Free Ariel Custer by Grace Livingston Hill

because your father sensibly prevented you from running away with a country lout poor as a church mouse and ruining your life that the worst thing that can come to a person is not to get married. Oh, you didn’t know I knew that, did you? But I am not so dumb as I seem. Because you’re an old maid you’re morbid about love and all that slush. Now, I want you to understand that you can mind your own affairs and keep out of mine hereafter.”
    With that she swept heavily upstairs to her room and locked her door noisily, spending the rest of the evening in a thorough cleaning out of her clothes closet and bureau drawers, thumping them hard on the floor when she brushed the dust out.
    Emily, her cheeks flushed to burning, turned with a humbled droop of her fine little head and went to the sink where she washed the dishes quietly with a few tears mingled in the dishpan, and left the kitchen as neat as a pin. Then she went up to her room, locked her own door noiselessly, and lay on her bed a long time trying to get steady and calm. After which she knelt in humiliation, asking for strength to carry on this tempestuous life that she had been called upon to live. It seemed to her that the very center of her soul had been taken out and, raked and bleeding, thrust back again within her throbbing body and that her innermost secrets had been held up to the ridicule of the world; so had Harriet’s cruel taunts tortured her sensitive nature. But after a while she grew calm and prayed for Jud. Poor patient, splendid Jud, and the sweet little girl who had come to live on their street.

Chapter 7
    M eanwhile, Ariel, in her little new room looking out on the pansy bed, was kneeling by a hard little iron bed and thanking her heavenly Father for this haven of rest.
    The room was small, but it was large enough for Ariel’s few worldly goods. Her little old trunk filled with her simple wardrobe, half a dozen books, and some old photographs were all she had to put away; and the trunk containing them would not come out from the city until the next day.
    There was a cretonne curtain with blue and green parrots amid red banana leaves across one corner of the room where she might hang her dresses, and there was a golden oak bureau, two chairs, and a little table with a wobbly leg beside the bed. It was clean enough and cheery enough for a girl who had spent two nights in city lodgings, and she appreciated finding it. Mrs. Smalley said she had a gas hot plate with two burners that she might have on a box in the corner to cook her own breakfasts on if she wanted to. There was a gas attachment where they used to have a little gas heater last winter. She said twenty-five cents a week would be all right for the extra gas, if she wanted to cook, and Ariel saw how she might cut down expenses still more by getting her own meals night and morning and eating a good lunch in the city in the middle of the day.
    She opened her bundle and began to put her things away. Miss Darcy had given her a pasteboard suit box, so her old satchel had been discarded.
    Some of her garments were streaked with dust from the street when she had fallen down, and as she brushed them and busied herself wiping out the bureau drawers and lining them with pieces of a newspaper she had brought home with her, her thoughts were busy with the way she had been kept since she had left home. She realized once more vividly how like a miracle it was that she had not been run over by that great truck that towered above her as she fell, or the big blue touring car that came to such a sudden halt above her very head.
    Or suppose she had broken her leg or her arm, and had had to go to a hospital and then be unable to work for days or weeks. She certainly had been kept miraculously. Of course she was no exception in the world. Other people were kept, too; each human life that went on from day to day was a continual miracle, but she felt the upholding so strongly in her own case because without it she