The Girl from Sunset Ranch by AMY BELL MARLOWE (best ereader for manga .TXT) 📖

all pretty. The Madison Avenue mansion gave them the open sesame into good society--choice society, in fact--and there some wealthy trio of unattached young men must see and fall in love with them.

And the girls understood this, too--right down to fourteen-year-old Flossie. They all three knew that to "pay poor papa" for reckless expenditures now, they must sooner or later capture moneyed husbands.

So, there was more than one reason why the three Starkweather girls leaped immediately from childhood into full-blown womanhood. Flossie had already privately studied the characters--and possible bank accounts--of the boys of her acquaintance, to decide upon whom she should smile her sweetest.

These facts--save that the mansion was enormous--were hidden from Helen when she arose on the first morning of her city experience. She had slept soundly and sweetly. Even the rustling steps on the ghost walk had not bothered her for long.

Used to being up and out by sunrise, she could not easily fall in with city ways. She hustled out of bed soon after daybreak, took a cold sponge, which made her body tingle delightfully, and got into her clothes as rapidly as any boy.

She had only the shoddy-looking brown traveling dress to wear, and the out-of-date hat. But she put them on, and ventured downstairs, intent upon going out for a walk before breakfast.

The solemn clock in the hall chimed seven as she found her way down the lower flight of front stairs. As she came through the curtain-hung halls and down the stairs, not a soul did she meet until she reached the front hall. There a rather decrepit-looking man, with a bleared eye, and dressed in decent black, hobbled out of a parlor to meet her.

"Bless me!" he ejaculated. "What--what--what----"

"I am Helen Morrell," said the girl from Sunset Ranch, smiling, and judging that this must be the butler of whom the housekeeper had spoken the night before. "I have just come to visit my uncle and cousins."

"Bless me!" said the old man again. "Gregson told me. Proud to see you, Miss. But--you're dressed to go out, Miss?"

"For a walk, sir," replied Helen, nodding.

"At this hour? Bless me--bless me--bless me----"

He seemed apt to run off in this style, in an unending string of mild expletives. His head shook and his hands seemed palsied. But he was a polite old man.

"I beg of you, Miss, don't go out without a bit of breakfast. My own coffee is dripping in the percolator. Let me give you a cup," he said.

"Why--if it's not too much trouble, sir----"

"This way, Miss," he said, hurrying on before, and leading Helen to a cozy little room at the back. This corresponded with the housekeeper's sitting-room and Helen believed it must be Mr. Lawdor's own apartment.

He laid a small cloth with a flourish. He set forth a silver breakfast set. He did everything neatly and with an alacrity that surprised Helen in one so evidently decrepit.

"A chop, now, Miss? Or a rasher?" he asked, pointing to an array of electric appliances on the sideboard by which a breakfast might be "tossed up" in a hurry.

"No, no," Helen declared. "Not so early. This nice coffee and these delicious rolls are enough until I have earned more."

"Earned more, Miss?" he asked, in surprise.

"By exercise," she explained. "I am going to take a good tramp. Then I shall come back as hungry as a mountain lion."

"The family breakfasts at nine, Miss," said the butler, bowing. "But if you are an early riser you will always find something tidy here in my room, Miss. You are very welcome."

She thanked him and went out into the hall again. The footman in livery--very sleepy and tousled as yet--was unchaining the front door. A yawning maid was at work in one of the parlors with a duster. She stared at Helen in amazement, but Gregson stood stiffly at attention as the visitor went forth into the daylight.

"My, how funny city people live!" thought Helen Morrell. "I don't believe I ever could stand it. Up till all hours, and then no breakfast until nine. What a way to live!

"And there must be twice as many servants as there are members of the family---- Why! more than that! And all that big house to get lost in," she added, glancing up at it as she started off upon her walk.

She turned the first corner and went through a side street toward the west. This was not a business side street. There were several tall apartment hotels interspersed with old houses.

She came to Fifth Avenue--"the most beautiful street in the world." It had been swept and garnished by a horde of white-robed men since two o'clock. On this brisk October morning, from the Washington Arch to 110th Street, it was as clean as a whistle.

She walked uptown. At Thirty-fourth and Forty-second streets the crosstown traffic had already begun. She passed the new department stores, already opening their eyes and yawning in advance of the day's trade.

There were a few pedestrians headed uptown like herself. Some well-dressed men seemed walking to business. A few neat shop girls were hurrying along the pavement, too. But Helen, and the dogs in leash, had the avenue mostly to themselves at this hour.

The sleepy maids, or footmen, or pages stared at the Western girl with curiosity as she strode along. For, unlike many from the plains, Helen could walk well in addition to riding well.

