The Fortunate Calamity, by “Pansy”

THE Formans were at breakfast, at least two of them were. The others were absorbed with the morning mail. The table was neatly spread, the aroma of coffee was in the air, and the plate of home-made cookies invited attention, but Jean, the youngest daughter, and Derrick, the son, were the only ones who paid the slightest attention to breakfast.

Jean was eating grapes, and Derrick, as he reached for the fourth cookie, said: “I wonder if I am expected to eat all these.”

Jean giggled. “You are getting well under way, I think; keep right on; I’m attending to the grapes myself. Only look at them!—I mean the folks, Dickie dear, not the grapes—even mother is lost in a letter. I wonder who it can be from? It’s an awfully long one.” Then she raised her voice: “I think one of you might read aloud for the benefit of Dick and me—and the cookies; mother, there won’t be a single cookie left if you don’t attend to Dick.”

Thus roused Mrs. Forman laid down her letter with a little sigh, and grasped the handle of the coffee pot as she said: “What is it you want, Derrick, a cup of coffee?”

“No, mother; no coffee for me. I’ll just take a cookie or two and be off.” Saying which he reached for his fifth and, to the sound of Jean’s laughing protest, hastily left the room.

Mrs. Forman did not smile; she was still preoccupied; but she tried to rally her thoughts. “Joseph your coffee is getting cold. Girls, will you have coffee? Have you letters from any of the relatives?”

“Mine isn’t,” said Florence, the second daughter. “It is from Nannie Douglass; they are at Delmont, and expect to stay through the month. Oh mother, I wish I could have Nannie spend a week with me while they are so near.”

There was a pathetic note in her voice suggesting the hopelessness of the wish, but the mother, usually quick to sympathize, did not respond to it even by a glance. Ray, the observant oldest daughter, noticed the tightening of muscles about her father’s mouth, and knew that, although he was supposed to be absorbed in his paper, he had heard. She telegraphed a note of warning to her sister, who, however, did not need it. The girl had returned to her neglected muffin, her face grave and sad; but evidently she had thought, and meant to say no more.

“My letter,” said Ray, “was from the girls, all of them; they are at Ocean Beach for a week together; only four of the class missing; isn’t that doing well for so large a class?”

“Eleven girls!” Jean exclaimed. “What a babel they must make! I hope they are not all at the same boarding house! Where are the others?”

“The others? of the class? Why, Edith and Emily Prentiss are still in the East; Edith is studying music in Boston.”

“And the other two?” persisted the heedless Jean. Her sister turned grave eyes upon her.

“Don’t you remember, Jean, that Celia Roberts died only a few weeks after commencement?”

“Oh, I remember; and you are the fourth? Poor Ray! you ought to be there this minute.”

Mr. Forman rose up suddenly, his coffee still waiting. “I must go,” he said. Mrs. Forman protested anxiously; wouldn’t he let her give him a cup of hot coffee? No, he wouldn’t; he murmured something about it being later than he had realized, and hurried away.

Mrs. Forman waited until the door closed after him, then spoke in a discouraged tone: “I wish, Jean, you could learn to be a little more considerate of your father’s feelings; it is hard enough for him to be compelled to deny you all sorts of pleasures, without having it stabbed into him.”

“It was horrid of me, mommie,” said the penitent Jean. “I wish I hadn’t such an awful forgettery; but father knows that I didn’t mean a thing.”

“He and the cookies skipped, I guess, while you were reading that long letter,” Florence explained. “Who is it from, mother?”

Mrs. Forman looked down at the closely written pages and sighed, as she answered: “It is from Aunt Caroline, and it is all about your Aunt Elsie; she wants us to let her come here.”

“It is a long story, girls, going back before you were born; but the part that concerns us now is simple enough. The woman who has lived with Aunt Elsie for years, and cared for her like a daughter, has recently died, and there must be an entire change of arrangements.”

“Well,” Florence said, after an ominous silence, “why should that make it—what about Aunt Caroline? Why doesn’t she look after her own sister?”

“Company,” she says. “Two of her husband’s relatives to stay through the fall, one for all winter, perhaps. Besides, she has no suitable downstairs room; and there are half a dozen other reasons; the main one, I imagine, being that she doesn’t want her.”

“Neither do we,” murmured Jean, but no one noticed her, and Mrs. Forman continued.

“Those sisters have not been together, except for a few hours at long intervals, since they were young girls, and they seem to have nothing in common.”

Then Florence interposed: “Why doesn’t she go to Uncle Evarts? He has a large house and servants to wait on her.”

“That, your Aunt Caroline says, is quite out of the question. It seems that the married daughter has come home to spend the winter, and has three little children. Your uncle says it would be very bad for his sister to be shut into a furnace-heated house all winter in the centre of a great city, ‘with three lively children who would fit her for the lunatic asylum before the winter was half over.’”

Mrs. Forman had taken up her letter again and was quoting from it. A silence that suggested consternation fell upon them, broken presently by Jean.

Mrs. Forman’s expressive eyes rested full upon her youngest daughter, with a shade of rebuke in them.

“Well, but—” Jean hesitated, her face flushing under the rebuke, then she hurried on: “Mother, it isn’t just an ordinary visit; you said for all winter, didn’t you? That is what it means, anyway; and she is only a half aunt; it isn’t as though she were father’s own sister; he doesn’t even know her very well; it seems as though he had enough—”

She left her sentence unfinished, but the mother answered what she had meant to say.

“He certainly has, Jean; for that reason we must not do anything to make it harder; he has always looked upon your Aunt Elsie as his sister, and although he left home when he was a mere boy he remembers her perfectly as a little child of whom he was fond; it would break his heart to be compelled, with all the rest, to deny her any kindnesses she may need.”

“But that’s just it; she can’t help being an added burden, and there are her own sister and brother, both of them with plenty of money; they could do a great deal more for her than we possibly can. Do you really think he would want her to come if he realized that?”

“Of course, Jean, he will want to receive his sister if she wants to come. We can manage to make her comfortable, can’t we, mother?”

“Well, I must say I don’t see how,” Florence said, without waiting for her mother. “You say Aunt Caroline has no downstairs room, and I’m sure we haven’t; why isn’t that an excellent reason for her not coming? For that matter we haven’t an upstairs room, either, that would be nice for her, unless—how could we possibly manage it? Mother, why don’t you speak?”

Mrs. Forman spoke with evident effort: “There is only one way, Florence; your father and I would have to take an upstairs room.”

“I know—but there is no other way; Aunt Elsie is lame, and stairs for her are out of the question; but I am sure your father would rather move out of the house altogether than be forced to turn down this appeal for his help. We can manage to be comfortable upstairs, I think, in any room that our children are-willing to give up to us.”

She attempted a smile. Ray spoke quickly: “Of course, mother, if it comes to that you and father must have our room; Jean can go with Florence.”

Groans followed from both of the younger girls, but Jean recovered speech quickly and wanted to know what Ray proposed to do with herself; did she mean to dress on the back porch, as well as sleep there? Then, dolefully: “Oh, Ray, your lovely big room, with all your college things in it! how can you?”

“Never mind, Jeanie,” the girl said, brightly. “Don’t you know how often we have said that mother and father ought to have that room? I could manage nicely with the little one back of it, but I was thinking—will it do, mother, to leave Aunt Elsie alone on the first floor?”

Mrs. Forman admitted that it might not be right for a lame person to sleep so far from others, yet she did not know how else to plan; that was certainly the only downstairs sleeping room, and there was no other that could be converted into one. Then Ray wondered if a couch could not be set up in the little trunk room if the trunks were moved to the attic; she believed the room was long enough on the south side for a cot, and, if so, she could sleep there and be within call.

“It has a wide window, Jean dear; I could sleep with my head out of doors if I chose; and think what a nice roomy place I should have upstairs, with the bed out of the way; I can do it nicely, mother, if you want to plan it so.”

