Valancy tried to read a story, but it made her furious. On every page was a picture of the heroine surrounded by adoring men. And here was she, Valancy Stirling, who could not get a solitary beau! Valancy slammed the magazine shut; she opened Magic of Wings. Her eyes fell on the paragraph that changed her life.
“Fear is the original sin,” wrote John Foster. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.”
Valancy shut Magic of Wings and stood up. She would go and see Dr. Trent.
VI
The ordeal was not so dreadful, after all. Dr. Trent was as gruff and abrupt as usual, but he did not tell her ailment was imaginary. After he had listened to her symptoms and asked a few questions and made a quick examination, he sat for a moment looking at her quite intently. Valancy thought he looked as if he were sorry for her. She caught her breath for a moment. Was the trouble serious? Oh, it couldn’t be, surely—it really hadn’t bothered her much—only lately it had got a little worse.
Dr. Trent opened his mouth—but before he could speak the telephone at his elbow rang sharply. He picked up the receiver. Valancy, watching him, saw his face change suddenly as he listened, “ ’Lo—yes—yes—what?—yes—yes”—a brief interval—“My God!”
Dr. Trent dropped the receiver, dashed out of the room and upstairs without even a glance at Valancy. She heard him rushing madly about overhead, barking out a few remarks to somebody—presumably his housekeeper. Then he came tearing downstairs with a club bag in his hand, snatched his hat and coat from the rack, jerked open the street door and rushed down the street in the direction of the station.
Valancy sat alone in the little office, feeling more absolutely foolish than she had ever felt before in her life. Foolish—and humiliated. So this was all that had come of her heroic determination to live up to John Foster and cast fear aside. Not only was she a failure as a relative and nonexistent as a sweetheart or friend, but she was not even of any importance as a patient. Dr. Trent had forgotten her very presence in his excitement over whatever message had come by the telephone. She had gained nothing by ignoring Uncle James and flying in the face of family tradition.
For a moment she was afraid she was going to cry. It was all so—ridiculous. Then she heard Dr. Trent’s housekeeper coming down the stairs. Valancy rose and went to the office door.
“The doctor forgot all about me,” she said with a twisted smile.
“Well, that’s too bad,” said Mrs. Patterson sympathetically. “But it wasn’t much wonder, poor man. That was a telegram they phoned over from the Port. His son has been terribly injured in an auto accident in Montreal. The doctor had just ten minutes to catch the train. I don’t know what he’ll do if anything happens to Ned—he’s just bound up in the boy. You’ll have to come again, Miss Stirling. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“Oh, no, nothing serious,” agreed Valancy. She felt a little less humiliated. It was no wonder poor Dr. Trent had forgotten her at such a moment. Nevertheless, she felt very flat and discouraged as she went down the street.
Valancy went home by the shortcut of Lover’s Lane. She did not often go through Lover’s Lane—but it was getting near suppertime and it would never do to be late. Lover’s Lane wound back of the village, under great elms and maples, and deserved its name. It was hard to go there at any time and not find some canoodling couple—or young girls in pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly talking over their little secrets. Valancy didn’t know which made her feel more self-conscious and uncomfortable.
This evening she encountered both. She met Connie Hale and Kate Bayley, in new pink organdy dresses with flowers stuck coquettishly in their glossy, bare hair. Valancy had never had a pink dress or worn flowers in her hair. Then she passed a young couple she didn’t know, dandering along, oblivious to everything but themselves. The young man’s arm was around the girl’s waist quite shamelessly. Valancy had never walked with a man’s arm about her. She felt that she ought to be shocked—they might leave that sort of thing for the screening twilight, at least—but she wasn’t shocked. In another flash of desperate, stark honesty she owned to herself that she was merely envious. When she passed them she felt quite sure they were laughing at her—pitying her—“there’s that queer little old maid, Valancy Stirling. They say she never had a beau in her whole life”—Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover’s Lane. Never had she felt so utterly colourless and skinny and insignificant.
Just where Lover’s Lane debouched on the street, an old car was parked. Valancy knew that car well—by sound, at least—and everybody in Deerwood knew it. This was before the phrase “tin Lizzie” had come into circulation—in Deerwood, at least; but if it had
