Ariel Custer Read Online Free PDF

TOP, and bore down upon them. Someone extricated the man and the bicycle, and kind, strong hands lifted Ariel to her feet again. She found herself wondering if it was the Lord or one of His angels. A man picked up the satchel, all burst open with her little white garments flung around the street, but Ariel was too shaken and dazed to realize. Her face was flaming with mortification.
    “Can you walk?” roared the traffic officer.
    “Oh yes, I think so,” gasped Ariel, trying to smile, and wishing only to get away out of this throng to hide her mortification. To think she should have fallen in the street, and all her own fault the officer had said. He spoke so rudely to her. She was glad her grandmother could not know. He had asked her if she hadn’t seen his sign, and told her all women walked along with their heads down and expected to hold up traffic for half an hour while they meandered across the street. He had scolded her like a naughty child! And there were tears in her eyes. She must not cry in the street with all those people looking. And that was her satchel all broken open, and her toothbrush lying in the road. She could never use it again. And people seeing—! It was awful. Would she ever get away? Would they never get her little things picked up? And how was she to carry them now, with the handle off her bag and a great gash in its side?
    The young man who was picking up her things gathered her satchel under his arm. He was big and strong, and he put a hand under her sore, shaken little arm and guided her across to the sidewalk. She was beginning to feel the jar of the fall. Her knee was bruised, and her wrist hurt. Her head was throbbing, and little black specks darted before her eyes. She couldn’t somehow think. The young man seemed to know how it was, for he kept hold of her arm and guided her toward the door of the station.
    “Were you going in here?” he asked, and she tried to answer sanely, although she couldn’t remember afterward what she had said.
    He guided her toward the elevator and got her up to the waiting room into a seat before he spoke again.
    “Do you feel all right now,” he asked from what seemed a long way off, “or would you like me to get you a doctor?”
    “Oh no,” she said, rousing at that. “No, I’m all right. I’m just trembling a little yet—” But her voice trailed off and she put her head back and closed her eyes.
    The young man summoned a porter and sent for some aromatic ammonia. In a moment more, a glass was at her lips, and she swallowed the dose and then she did sit up and open her eyes, and the color came slowly creeping back into her face.
    “I’m so sorry to have made you so much trouble,” she said in her soft, pleasant Southern voice. “I don’t know what made me do like this—”
    “You had enough to take anybody’s nerve. Are you sure you are all right now?”
    “Yes, thank you.” She smiled, and the man knew that here was a girl he could respect.
    He smiled back a big, warm, gentle smile that made her feel he was her friend, yet presumed nothing. She was a Southern girl, used to hospitality, used to trusting people. A girl who had been sheltered phenomenally and was not alert to evil. He saw that she trusted him as a gentleman, and he felt a great yearning to protect her. She in her turn felt that he was the one whom the Lord had sent to guard her.
    The young man turned his attention to the dilapidated satchel that he had deposited on the seat beside the girl.
    “I’ll just tie this up so it will be safe to travel,” he said in a matter-of-fact way, spreading out the newspaper that was in his pocket and wrapping it around the broken, bulging leather bag.
    “Oh, please don’t take all that trouble,” said the girl. “It was an old thing. I’ll have to get a new one.”
    “Time enough for that tomorrow when you’ve rested up from the shock,” said the man pleasantly. He was deftly folding the paper and tying it with a string he’d