Mrs. Forman sighed again, and said that Ray was doing, once more, what she had done ever since she was able to think and plan—sacrificing herself for others; she, the mother, ought to be used to it, but it did seem a pity that it must always be the same one on whom the burden fell heaviest. She arose from the table as she spoke, the others following her lead. Jean, as she clattered the cups and saucers, gathering them for the little maid in the kitchen, continued to express her mind, with no listener save herself. “All I have to say is that I think there are a lot of awfully selfish people in this world, and they don’t all live in this house, either. I just detest rooming with Florence, but, of course, I’ll do it, and mother knows I will; she needn’t think that Ray does all the sacrificing. If I were Aunt Caroline, or Uncle Evarts—which, thank goodness, I’m not—I should be ashamed to look any of us in the face after this.”

Nothing had occurred for months to upheave the Forman household as did this letter from Mr. Forman’s youngest sister. The family had grown accustomed, at least in a degree, to straitened means and careful economies. Mr. Forman’s failure in business had occurred when Jean, the youngest, was a mere child; yet she distinctly remembered the great house on Duval Circle, and especially the fine car in which she daily rode, attended by a maid. The others, of course, had vivid recollections of the refinements and luxuries, as well as of many things that they used to name necessities, that had to be given up when the crash came; but time had softened much of the bitterness connected with the change; they were even growing used to the small, plain house on Fourth Street and one untrained little maid, although they still never went in the vicinity of Duval Circle if it could be avoided; and Florence had not yet trained herself away from occasional outbursts over the changed conditions. These, however, were very rare in her father’s presence. She still remembered with remorse the day when, after an especially harrowing experience, she had burst forth with: “Oh, if father could only have been persuaded not to trust that horrid man who is responsible for all this” and then had heard a heavy book drop to the floor with a thud, and a deep groan from the father whom she had supposed was not in the house. A moment afterwards the door of the little reading room, which now served as his library, was quietly closed, and save for the look of unutterable reproach on her mother’s face as she closed it, no reference was ever made to the incident. But that groan had burned into her heart. Jean, under like circumstances, would have rushed into her father’s arms and fairly smothered him with kisses while she poured forth a volume of regrets and frantic promises never to do so again; she would also be liable to forget it all, before the day was done, and fail in exactly the same way. Florence was different. However, they all, in their differing ways, had for a central object in life the saving of their father’s feelings.

MRS. FORMAN and her two daughters, Ray and Florence, were in the attic studying the possibilities of certain stowed-away pieces of furniture; also arguing as to the merits—or possibly demerits—of a set of old curtains.

Florence was sure that they would not do at all for Aunt Elsie’s room, although while she said it she was oppressed by the thought that new curtains were not even to be mentioned. Only that morning her mother had tried to impress them with the fact that even very small expenditures must be carefully guarded; they really must not for the present spend an unnecessary penny. It evidently comforted the poor lady to use that phrase “for the present,” although they knew she had a haunting fear that the future would not make the pennies more plentiful.

“If we had a new edge to replace this dreadfully frayed one, we might make these curtains answer for the present,” she thought aloud, rather than said, and the sentence closed with that much-worked word “but,” which is capable of eloquently leaving unsaid many things.

“I’ll crochet an edge for them. Don’t you know that little lace edge I made for Jean’s waist? With coarser cotton it would make a pretty curtain trimming, and the pattern is so simple I can make it very fast. I’ll begin it to-night; I have the cotton.”

“Florence,” said Mrs. Forman, “if I should declare that I didn’t know how to get along another day without a new house, don’t you think Ray would say, ‘I’ll make you one?’”

By way of answer Florence said grimly that if Ray had been one of those old Israelites she would have had no trouble at all in making bricks without straw.

Then the front door opened and closed with a bang, and Derrick’s shout was heard through the hall. “Mother! Ray! where are you all? Say, mother, don’t you think they are coming to-day, on the two-fifty!”

“Uncle Evarts and Aunt Elsie, and I don’t know how many more. Where’s mother? Say, mommie, daddy had a telegram; here it is; he sent over to our school for me to get excused and skip home with it and stay here and help. What do you want first?”

By this time Mrs. Forman had the telegram in hand and read it aloud: “Compelled to go East to-night; must bring Elsie. Reach Welland afternoon train Friday. Evarts.”

“The idea!” said Florence. “Isn’t that cool? He hasn’t even given us time to write and say that she could come.”

“That’s what he’s after,” Derrick explained. “Says he to himself: ‘I’ll rush the old lady off before they have a chance to say no, then they’ll just have to take her in.’ See? Trust Uncle Evarts for being sharp, every time.” But no one was heeding him. Mother and daughters were making a rush for that downstairs room to try to accomplish in breathless haste the dozen or more “last things” that were waiting for a leisure hour.

Left to himself the boy, with hands thrust into his pockets, tramped about the attic for a few minutes, curious to see what the great unfurnished room, which he seldom visited, had, stowed away in its keeping. He passed a number of interesting-looking packages, from whose bulging ends he caught glimpses of things that he could utilize in his “shop,” and mentally resolved to forage here some day and see what he could find. But he carried a divided mind, and although he whistled a few bars as he ran downstairs it was a rather gloomy-faced fellow who presently appeared before his mother for orders.

Being a boy who was distinctly loyal to his father, Derrick Forman had made very few remarks aloud about the family innovation; nobody but himself, at least so he fondly believed, knew how utterly he disliked the thought of it. He did not in the least remember his Aunt Elsie, although there was a tradition in the family that once in his very early childhood she had kissed him fervently and declared that he “looked enough like father” to be her brother.

“I’m awfully glad that I’m not!” he told himself, savagely, as he recalled the incident, “and I wish she were in Jericho. She isn’t a speck like my father, I know that; none of ’em are; but that’s something to be glad over. A fellow can afford to shout over the fact that he isn’t a bit like any of them.”

He had a distinct boyish recollection of his Aunt Caroline and his Uncle Evarts, and disliked them both. Aunt Caroline, as he remembered her, was always saying: “Dear me! Why do you yell so when you talk? None of your family is deaf.” Or: “If you were my boy I should give you a good whipping every time you rolled down stairs in that lubberly fashion.” Or: “For pity’s sake, Dick, don’t whistle all the time! your family do not seem to have any nerves.” “An everlasting nagger,” was the phrase with which he summed up her defects.

Yet after all, the real thorn in his heart was the fact that his aunt had not confined her “nagging” to the girls and himself, but was given to much advising his mother, and finding fault with her ways. He had a vivid memory of Aunt Caroline’s voice, high and insistent, as it came out to him when he stood in the hall waiting for a chance to speak to his mother: “You really ought to insist on Joseph’s having things fixed conveniently for you in the kitchen, at least; you can’t expect to keep a girl unless you furnish her with some of the modern conveniences; in these days they won’t stand it. Joseph ought to know that there are labor-saving devices that all respectable people use. He doesn’t understand, of course; men never do; but you ought to be firm about it; because he chose to trust a man that nobody else would, and so lost all his money, is no reason why he should let his family go without ordinary comforts. I’ll risk that he could raise some money for you if he knew he had to.” Then his mother’s voice, too low for him to hear, and his aunt’s again, in reply: “Oh, now, Louise, there is no use in getting on your dignity just because I mentioned Joseph; I’m sure I didn’t say anything against him; I said not a word more than I would of my own husband if he had been such a fool as to place confidence in that man. You need to remember that I knew Joseph long before you did, and, in some respects, I think I know him better now than you do.”

How the boy waiting in the hall hated her! He wanted to burst in upon her and say, fiercely: “You let my mother alone! She knows a great deal more than you do about everything; and don’t you dare to say another word about my father; he is the best father in the world, and we all think so; and I’m awful glad that he isn’t the least little speck like you.”

