New Name by Grace Livingston Hill Page B

up to know anything but the material in life. As it was, he named it “strange” and let it go at that. But he liked it. They fascinated him. A wild fancy passed through his mind that if he ever had to be tried for murder, he would like it to be here, among a people who thought and talked as these people did. They thought him like themselves, and he was not. He did not even know what they meant by some of the things they said.
    Between such weird thought as this, he certainly enjoyed his dinner, wineless and smokeless even though it was. There was a taste about everything that reminded him of the days when heused to go up to Maine as a little boy and spend the summers with his father’s maiden sister, Aunt Rebecca, long since dead. Things had tasted that way there, wonderful, delectable, as if you wanted to eat on forever, as if they were all real and made with love. Odd how that word love kept coming to him. Ah! Yes, and there was Mrs. Chapparelle. She used to cook that way, too. It must be when people cooked with their own hands instead of hiring it out that it tasted that way. Mrs. Chapparelle and the pancakes, and the strawberry shortcake with cream, made of light puffy biscuit with luscious berries between and lots of sugar. Mrs. Chapparelle! Her face had begun to fade from his haunted brain since the night he had looked into her kitchen window and had seen her go briskly to the door in answer to the ring. What had she met when she opened that door? A white-robed nurse, and behind her men bearing a corpse? Or had they had the grace to send someone to break the news first?
    The thought struck him suddenly from out of the cheerfulness of the evening, and he lifted a blanched face to Anita as she put before him his second helping of ice cream and another cup of coffee.
    And he was a murderer! He had killed poor Bessie Chapparelle, a girl a good deal like this Anita girl, clean and fine, with high ideals. What would these people, these kind, good people, think of him if they knew? What would they do? Would they put handcuffs on him and send for the police? Or would they sit down and try to help him out of his trouble? He half wished that he dared puthimself upon their mercy. That minister now. He looked like a real father! But of course he would have to uphold the law. And of course there wasn’t anything to do but hang him when he had killed a girl like Bessie! Not that he cared about the hanging. His life was done. But for the sake of his mother, who had never taken much time out of her social duties to notice him, and the father who paid his bills and bailed him out, he was running away, he told himself, so that they would not have to suffer. Just how that was saving them from suffering he didn’t quite ever try to explain to himself. He was running away so there would not be any trial to drag his father and mother through. That was it.
    He ate his ice cream slowly, trying to get ahold of himself once more, and across the room Anita and Jane happened to be standing together for an instant in a doorway.
    “Isn’t he stunningly handsome, Anita? Aren’t you just crazy about him?” whispered Jane effusively.
    “He’s good-looking enough,” admitted Anita, “but I’m afraid he knows it too well.”
    “Well, how could he help it, looking like that?” responded the ardent Jane, and she flitted away to take him another plate of cake.
    But the crowning act of his popularity came when Mr. Harper, president of the bank, senior elder in the church, and honored citizen, came around to speak with the young man and welcome him to the town. He had been detained and came in late, being rushed to his belated supper by the good women of the committee. He had only now found opportunity to find the new teller and speak to him.
    Murray rose with a charming air of deference and respect and stood before the elder man with all the ease that his social breeding had given him. He listened with flattering attention while the bank