THE HONOR GIRL by Grace Livingston Hill

had left undone for the past five years.
    And so at last she slept.

Chapter 8
    E lsie kept her own counsel most of the week. She avoided discussions with her aunt concerning Morningside, and she managed to turn the conversations away from the symphony concert whenever an approach to it threatened, so that her cousins asked no more unpleasant questions.
    But when a friend telephoned Friday evening and asked her to go to the university play Saturday afternoon, she declined on the plea that she had another engagement; and Bettina, overhearing, grew unmercifully curious, and began begging her to go to a famous moving-picture play with them Saturday afternoon. She evaded Bettina successfully, but Saturday morning Halsey Kennedy drove up in his big motorcar, and invited all three girls to go on an all-day trip with himself and a friend. Of course Elsie’s negative brought a torrent of exclamations and coaxings upon her, and Katharine and Bettina finally went off in a huff with the deeply disappointed young men.
    It was a little hard for Elsie, standing in the door watching them depart, to know that she might have had the front seat and the exclusive attention of Halsey Kennedy for the day if she had gone. The task she had set herself looked like a dismal one as she turned away from the brightness of the morning and went upstairs to prepare for it.
    She soon came down, however, in a street suit with a large neat bundle in her arms, and hurried away to the trolley car, thankful that her aunt had already gone to an early committee meeting of the Civic Section of the Woman’s Club, and therefore would not protest.
    She did not take a book along this time. There were things to think over and decide in her aunt’s house.
    She was the same girl, sitting in the trolley car taking the same trip she had taken the week before; and yet there was about her an air of purposeful strength that had not been there before. This girl now was not merely a creature of beauty enjoying life. She looked as though her eyes had been opened and her ears had heard the call to duty. There was a set about her pretty lips that did not speak of self-indulgence and a gleam in her pleasant eyes that made one feel that here was a girl who would accomplish something in life.
    She left the trolley car before she reached her father’s house. She desired to approach from the side street and examine things. The fact that she had heard nothing from her father during the week made her reasonably sure that he had not guessed that it was she who had made the mysterious visit last week. Still, she wished to remain unknown for a little while longer; so she walked around by the way of the store, left an order, and came back to the house by way of the side street, approaching the back door whence she had fled in the dusk of the evening.
    All was quiet about the house. The back door was closed and locked. A furtive glance at the windows revealed no sign of anyone in the house. She went up to the front door. Some one had picked up the papers and straightened the old chairs. One chair, the most dilapidated of all, had disappeared. Perhaps her example had incited a desire to keep things looking better. The leaves had been raked up about the door, and things outside did not look quite so forlorn, although there was plenty yet to be done. The lower step was weaker and more wobbly than ever.
    The day was warm for that time of year, and the gaunt cat had folded herself neatly together on the railing of the porch in the sun, her paws doubled closely, eyes like two tailored button-holes set slantwise in the lapels of a coat. A very common, cold little pussy, seeking to get warm in the sun, asking little of the world and receiving less.
    The key was under the mat, and Elsie looked anxiously about as she entered to see whether the good cheer she had left behind last week had remained.
    Yes, everything was in order, as if great pains had been taken to leave it so. The closet door was