Of course, he did nothing of the kind; instead, he gave over the hope of a word with his mother, and went noisily down the hall, whistling very loud, and banged the door as hard as he could; these demonstrations being for his Aunt Caroline’s benefit. But he nursed his dislike of his aunt through the years; nothing in his after experiences helping to change his impressions of either her or his Uncle Evarts. He was all ready to dislike his Aunt Elsie as soon as she appeared. Even the memory of those early kisses rankled in his thoughts. What if she should think she could kiss him now, when he was taller than his father?

“If she tries it on me,” he muttered, “I’m afraid I’ll shake her. O yah! what a mess! Wish I was to be done with high school to-morrow, and could get out of this town. Home is spoiled, anyhow.”

His sister Ray, as she watched him a few minutes later swing down the street on an errand for his mother, had a shadow on her face over this very fear. It had been troubling her thoughts for days. Were they spoiling home for Derrick? If they were—ought it to be done? Derrick, the heedless, noisy, fun-loving boy, who rarely stopped to consider whether his fun was a pleasure or an annoyance to even his best friends. Derrick, who was inclined to be—gay; she had almost thought that hateful word “fast!” Already he liked the streets at night too well, and was chafing a little even under the very mild restraints that they had tried to throw around him. If this unknown aunt were like her sister and brother, might she not drive him from home altogether?

Ray Forman could not have told the precise time in her life when she began to shoulder responsibilities and try to devise ways for relieving the family burdens. It seemed to her that she had always known that both father and mother had more work and care than they ought, and that Florence and Jean, and especially Derrick, were not old enough to realize it, but she was, and must help. Right royally she had been doing it for years. The winning of a scholarship had enabled her to spend two years in an institution far in advance of the local college where she had expected to graduate. She had paid her board during this time by teaching for two hours each day in the preparatory department; and her incidental expenses had been so much less than her sister’s as to call from their father the dry remark that they ought to have sent Florence also, for economy’s sake.

It was not alone in money matters that Ray helped. To both Jean and Derrick she had been more like a mother than a sister. Derrick especially, since the time when she had followed him patiently through the long, bright days of his second summer while her mother lay ill, had seemed to be her very special charge. He had accepted her watchful care with cheerfulness, even with satisfaction; often, from force of habit, rushing in search of her—when in need of help—instead of his mother.

It was only quite recently that she had begun to feel a foreshadowing of restiveness under her suggestions. Not that he had outspokenly rebelled; nor referred to her fretfully as the others did occasionally. More than once Florence had been heard to exclaim: “Oh, Ray, don’t be so awfully old maidish! What’s the harm?” The utmost that Derrick had allowed himself was a good-humored drawling jibe, like: “Oh, yes, grandma, I’ll be careful; I won’t even get my feet wet when I go in swimming,” or some kindred sarcasm intended to emphasize the folly of her solicitude; yet Ray understood and puzzled over it all, questioning sometimes as to whether she was helping, or hindering.

That hint of “old maidishness” touched a sorer spot in her heart than her sister realized. There were hours when she assured herself that there was no prospect of her being able to leave her mother with a daily increasing burden of work and care upon her, and set up a home of her own; the only honorable course for her was to explain this to Kendall Forsythe and beg him to give up even hope; it was more than a year since she had promised to be his wife, and at that time they had hoped and believed that the way would very soon open for them, but instead it had seemed to close even more securely with each passing month. Kendall’s mother, who had been his housekeeper and daily companion since the time when they two were suddenly left alone together, front being a very efficient and capable woman had dropped into permanent invalidism, to be cared for by the son, who was still struggling with an insufficient salary and the promise of a larger one when conditions permitted; and there were no present indications of a rise.

Notwithstanding all this the young man steadily urged immediate marriage; he had gone over the whole ground carefully, he assured Ray, and with pencil and paper and eloquence he tried to convince her how much better the salary could be managed if she were there to help. When, after careful where consideration and the shedding of some bitter tears, she reached the point where she urged upon him honorable freedom, representing it as the only wise course, he merely scoffed, not considering the suggestion worthy of being treated seriously. She might talk to him about that, he said, on his hundredth birthday; certainly before that date he should not be ready to give it the slightest attention. Nevertheless, Ray, glad over his unhesitating refusal to listen to her, was yet seriously considering that she ought to take steps which would compel him to do so. In all his rose-colored plans for their mutual spending of his salary, Ray had given no voice to the one word that loomed before her portentously; that fateful word—clothes. She knew that she realized, as he could not, that Ray Forman, one of the girls in her father’s unpretentious house, could be clothed respectably on a much smaller sum of money than would suffice for Mrs. Kendall Forsythe, who would enter a family that had for generations made a bride the excuse for all manner of social functions, of which she was expected to be the centre. The Forsythe family, at least that portion of it to which Kendall belonged, were no longer wealthy, but they were aristocratic, and were looked upon as one of the oldest and most honored of the “first families”; as often as Ray tried to imagine herself making ready to be the lady of honor at one of their dinner parties she shivered and thought of her father’s burdens. Certainly they must not marry yet, not for a long time, probably; and the probability grew to certainty in her own mind as she watched the trend of circumstances. Now here was coming Aunt Elsie to add to the household duties and expenses! Certainly she ought to have that emphatic break with Kendall that would mark her hereafter as one who had a right to be “old maidish.”

Her thoughts were hovering about matters like these when she heard a suppressed shout from Jean: “Ray! Ray Forman! Where on earth are you? They’ve come! Two hours before the train is due. Did you ever! Florence says you are to come down quick and see to them; she hasn’t got the room ready yet, and mother is in the oven.”

DESPITE the startling nature of that last announcement Ray answered the summons quietly enough; she was used to Jean. As she neared the living-room she could hear her uncle getting off smooth, easy-flowing sentences that somehow gave the impression of thoughts clothing themselves in words without any help from the speaker.

“Yes, the limited stopped at the junction for us; I didn’t think it would, we were so late getting in; it is interesting to see what diplomacy will accomplish; saved us nearly two hours, which is a good deal of time to a busy man, not to mention having an invalid in charge; but Elsie is a capital traveller in spite of her crutches. I made it as easy for her as I could, of course; parlor car and all that sort of thing; and Dick here did the honors at the station splendidly. I say, Dick, you are almost a man, aren’t you? I was expecting to see a little chap; I had forgotten how time flies; I’ve reached the age, you know, when it is convenient to forget the passing years; let me see—how old are you, anyhow?”

At this point Ray decided to open the door; there seemed to be no use in waiting for a full period. Her entrance simply changed the current of the flow of words.

“Hello! if here isn’t—let me see—not Jean, of course, but—oh, yes, Ray, to be sure. I’m great on mixing names. It is a good while since I’ve seen you, though.”

Ray helped him by reminding that she was away from home on the occasion of his visit three years before.

“That’s so,” he said, briskly. “I remember all about it now; you are the oldest girl, of course. Bless me! Elsie, think of Joe’s oldest being a fresh young girl yet in her teens.”

Ray, in all the dignity of her twenty years, only laughed; Uncle Evarts never really desired information, and she felt that he neither knew nor cared how old she was. Words flowed on.

“It is bewildering, anyhow; here is Dick sprung up in the night like a mushroom! I should never have known him in the world if he hadn’t claimed me for an uncle. By the way, Dick, what is it to be? law, medicine or theology?”

But Derrick, every line of his pressing annoyance, muttered something about not being absolutely driven toward any of them, and made his escape under cover of his mother’s entrance. She had emerged from the “oven” with her face much flushed and a dab of flour on her left cheek. Her brother-in-law effervesced again at sight of her.

“Upon my word, Louise, I can’t see that you look much older than you did the day Joe brought you home a bride. How do you contrive to cheat old Father Time so successfully? Look at those cheeks, Elsie.”

“They must be reflecting the cook stove,” Mrs. Forman managed to say, while the stream of compliment was still flowing.

Ray, in the background waiting for a chance to carry off her aunt and minister to her comfort, felt her face rippling into laughter as she recalled a remark of her mother’s, made several years before: “If Evarts ever said anything he would be worth listening to, he has so many words at his command.”

