Dormer it’s enough to make people hate each other just to have to walk down the same street every day. But you don’t live here, and you don’t know anything about any of us, so what did you have to meddle for? Do you suppose the other girls’d have kept the books any better’n I did? Why, Orma Fry don’t hardly know a book from a flat- iron! And what if I don’t always sit round here doing nothing till it strikes five up at the church? Who cares if the library’s open or shut? Do you suppose anybody ever comes here for books? What they’d like to come for is to meet the fellows they’re going with if I’d let ’em. But I wouldn’t let Bill Sollas from over the hill hang round here waiting for the youngest Targatt girl, because I know him…that’s all…even if I don’t know about books all I ought to….”
She stopped with a choking in her throat. Tremors of rage were running through her, and she steadied herself against the edge of the desk lest he should see her weakness.