Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-11-16
RHODA
A Red-Headed Girl
By Henry Kitchell Webster
Copyright ortiz Newspaper Alliance and
oitan Newspa
Copyright 1922 American Newspaper Alliance and
Metropolitan Newspaper Service.

walls all too clearly. He'd come to try
to make her father give her away, for
ever, to him. He'd spoken of her, ter
rifyingly, as "the child! But her ia
Their, though quiet and conciliatory at
first, had finally defied her uncle.
After her uncle had gone, her father
asked whether she had heard any of
their talk. She told him she had not,
She hadn't understood much of 1T at
the time, beyond her uncle's assertion
that her father had disgraced himself
and wasn't O fit person to bring up a
child. She must, though, have stored
up q good many Umcomprehended
phrases of that talk, or how could she
have been so sure, two or three years
later, when she read in the newspaper
of a sensational prosecution of another
professor, that this was the kind Of trial
her father had had.
Her father, of course, hadn't been
sent to prison. He had got off," But
why, If he hadn't done the horrible
thing, hadn't he gone back to the col
lege and she to school and Ann and
Alice and Amy come to play with her
again? Probably because people had
thought he'd done 1t, anyhow.
Their departure from the little uni
verSity town out in California had
seemed like running away to her and,
she was sure, to her father, also. She
could have got the idea from no one
but him, and it must have been pretty
strong to have quenched the pleasur-
able excitement she'd otherwise have
felt over her first long ride on the train,
They'd had a compartment and her
father, she remembered, had hardly
left it. She'd been warned not to talk
to people and especially not to answer
questions.
There was one incident she ~emem-
bered very clearly. Her fathers voice
had tagged and she'd looked up to see
If he'd fallen asleep. He wasn't asleep,
but staring out over the desert with
such a look of pain in his face that
she'd burst into tears.
He'd comforted her and had said the
only thing that he'd ever said in direct
reference to the catastrophe: 1--WE got
you" he told her, land they can't take
you away from me. And I'm going to
see to it that you shan't be the loser by
this thing that's happened to me. In
the long run, it may be just as we'll for
you that it did happen" .
At the time she'd no idea what he'd
meant by that. But the events of the
later years made it clear. He'd had a
scheme for making her rich, A scheme
that he'd never brought of, to be sure.
but one that, down to the very night of
his death, he'd never lost hope about.
She couldn't doubt, now, that he had
undertaken it for her. Nothing that
he'd ever said or done made it seem
that he cared anything about wealth,
except for the secure, happy life that
it would bring her.
Yet, as it worked out, it was that
hope of his, always on the point of
coming true, that had been the cause
of most of her unhappiness during the
four long years they had lived in that
Chicago hotel. She didn't know that
she had regretted them now. That
made pretty hard sort of problem to
work out. Most people, certainly,
would say II was q hnrrible way for a
child to be brought up.
The hotel itself was all right, one
of the less pretentious ones of the new
residential type. Her first impression
of it, especially after the rather dingy
boarding house where they'd lived for
the first little while upon their arrival
in Chicago, had been one OF unbridled
and incredible luxury; walls and pill
lars downstairs that she assumed to be
marble; swift elevators run by boys in
maroon livery; a headwaiter in a per-
petual dress suit.
Their own two rooms up on the tenth
nut and taupe upholstery, especially
perhaps the floor lamp with its heavy
silk shade, had carried out the idea
that they'd come to live in palace.
The kitchenette, with its electric stove,
had seemed q marvellous toy to her;
and their white tile bathroom, with its
modern plumbing and its never-failing
abundance Of hot water, had been a
luxury.
Shed taken 1t for granted, during
those first few days while breathless
she explored the wonders of the hotel,
that the wealth her father had
limited at was already in his pockets.
1t wasn't until he expressed concern
over her loneliness-it was beginning
to strike in a little-that she asked
him why, now that he was rich, he had
to work so hard and couldn't take a
little time of to play with her.
He'd smiled and told her he was not
rich yet, not rich at all, but that he
thought 1t wasn't going to be long, not
more than . few months at most, be-
fore he was. AS soon as that happened
he'd stop work and they'd go roaming
the world together. Meanwhile she was
to be patient and get along as best she
could.
CONTINUED in tomorrow's star.)