It would have been hard to find two people more unlike in every respect than were Evarts Forman and his sister Elsie. He was above medium height, straight as an arrow and well proportioned; he wore his clothes with the air of one who knew they were faultless, and gave one the impression of being always at ease, knowing to a fraction what ought to be said or done next. His sister was much below the average height of women, and was used to being described by her sister Caroline as “dumpy.” She had scant gray hair unbecomingly arranged, and although her blue eyes must once have been bright they had faded and were growing dim. Her dress was plain to severity, and was unmistakably the work of a country dressmaker. As for her conversational powers, on this day at least, she seemed to have almost no words; but, after all, that was not strange when her brother Evarts was present to furnish volumes.

In the privacy of Jean’s room that evening her disrespectful nephew expressed his opinion to his boon companion.

“Isn’t she just about the homeliest critter you ever looked at? Turned-up nose, and no eyes to speak of, and the oddest little wad of gray hair perked on top of her head. I can’t imagine how she and Aunt Caroline ever came to be sisters.”

“She is mortally homely,” Jean agreed. “But then she isn’t the least bit like Aunt Caroline in other ways, and I’m sure that is a comfort. I can see why she didn’t plan to go and live with her, can’t you? Aunt Caroline would simply crush her!”

“She would sit down on her, all right; you can bet your life on that. If it weren’t for having her around all the time spoiling everything, a fellow could be almost glad that she is to have mother, instead of a woman like Aunt Caroline; mother will be lovely to her.”

Jean sighed. “Yes, and so will Ray. I don’t see why people who belong to the same family are so different; there are regular sets of us; mother and Ray make one set and you and Florence and I the other.”

“Father doesn’t belong to the family, I suppose!” Derrick chuckled. Jean joined the laugh, then grew suddenly serious.

“Father doesn’t belong to the sets,” she said. “He is all by himself; he tries, but he doesn’t rise above things as mother and Ray do. I suppose it is because responsibilities rest heavier on him. Dick, what is going to become of us all, anyhow? Can’t you see that things are growing harder all while? I’m just afraid that by the time you and I get ready to take hold there won’t be any father to help.”

“Don’t croak!” said Derrick, in a changed and as cross a tone as he ever used to this favorite sister. He left her at once, but did not whistle as he went down stairs, nor for a full half-hour afterwards.

Uncle Evarts, notwithstanding his joy over those two hours saved from the train, thus enabling him to continue his journey that same evening, changed his mind and stayed over night. His brother and sister-in-law gave him their newly acquired room and took refuge in Derrick’s, and that long suffering youth “slept around in any old place” to quote his own language. Also Uncle Evarts stayed for morning family worship and led in prayer, and the two who were sure to talk things over together discussed him from this standpoint on their way to school, Jean leading with:

“Do you know, Dick, I like Uncle Evarts less when he prays than at any other time?”

Derrick laughed. “I ‘like him less’ so much on all occasions,” he said, “that I don’t often stop to particularize. What is the special grievance about him then?”

“Oh, I don’t know; I can’t put it into words; he has a lot of high-sounding phrases that would mean really wonderful things if one only meant them at all; but when he uses them, they seem like cathedral bells tolling simply to be heard; just sound, you know, no soul behind them. I can’t describe the feeling they give me, but—father’s prayers never seem like that.”

Derrick’s only reply was a request that she would have the goodness not to mention father and Uncle Evarts in the same sentence, because he didn’t think he could stand their being brought so close together. On the whole it was evident that their uncle’s suave efforts at comradeship had not been successful. Ray and Florence were less outspoken, but they, as well as the younger ones, had resented their uncle’s attempts to be sympathetic with their mother.

“It is too bad, Louise,” he had said, a few minutes before his departure, “to have Elsie foisted upon you in this way. I told Caroline that I thought she ought to plan to have her for part of the winter, at least; but I made no impression; she insisted that it was no more than fair for Joe to take his turn first, since he was the oldest. She doesn’t realize how hard up poor Joe is; I didn’t myself, until I saw him this time; grows old fast, doesn’t he? Poor old chap! Between you and me, Louise, Caroline is a bit tempted think of her own comfort first. Well, I wish I could do something myself, but you know how my hands are tied. Elsie is a good soul, she won’t make any more trouble than she can help; and perhaps by another year something will turn up. Who knows? That’s my car, isn’t it?”

As they watched him spring briskly to the platform, and wave his hand in graceful farewell, Florence gave vent to her pent-up feelings.

“I must say I detest that man! He talks about Aunt Elsie as though she were a bale of cotton to be dumped down wherever it happened. Wouldn’t I hate to be beholden to him! ‘Poor Joe’ indeed! what right has he to speak in that way of father? Didn’t you feel like choking him, mother?”

For the next two days the Forman family struggled with the problem of being and doing just as usual, with the consciousness always upon them that there was an added member who made all things different. They succeeded fairly well. Ray spent most of the time with her aunt, unpacking and regulating, and stooping over boxes and baskets and reaching up to hooks and shelves that were all beyond the powers of the little lame woman. Much planning had been necessary in order to lodge many things in a small space, for Aunt Elsie had certainly brought many things. Jean grumbled over that fact in her characteristic way: “Whatever Uncle Evarts and Aunt Caroline meant, that little woman has evidently planned to spend her life with us.” And Derrick replied, with energy:

“Humph! they did the planning. You bet your life those two know what they are about. They mean that ‘poor Joe’ shall do his share with a vengeance! If I were father I wouldn’t stand that sort of thing.”

However, the two who had done most of the settling were well pleased with the result. At the Friday evening dinner table Aunt Elsie announced that, thanks to the most efficient helper a lame woman ever had, she was all settled, ready to begin to live. She had owned, however, to being very tired and had gone early to her room. The younger Formans speculated as to whether that might be her usual habit, every one of them owning to the hope that such was the case; though Ray did her best to keep the cheerful side of the innovation in the forefront. Aunt Elsie, she said, had been ever so nice, all day; not a bit fussy or overparticular. She had loads of pretty things, but she had not been afraid to have them touched, and had been cheery and genial throughout the weariness of unpacking and settling. She had not lost her good nature even when none of her boxes would fit on the shelves where she wanted them to go. But Florence was not to be comforted.

“Why shouldn’t she be good-natured?” she had demanded, fiercely. “You did all the work and she had only to sit and look on and give orders. Oh, you needn’t tell me; I know as well as though I had watched the whole performance that you worked all day like a slave, and fixed every last thing exactly as she wanted it. I only hope she has sense enough to realize what a downy nest she has dropped into! Father treats her as though she were a queen, and mother—well, we all know what mother is.”

“But think of poor Ray,” Jean interrupted. “She lives almost in the same room, ready to be summoned any minute, day or night. The rest of us can go on living much as usual except at meal times, and prayers, and a few such functions, but Ray will have her all the time. I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, Ray Forman! It’s a blessed thing that I am not the oldest daughter; I couldn’t play the part worth a cent; but you will do it beautifully.”

Still, on this Saturday morning things were not quite as usual anywhere in the Forman household. Or rather they were, as Jean expressed it, “a good deal more ‘usual’ than they usually were.” Trouble had begun when it was admitted that Ray must go to town to look after errands that only she could manage. Jean had complained that the business in hand would keep Ray in town “the whole blessed day,” and her mother had looked so grave when she acknowledged this that it had immediately called forth another outburst.

“Mother remembers that she must get through with Saturday’s baking and frying and all other extra-ing without the help of her efficient eldest daughter, and only Jean to take her place. O mommie! I’m almost sorrier for you than I am for myself.” Whereupon she flew at her mother with kisses and caresses, petitioning her not to worry; that she, Jean, would help all day like a tornado; see if she didn’t.

