Free What the Heart Keeps by Rosalind Laker Page B

frustration. Not long afterwards she had cause again to rage against dubious circumstances. A widower came to collect an exceptionally pretty child for adoption. Well dressed, and with a cultured voice, he made a generous donation to the society in appreciation of its charitable work, but Lisa felt an instinctive abhorrence for him. Shut out by Miss Drayton, she implored Miss Lapthorne to intervene on the child’s behalf and not let her be taken away by him.
    “ Don’t be foolish, Lisa. He’s a gentleman,” Miss Lapthorne replied inanely. “He has a fine home in Ottawa and our fortunate orphan will lack for nothing. There’s no need to worry that he has no wife. He has assured Miss Drayton that his housekeeper is a most motherly soul.”
    Lisa trembled for the fate of that child. She had not grown up in an orphanage without learning a great deal of life through the experiences of other inmates. Her loathing of Miss Drayton increased, knowing that the woman must have closed her eyes to the obvious. Miss Lapthorne, on the other hand, was curiously innocent. For that reason alone, Lisa was able to forgive her for many stupidities.
    Another year dawned. Lisa passed her sixteenth birthday. The mirror in her room had reflected changes in her face and figure. She put up her hair into a knot at the top of her head. She sewed her own clothes. Although officially she still received no wages, Miss Lapthorne, perhaps fearful that she might leave for fully paid employment, made sure she received a small amount of money regularly out of the petty cash. If Lisa had not known herself to be a comfort and a refuge to many of the bewildered children who arrived at the Distribution Home, she would not have stayed. In moments of depression, she could see herself ending her days as another Miss Lapthorne. At least she had no desire to marry. Her single terrible experience had closed such doors for her.
    She often wished she had someone to talk to about everything and knew whom she would have chosen. In her little room she had a small Norwegian flag tucked into the corner of a framed text on the wall. She had cut it out from an old magazine illustrating in rather gaudy colours the flags of all nations. It kept Peter Hagen in the forefront of her mind. Not that she thought that she would ever forget him. More than that, the proximity of the flag to the words of blessing seemed to her to be a means of ensuring his safekeeping wherever he might happen to be.
     

 
    Four
     
    Peter Hagen had been in the United States for more than three years on the late August day in 1906 when he alighted from a train that had brought him to Toronto from Buffalo. If there was any difference in his appearance, apart from his being much better dressed, it lay in his muscular development, the last trace of the ranginess of youth lost in the full physique of a powerful man. There was little that he had not done in the way of heavy work since being pushed around and kept waiting and hustled along in the sheds of Ellis Island. His fierce Viking pride had made it difficult to tolerate the arrogance of officials, but once he was on the mainland he forgot his resentment in his interest in all there was to see. He had thought Bergen a big city, but New York was the size of many Bergens, and noisier by night and day than any avalanche he had ever heard.
    With his box on his shoulder, his homespun attire marking him out as a newly arrived immigrant, he had stared at everything from the windows of the stores to the handsome mansions on Fifth Avenue. He had an address in his pocket. There probably was not a Norwegian anywhere who set out on a journey, either at home or abroad, without a list of hospitable anchorages where he would be given a meal and a place to sleep by a relative, friend, or somebody recommended by either of the former. It was hospitality that was gladly returned in full measure when the opportunity arose, and Peter did not have the slightest doubt of his