She reached the plaza, and crossing it, entered the park. The trees were just coloring prettily. There were morning sounds from the not-far-distant zoo. A few early nursemaids and their charges asleep in baby carriages, were abroad. Several old gentlemen read their morning papers upon the benches, or fed the squirrels who were skirmishing for their breakfasts.

Several plainly-dressed people were evidently taking their own "constitutionals" through the park paths. Swinging down from the north come square-shouldered, cleanly-shaven young men of the same type as Dud Stone. Helen believed that Dud must be a typical New Yorker.

But there were no girls abroad--at least, girls like herself who had leisure. And Helen was timid about making friends with the nursemaids.

In fact, there wasn't a soul who smiled upon her as she walked through the paths. She would not have dared approach any person she met for any purpose whatsoever.

"They haven't a grain of interest in me," thought Helen. "Many of them, I suppose, don't even see me. Goodness, what a lot of self-centred people there must be in New York!"

She wandered on and on. She had no watch--never had owned one. As she had told Dud Stone, the stars at night were her clock, and by day she judged the hour by the sun.

The sun was behind a haze now; but she had another sure timekeeper. There was nothing the matter with Helen's appetite.

"I'll go back and join the family at breakfast," the girl thought. "I hope they'll be nice to me. And poor Aunt Eunice dead without our ever being told of it! Strange!"

She had come a good way. Indeed, she was some time in finding an outlet from the park. The sun was behind the morning haze as yet, but she turned east, and finally came out upon the avenue some distance above the gateway by which she had entered.

A southbound auto-bus caught her eye and she signaled it. She not only had brought her purse with her, but the wallet with her money was stuffed inside her blouse and made an uncomfortable lump there at her waist. But she hid this with her arm, feeling that she must be on the watch for some sharper all the time.

"Big Hen was right when he warned me," she repeated, eyeing suspiciously the several passengers in the Fifth Avenue bus.

They were mostly early shoppers, however, or gentlemen riding to their offices. She had noticed the number of the street nearest her uncle's house, and so got out at the right corner.

The change in this part of the town since she had walked away from it soon after seven, amazed her. She almost became confused and started in the wrong direction. The roar of traffic, the rattle of riveters at work on several new buildings in the neighborhood, the hoarse honking of automobiles, the shrill whistles of the traffic policemen at the corners, and the various other sounds seemed to make another place of the old-fashioned Madison Avenue block.

"My goodness! To live in such confusion, and yet have money enough to be able to enjoy a home out of town," thought Helen. "How foolish of Uncle Starkweather."

She made no mistake in the house this time. There was Gregson--now spick and span in his maroon livery--haughtily mounting guard over the open doorway while a belated scrubwoman was cleaning the steps and areaway.

Helen tripped up the steps with a smile for Gregson; but that wooden-faced subject of King George had no joint in his neck. He could merely raise a finger in salute.

"Is the family up, sir?" she asked, politely.

"In Mr. Starkweather's den, Miss," said the footman, being unable to leave his post at the moment. Mr. Lawdor was not in sight and Helen set out to find the room in question, wondering if the family had already breakfasted. The clock in the hall chimed the quarter to ten as she passed it.

The great rooms on this floor were open now; but empty. She suddenly heard voices. She found a cross passage that she had not noticed before, and entered it, the voices growing louder.

She came to a door before which hung heavy curtains; but these curtains did not deaden the sound entirely. Indeed, as Helen hesitated, with her hand stretched out to seize the portière, she heard something that halted her.

Indeed, what she heard within the next few moments entirely changed the outlook of the girl from Sunset Ranch. It matured that doubt of humanity that had been born the night before in her breast.

And it changed--for the time being at least--Helen's nature. From a frank, open-hearted, loving girl she became suspicious, morose and secretive. The first words she heard held her spell-bound--an unintentional eavesdropper. And what she heard made her determined to appear to her unkind relatives quite as they expected her to appear.

CHAPTER XI (LIVING UP TO ONE S REPUTATION)

"Well! my lady certainly takes her time about getting up," Belle Starkweather was saying.

"She was tired after her journey, I presume," her father said.

"Across the continent in a day-coach, I suppose," laughed Hortense, yawning.

"I was astonished at that bill for taxi hire Olstrom put on your desk, Pa," said Belle. "She must have ridden all over town before she came here."

"A girl who couldn't take a plain hint," cried Hortense, "and stay away altogether when we didn't answer her telegram----"

"Hush, girls. We must treat her kindly," said their father. "Ahem!"

"I don't see why?" demanded Hortense, bluntly.

"You don't understand everything," responded Mr. Starkweather, rather weakly.

"I don't understand you, Pa, sometimes," declared Hortense.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing right now!" snapped the older girl. "I've ordered her things taken out of that chamber. Her shabby old trunk has gone up to the room at the top of the servants' stairway. It's good enough for her."

"We certainly have not got to have this cowgirl around for long," continued Hortense. "She'd be no fit company