Florence’s dismay over the state of things had been too deep for words. She felt that they all ought to know without her saying it that she would be by far the greatest sufferer through Ray’s absence. A function of importance in her social world was to take place that evening. A classmate who was about to marry into aristocratic circles had invited a very select few to meet the prospective groom, and Florence, being one of the elect, had her best gown partially ripped ready to undergo a severe refurbishing. Of course, there had been a tacit understanding that Ray was to assume the lion’s share of the work. Mrs. Forman had not for several years been able to do much sewing, and she frankly admitted that since Ray had come to the front she had lost what little skill in that direction she had possessed. No wonder that Jean, having almost smothered her mother, had turned to the trouble-faced seamstress with another doleful:

“Poor Florence! I’m awfully sorry for you; if I only knew how, I could help you like a whirlwind.”

“I have no doubt but you would, and be almost as useful!” was Florence’s answer.

She was too troubled to be other than sarcastic over the doubtful offer. It was just at that moment that the thump of a crutch was heard in the hall.

“OH, DEAR!” Florence groaned, as her ear caught the sound; “if Aunt Elsie is coming in here I may as well give up; I can’t sew, with her looking on. Why can’t she stay in her room when we have given up the best one in the house for her use!”

“Good-by,” said Jean, with a spring toward the door that led to the kitchen. “I belong to the culinary department, thank goodness. Poor Florrie!”

The thump of the crutch stopped and presently the door of the dining-room swung back to admit Aunt Elsie.

“I thought likely you were sewing,” she said, cheerfully. “I brought my thimble and spectacles, thinking there might be something that I can do.”

Florence made haste to explain. “Oh, thank you, but this is just some fussy sewing that I have to do myself; I’m fixing over an old dress, and of all stupid tasks I consider that the worst.”

“It is pretty,” said her aunt, examining the goods with critical eye, “and the color just suits you, doesn’t it? You will have to hem it over again, won’t you? That is done by hand, of course?”

“I’m sorry to say that it is,” Florence admitted, with a sigh. “The machine won’t do for this thin stuff; I tried a little bit and it looked horrid.”

“Do you ever hem with ravellings? In goods of this kind they generally do nicely; here is a scrap that would be just right to ravel out; suppose I hem a little bit, and see if it looks well?”

Florence gave reluctant consent, with doubt in her heart; she was what Jean called “fussy” about her work, and she had never sewed with “ravellings”; she resolved to watch closely and be ready with objections at the earliest possible moment. But while the volunteer was choosing a needle Derrick came ready to do the errand that had been asked of him, and to ask innumerable questions. Just what was it she wanted at Wheeler’s and where was the thing to be matched. Must he undertake to match it, or would the clerk do it for him. Just exactly how much did she want, and what would it probably cost. If he did not find it at Wheeler’s was he to go elsewhere, and if so, where. Florence had to hunt through boxes and baskets for the desired samples, then go to her mother for advice as to measurements, then find her pocketbook for Derrick to use, as he announced himself “dead broke.” When she at last turned from him to give belated attention to ravellings her remarks were all exclamatory:

“You don’t mean that you have done it! Have you been all round that skirt already? Why it is only a few minutes since you began! Do look at it! The stitches are not there at all! I mean I can’t find one of them! How perfectly lovely! I just dreaded that hem! Aunt Elsie, I believe you are a witch!”

“It doesn’t take long to hem with ravellings,” Aunt Elsie said when she was given a chance to speak. “I saw the stitches weren’t going to grin, and as you were busy with Derrick I pushed right on. Now suppose you let me put in these sleeves? I’m a master hand at sleeves; I took lessons how to do them, of a first-class dressmaker’s.”

Florence, who was not a “master hand” and had dreaded the sleeves almost as much as the hem, relinquished them with a relieved sigh, and boasted of them the next time she made a dash to the kitchen to consult her mother.

“Don’t you think, they came right the first time! and even Ray has to rip them out once. She goes at things as though she had been a dressmaker all her life; and she’s quick, too.”

When the garment reached the trying-on stage, and Florence was posing before the sideboard mirror, her aunt, who had worked steadily and skillfully on other than hems and sleeves, asked a question that was even then puzzling the young girl:

“How are you going to finish the neck? Is it to be faced, or bound, or what?”

“I guess it will have to be ‘What,’” Florence said, trying to laugh. “I don’t know how to fix it, I am sure. I suppose I shall use the old collar again in some fashion; it is too small, and not the right shape anyway, but it will have to do.”

“It could be set on with a bit of lace,” she said, presently. “Wide lace, you know, falling below it, and a narrower bit above, of the same pattern; you have seen them made in that way, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes, I have; that is the very latest style; but you see the trouble is I haven’t the lace. Mother used to have a piece of nice lace that she lent to us girls on occasions, but it was in that dreadful trunk that was lost in the railroad accident. It seems sometimes as though nearly everything we had that was worth much was in that burned-up trunk.”

“I wonder if I haven’t a bit that would do for this dress,” the elder lady said, thoughtfully. “I believe I have, if there is enough for the sleeves, too. Suppose you climb up to that highest shelf in my closet and get the little green box at the left corner, and we’ll measure and see.”

Florence made a vigorous protest and, failing, went with a reluctance that covered dismay. What had she done now! She heard herself trying to argue with Aunt Elsie over a strip of cheap lace to prove, without hurting her feelings, that it was not suitable for the dress in question. What if she should fail and be obliged to accept it?

“I won’t do it!” she told herself, firmly, as she climbed after the green box. “She has helped me a lot, and I’m thankful, but I simply can’t reward her by tricking myself out in her old cotton finery; not if she were father’s mother, instead of his half-sister. Oh, dear! If Ray were only at home, she would help me out of this scrape. I don’t care! We can’t sacrifice everything in order to save her feelings. I’m just going to tell her that I can’t use it.”

But in less than half an hour from that resolute moment this same maiden was standing before the sideboard mirror, aglow and eyes very bright, “tricked out” in Aunt Elsie’s “finery,” and what she was telling her was this:

“Oh, Aunt Elsie! I never saw anything so lovely in all my life! It is as fine as a cobweb, and so wide! Dear me! I should like to have Frances Powell see this; she thinks she has the most wonderful piece of old lace in the world; it was her grandmother’s and it is beautiful, but nothing like this! May I just show it to her some time? Of course, I do not mean on the dress; I couldn’t think of wearing it. Oh, I wouldn’t for the world! It is much too fine for me.”

Said Aunt Elsie, stepping back to view it with a critic’s eye: “It would look better, I believe, dropped a little lower on the shoulder; just let me try it. There, isn’t that more graceful? Stand still, dear, until I pin it all around, then I can sew it on in a minute. Nonsense, child, of course you will wear it; that is what it is for; I’m glad there is enough for the sleeves; I was a little bit afraid—but there is plenty.”

The lace went to the party that same evening, accompanied by a radiant girl, who, as she surveyed herself in the mirror confided to Jean that, thanks to Aunt Elsie, she felt herself to be really well dressed for the first time in her life.

“The idea!” Jean said, “when you have worn that same dress dozens of times.”

Jean regarded her gravely, with a faraway look in her eyes; evidently her thoughts were elsewhere. Unconsciously to herself she began to sing softly:

“What on earth!” began Florence, wheeling about to stare at her. Jean laughed shamefacedly.

“Evidently you don’t think my selection fits the occasion,” she said. “It was your ‘glorified’ dress that did it. That is a song we are to sing next week at vespers; it is a very catchy tune; I find myself humming it half the time.” Whereupon she sang again:

“To be sure, you are a pilgrim going away from home,” she broke off to say, “but you have ‘put on glory’ all the same. You look too lovely for anything, as Florry Mitchell is always saying. Aunt Elsie ought to give you that lace; it just fits you. How queer for her to have such a costly cobweb as that! I wonder how it feels to be near that other home?” She was humming again:

“Well,” said Jean, with a graver face than one often saw her wear, “things are dreadfully mixed in this life. You know that Helen Darroll who stayed to dinner here the night it rained so hard? She has been planning for more than a week for that dancing party to-night at Dr. Willard’s; couldn’t think or talk of anything else; and just before school closed to-day she had a telegram that her father had been thrown from his horse and killed.”

“Isn’t it? So sudden! She is travelling home to-night, instead of dancing. I wonder if her father has ‘put on glory’? I hope he was a good man.”

Florence gave her sister another quick, searching look, and after a moment said: “You are a very strange girl, Jean, do you know it?”

“Why?” Jean asked. “What is there strange about hoping that a man who had to exchange worlds without a moment’s warning was ready for it? Florence, the way that lace falls back from your arms is exquisite; I shouldn’t wonder if you would be the most becomingly dressed girl there. Isn’t it time you were off? The moon has risen. Oh, look! isn’t it a glorious night!”

She drew back the curtain to gaze on the shimmering glory, and Florence went downstairs to the sound of her voice trilling:

An hour later Derrick came clattering downstairs and bounced into the family sitting-room with an imperious question: “Where is Ray?”

When his mother explained that Kendall had taken her out for a moonlight walk, he growled: “Oh, bother Kendall! He is always carrying her off just when a fellow needs her most. I can’t make any sense of this mess and I’ve gone over it fifty times, at least. I wish there wasn’t such a language as Latin, anyhow, or else I wish that a fellow like me had—”

At that point he stopped, and his mother took up the unfinished sentence: “Had a mother who knew enough to help him out of trouble, was that what you were about to say?”

“Not much it wasn’t!” with a quick little flash from expressive eyes. “I’ve got exactly the kind of mother I like best; but I wish I had brains enough to see through a thing, without everlasting drudgery; I spend more time on my Latin than all the fellows do put together, and then don’t more than half know. Ray, now, could tell in two minutes what all this fool stuff is about. Why can’t I see it?”

Then from a voice just behind him came a surprising suggestion: “What if you should let me have a peep at it, young man? I used to be called a fairly good Latin scholar once; I may not have forgotten all of it.”

Derrick turned suddenly. Up to that moment he had not noticed that his Aunt Elsie was in the room; and he thought he would not have been more astonished if the bronze figure supporting the droplight had offered to help him.

“Do you know Latin?” he asked, with an emphasis on the pronoun that marked his amazement. His aunt laughed good-naturedly.

“Try me,” she said, as she reached for the book in his hand. “I used to be somewhat familiar with this book, which is open to the very page over which I once puzzled, for—I believe I won’t confess how long; but I’ll venture to guess that this second paragraph is the one that you sit up nights with.”

“You’ve guessed right the first time,” he said, gleefully. “If you can help a fellow out of a snarl like that, I shall conclude you are a witch. None of the boys can make sense of it.”

As he spoke he kicked a hassock toward her and seated himself on it; Aunt Elsie, book in hand, bent toward him, and for the next half hour the two were absorbed. At the end of that time, Derrick gave a triumphant whistle.

“There you are!” he stopped to say, pounding his translation for emphasis. “Straight as preaching; never believed it could be done. I say, Aunt Elsie, you’re a trump! Who would have thought that old—I mean that a woman of your age would—would be interested in Latin!”

Aunt Elsie laughed. “I used to be wonderfully interested in it,” she said. “Very few of the girls in our neighborhood studied Latin; it wasn’t as common then as it is now, but I wanted to do everything that my brother did. The brother you are named for was the best Latin scholar in our school.”

At this Derrick frowned slightly, and cast a quick look at his aunt as he said: “I was named for my grandfather.”

“I know—and for your Uncle Derrick as well; your father’s brother; you know of him, of course?”

By this time they were alone; Jean, after yawning over her books for a while, had declared herself too sleepy to study, and said good-night. A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Forman had slipped away to see if her husband’s head was better, leaving the two absorbed ones to their Latin. Derrick glanced around to make sure that no one else was within hearing before admitting that he had heard of such a person, but had never felt any great desire to claim him as an uncle.

“Then you do him very great injustice,” his aunt said, quickly. “He was worthy of your respect, as well as your love; you didn’t know him, of course, but I did; I knew him as a child, and he was the dearest big brother a little girl ever had; if you knew all that I do about him you would be proud to claim Derrick Forman as an uncle.”

Derrick, the nephew, made flourishing capital D’s all over the blank half page in his exercise book and considered.

PRESENTLY he asked a question: “Wasn’t there something pretty shady about him, Aunt Elsie? I never knew just how it was, only—well, mother told us kids not to ask father any questions about his oldest brother because it made him feel badly to even think of him, and I know we got to feeling that he wasn’t the sort of uncle to be proud of, to say the least.”

Then he had a new view of his aunt; her gray eyes flashed as he had not dreamed that they could, and her voice rang: “Do you mean me to understand that that old story is hanging around yet! Doesn’t Joseph—doesn’t your father know that there wasn’t a word of truth in it?”

“I don’t know much about it, Aunt Elsie, that’s a fact. Mother told us children once, a good while ago when I was just a kid, about the stolen money, and how they came to know that father’s brother took it; and—” Aunt Elsie interrupted him:

“They didn’t know any such thing; it was false, Derrick, utterly false; your Uncle Derrick did not take a penny of that money any more than you did, and they drove him wild trying to make him confess a thing that he had never done.”

“Well, anyhow, they thought he did; and he ran away and stayed away, didn’t he? And isn’t that just exactly the way a thief would act? What made him do that, if he was all right?”

His aunt spoke more quietly, she was evidently holding herself in check, but her voice was as firm as before:

“It seems almost beyond belief that you haven’t been told all about it. I can not think that your father doesn’t understand; it doesn’t seem possible that Evarts and Caroline could have been so cruel as not to—but there! I mustn’t judge them; they must have thought they were doing right.”

Derrick’s interest was on the increase; his own opinion of Uncle Evarts and Aunt Caroline was such that he could fancy them doing anything they pleased which would further their own interests. He closed his Latin reader with a slam and, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, in the attitude of attention, said eagerly:

“Begin at the beginning, Aunt Elsie, and tell me all about it. Honestly, I never heard much about father’s home folks and the time when he was a boy.”

“The beginning of this,” said his aunt, “dates back to the time your Uncle Derrick chose for a friend a boy who wasn’t worthy of his friendship. I suppose you never heard of Horace Beach? I knew him well, and never liked him, although he was smooth-spoken enough, and tried to pet me; it seemed as though I always knew he was a kind of sneak. He was several years older than Derrick, and had great influence over him; mother used to say that Horace Beach could make him do anything he chose. The last time the fellow was at our house was a Christmas vacation; Derrick coaxed to be allowed to bring him home with him, because his mother was in Europe and he was lonesome; and he had word to go out and join her, before the vacation was over. If she had only sent a few days sooner poor Derrick’s life would have been very different.”

“What happened?” questioned the listener. He saw that his aunt was in danger of losing herself among mournful memories.

“Why, father’s old college friend, Colonel Banks, was visiting us, and one evening he showed us children a very curious leather belt that he said he always wore when travelling; he was a great traveller. I think he had been twice around the world, and that was a great feat in those days. The belt was to carry his money; gold, he always had, for his journey. He said he would be for weeks together where there was no bank or exchange office, or any way to get money. It is all arranged differently now, but he grew to liking that way so much that he said he carried his money about with him even when he was where banks were handy. He had it filled with gold that night; he showed it to us. The bag had an opening at one end that shut with a spring lock, and one who did not understand couldn’t have opened it. Then he showed us how it clasped about his waist, with another spring, that he said sometimes he couldn’t unlock, himself, without a good deal of fussing. I guess I remember every word he said about it, and every other thing that happened that night and the next day; it seemed sort of burned into me; and I wasn’t quite nine years old, either. While he was showing us this, and talking about it, a neighbor came to call; and very soon after that the boys, Derrick and Evarts and Horace, asked to be excused, and went up stairs. As Derrick was passing out, Colonel Banks motioned to him and gave him the money belt to carry to his room. He told him to open the valise that he would find there and lay it inside—and that was the last that was ever seen of that money belt.”

“Yes,” said his aunt, as though he had spoken, “it is dreadful, but it is true. There is no use in my trying to tell about the days that followed; I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Poor Derrick acted so very strangely; at least it seemed so to us at the time. He admitted that he took the belt from Colonel Banks’ hand, but he said that he did not take it up stairs and did not know what had become of it.”

“Rot!” said young Derrick. “How could he expect anybody to believe such a story?”

“I believed it,” Aunt Elsie said, firmly. “I was only a little bit of a girl, but I never believed for a single minute that your Uncle Derrick stole that belt; not a bit more than I believe it now.”

The boy had a flash from the gray eyes then. “Didn’t I tell you that there wasn’t a word of truth in that wretched story? That dreadful boy, who was three older than Derrick and ought never to have been his companion, was the thief; and Derrick, because of a false sense of honor, wouldn’t even explain the circumstances that would have helped to find out the truth. Don’t you know that there are boys trustworthy in all other ways who have a mistaken idea of friendship? They think they must shield a friend even to the extent of doing injustice to others, no matter what he has done.”

Derrick Forman flushed under this remark and shot a quick questioning glance at his aunt; did she possibly surmise how sorely he was being tempted just now in that very direction? A “false sense of honor,” was it really that? How much did she know, anyhow? Whatever she knew or surmised she made no sign, and continued her story:

“Well, that is just what poor Derrick did; stuck to it that he was telling the truth, and did not know anything about that money belt. And as he was used to being believed he was amazed to find that they doubted him. In a moment of horror over the discovery that some people actually thought him a thief, he did, as you said, the very worst thing for himself that he could do—ran away.”

“Oh, no; Joseph had been gone from home for two years, when Derrick went away.”

“Not very often, nor for long at a time; he was with your Grandfather Stuart, you know. I don’t think he was very happy at home. He and Evarts didn’t get on well together.”

“I don’t wonder at that!” young Derrick interrupted under his breath. His aunt took no notice.

“And mother—mother didn’t understand boys very well; Evarts was the only boy she ever had, you know, and Joseph and Derrick were different from him, and so—well, I needn’t go into that; but after I was grown up I had a feeling that perhaps mother was—was a little hard on Derrick; I don’t know; she meant to be good.”

Aunt Elsie’s eyes had dimmed and her voice faltered. Her nephew was watching her with keen, searching eyes. In his heart was a thought that, given voice, would have been: “If she goes back on her own mother I won’t have anything to do with her.” He was conscious of a distinct feeling of relief when her voice dropped into silence. Still he was eager for more and urged her on with a question:

“Didn’t grandfather believe what his son said? My father would take my word in spite of all the evidence against me that could be trumped up.”

“You have a good father, Derrick; I hope you will see to it that you honor the trust he has in you. Your Uncle Derrick made a mistake; I can’t deny that; he would be the last one to want me to; and father, I suppose, was stern; he was the very soul of honor himself, and there had never been a stain on the family name; he didn’t mean to be oversevere, and mother didn’t but—” That last little word was eloquent, especially when followed by silence.

Derrick shook himself impatiently and sat up straight; his heart was beginning to insist on some one besides Aunt Elsie who would champion his Uncle Derrick; she was not noticing him; she sat with folded hands and eyes dropped; apparently she had gone back into the past. After a moment she began again:

“As a matter of fact your Uncle Derrick did not run away, he simply ran after that young man, Horace Beach. I don’t believe he ever meant to stay away; he just thought, boy fashion, that he would find Horace and get everything straightened out. You see, it was this way: When they went out of the room that night Derrick remembered that he must look after the furnace before he went upstairs, so he handed the money belt to Horace and told him to lay it in Colonel Banks’ room, and that was the last he ever saw of it! He wouldn’t mention that part, because he thought it would be casting suspicion on his friend; and Horace was to leave at daylight the next morning, so he had a good chance, you see, to make away with it.”

“Well, didn’t he follow the sneak, and make him own up?” young Derrick asked, in great excitement.

“Oh, yes, he followed him, all right; that was why he seemed to be running away; he went off in a hurry, without explaining anything to anybody. But he was too late in New York; the steamer that was to carry Horace out to his mother in London had ready sailed. So, then, the poor boy wrote to him, and it must have been a pitiful letter; he begged Horace to own up to it for the sake of father—Derrick just about worshipped his father, and he knew it was breaking his heart to think that a son of his had become a thief!”

“But, Aunt Elsie, I don’t understand it at all! How did you find all this out, and when?”

“I didn’t find it out until long afterwards. Horace Beach answered the poor boy’s letter with an indignant denial of any knowledge of the money belt, even hinting at the belief that Derrick had taken it himself, and was trying to put the blame on him! And it wasn’t until death came to the rescue, years and years afterwards, that we knew the truth. Horace Beach, on his dying bed, had the whole story written out, his confession, you know, and his terrible remorse for the whole thing. The minister, who had been coming every day to see him, wrote it out just as he told it, and as soon as Horace was gone he sent it to Derrick. But by the time it reached him Horace had been in the grave for more than a month; you see, nobody knew just where he was, and that good minister went to all sorts of trouble to have him traced.”

“He never came home, Derrick; we never saw him again. You see, he was dumbfounded over Horace’s answer to his appeal; he had fully counted on his making everything right; up to that time he believed in his friend, and thought that it could all be accounted for by a confession of carelessness on his part. Then he began to realize how his own rushing away would look; and it seemed to him that he could not go back without any proof of his innocence, since they had not believed his word; so he just stayed away. He was only a boy, remember, and couldn’t realize how much better a straight-forward course all through would have been. He got a chance to work his way out West, about as far as he could get, in those days, and there he stayed; all the time hoping and believing that something would happen to make it possible for him to go home with an unstained name. But the confession came too late for father. When at last Derrick wrote the full account of it to mother, sending her copies of the minister’s letters, father had been gone for a long time. Derrick knew that; he managed somehow to get news of the family though we never any of us heard from him. He wrote to mother several times, after that; and sent her the $100 that was in the money belt, with interest, to be forwarded to Colonel Banks. Horace Beach himself had looked out for that part. He hadn’t the excuse of poverty to plead for his theft; they had plenty of money; but it seems he had got into some scrape and made debts that he knew his guardian would not allow, and this money belt full of gold came to him as an easy way out of trouble. He knew he was going abroad for a long stay, and he knew that Colonel Banks was a rich man; it seems he thought that there wouldn’t be much fuss made about so small a sum as a hundred dollars, and that by the time he came home it would all have been forgotten. The dishonesty of it did not seem to trouble him; he must have been very strangely brought up.”

“So my grandfather died before it was straightened out,” interrupted Derrick. “That’s too bad! But they let everybody know about it then, of course? Why wasn’t father told?”

“That,” said Aunt Elsie, earnestly, “is a part that I can not understand. Evarts had the business of the family to attend to, and we supposed, of course—Derrick, are you quite sure that your father doesn’t know about it?”

“Of course I am, dead sure; it isn’t two months since he reminded me, one night in talk we were having, that I had my grandfather’s name, which no breath of dishonor had ever sullied, so far as he was concerned; and while he didn’t say anything out plain about Uncle Derrick—he never has to me—he knew that I understood where the dishonor came in. That wouldn’t have been one bit like father, if he had known all this.”

“No,” said Aunt Elsie, “it wouldn’t.” Then she set her lips in a way that made her firm chin look firmer still, as she added: “He shall know it, though, before I am a day older.”

It was at that moment that Mrs. Forman returned to remind Derrick that it was growing late and that he had a hard day’s work coming.

“That’s so,” the boy said, springing up: “And I’ve got a whole page to copy into my exercise book before I sleep!” Whereupon he kissed his mother in haste and disappeared.

AUNT ELSIE was true to her word, and on the evening following her long talk with her nephew, Derrick, came her opportunity.

Mr. Forman was on the couch in the little sitting-room resting from a day of hard work, while his wife read the evening papers aloud. His sister was the only other listener.

In the midst of the reading Mrs. Forman was summoned to the aid of a neighbor who was ill, and Aunt Elsie offered to read in her stead. This was done with such acceptance that Mr. Forman was moved to compliment. “It isn’t often I find a reader who is as satisfactory as Louise,” he added. “Most of the young people read too fast, and those who don’t, mumble their words.”

“I had a long apprenticeship,” his sister said. “I used to read to father by the hour. Through that long illness of his it seemed as though I was always reading to him. We began reading aloud when we were little children, you know. Don’t you know how father used to have Derrick in to read to him every night after supper? Derrick was a good reader for a boy, wasn’t he?”

Mr. Forman made a sound as of assent, and she went on sturdily: “You don’t remember those evenings as well as I do, I suppose; you went away from home so early. Derrick was naturally a stay-at-home boy; he never seemed to care to run with the other boys, evenings, as Evarts did, and he seemed to understand just what parts of the paper father wanted, without being told. I have always been thankful that father had so much comfort with his boy.”

If she hoped to awaken sympathetic response she was disappointed. Mr. Forman remained silent, with his face shaded from view.

But Aunt Elsie’s resolve was strong within her, and although she stood somewhat in awe of this grave brother, of whom she had seen very little since her childhood, she went bravely on:

“Doesn’t it seem almost too bad that Derrick’s whole life should have been shadowed and he separated from all the people he loved just through a mistake?”

“For Horace Beach, you mean? Yes, of course, his part was sin; though I don’t think even that was premeditated; it was just a sudden temptation that he was too flabby to resist. But I was thinking of father, and—” There was a second’s hesitation, then she added, bravely: “And mother. It was such a dreadful mistake on their part not to trust a boy who had never deceived them. Of course, he was wrong, as well as foolish, in hurrying away without confiding in them, but even that grew out of the natural nobility of his nature, and he never would have done it in the world if father had shown confidence in him. I heard your Derrick say, last night: ‘My father would take my word in spite of all the evidence against me that could be trumped up,’ and I’m sure you would. If our father could only have seen it his duty to trust the boy in spite of appearances, all these wasted years need not have been.”

Mr. Forman pushed aside his hand-screen and came to a sitting posture, with a quick motion and an incisive question:

Despite the boy Derrick’s strongly expressed belief, that ought to have prepared her, she was startled; what she had thought all through the years still had her in possession. On thinking it over after her talk with Derrick, she had decided that he was mistaken. Joseph simply had not credited his brother’s tardy explanation, and so had chosen to say nothing about it to his children. She had hoped for a chance to ask him if he thought this was fair to his dead brother; but if he really was ignorant of the facts all that she had said must have been hard for him to hear. Now she must do as Derrick said: “Begin at the beginning.” She gave the story in more minute detail than she had for the boy, adding little illuminating incidents gathered from various sources through the years. After the first few minutes Mr. Forman asked no more questions; he dropped back among the cushions and again shaded his eyes from the light. When he finally spoke it was in a voice husky with emotion:

“I would have given my life for that boy. I thought of him as my special charge; my mother gave him into my care with almost her last breath; I was to ‘look after him for her.’ And I tried, I tried hard, as long as I had a chance. When the stepmother was—well, never mind that; I did my best, and I thought he trusted me fully. When he disappeared in that terrible way, making no sign, and giving me no chance to help him all through the years, it broke my heart.”

The silence of years had been broken now; the rush of words that followed, and the strong excitement under which they were spoken, would have amazed those who knew Mr. Forman only as a reserved, silent man, who looked much older than he really was. His half-sister seemed to understand.

“I know—” she said, sympathetically; “it was hard; and it seems too hard that you have never until now known the truth!”

“Why didn’t he write to me?” Mr. Forman broke out again. “Why didn’t he confide in me? He might have known that I—” His voice broke and he stopped abruptly. His sister’s voice was very gentle:

“He made mistakes, Joseph; it was a mistake to go away as he did, with all the appearance of running from discovery; he realized it all, afterwards; but he was very young; he said he was ‘young and foolish and proud.’ I suppose it would be hard for you to imagine just how you would feel or act if people should suddenly refuse to believe your word! I think it sort of stunned him.”

But Mr. Forman had already dropped into silence, his face almost entirely hidden. His sister had never felt a stronger desire to bestow comfort than she did at that moment. Also, there struggled within her another feeling, that of fierce indignation. Memory had taken her suddenly back to an afternoon of long ago when she and her brother Evarts were walking home together from Sunset Rock. A chance word had reminded her of the lost brother, and she had said how strange it was that he had never written to Joseph, his own brother, who used always to be looking out for him. She could almost hear Evarts’ words in quick response:

“It’s a mighty good thing he didn’t. Joe had a terribly soft streak in him where Dick was concerned; the scamp would have been sure to pull the wool over his eyes; it is a great wonder, though, that he didn’t try it. He really did the only decent thing left for him to do after disgracing us all. I didn’t expect it of him. I was looking for years to see him come whining back, by letter, at least, asking for help, and wheedling father out of more money than he spent in searching for him.”

Every word Evarts spoke seemed to have burned into her memory. She recalled how angry he had made her, and how eagerly she tried to say something in Derrick’s favor.

It was years after that talk before she knew of Derrick’s letter to his one brother, and his failure to answer it. That memory also was connected with Evarts, speaking volubly. He was making one of his flying visits to her at the old home and she told him of it.

“I am very glad to hear it,” he said. “If Joe ever received a letter from Dick—which I doubt—and failed to answer it, he showed more sense than I ever gave him credit for having. Silence was the best possible answer. There is no use in raking up an old disgrace and trying to smooth it over at this late day; that’s a piece of wisdom you would do well to take to heart yourself; silence is golden in such affairs.”

As the sentences came back to her through the years with startling clearness, they came fraught with new significance in the light of Mr. Forman’s words just now spoken; could it be possible that—she must know.

“Joseph,” she broke the silence abruptly, “didn’t you once, a long time ago, have a letter from your brother Derrick about the—his trouble?”

“Not a line,” came huskily from behind the shielding hand. “Never a single word or sign from him since the night he disappeared. I believed that I should; I watched for it through years; I told myself that if Dick were in the land of the living he would surely write to me, some time. I kept hoping for it against all odds, until—” His voice dropped again. His sister struggled with her dismay and indignation, and spoke earnestly:

“Joseph, he did write you two letters at different times, long ones, and told you everything.”

“That I do not know; I wish I did. Oh, I should be glad to feel certain that they were lost in the mails!”

If he followed her thought, he made no sign, but thrust at her another question:

“He told me, himself. No, I don’t mean that I saw him,” she added, quickly, in response to the look on the questioner’s face. “He wrote to me. He wrote very often; after everything was made plain by that young man’s confession, we corresponded for years. The reason he did not write to you during that time was because he thought you did not credit the story of the stolen money, and did not want to have anything to do with him. I shall have to confess, Joseph, that I thought the same. I am afraid I have thought of you all these years as a hard man. If I had imagined for a moment how it was, of course you would have been told long ago all that I knew; and I should have begged you to write to him.”

After that the stillness in the room grew oppressive to Elsie. Her heart seemed to be beating too fast, and her head throbbed with pain. It seemed to her that she had done no good at all and had been very cruel. Joseph was not in any sense of the word a “hard” man, she assured herself; she had been a member of his household long enough to be sure of that. A reserved, silent man he might be; a disappointed man in many ways, and one harassed by daily anxieties; all this was plain enough; she ought to have been doing something to help him, instead of telling him what would open old wounds and set them to bleeding. Yet how could she avoid it? Derrick Forman’s name ought to be cleared of reproach, and who could desire this more than his own brother? Even while he groaned over the thought of all that might have been had he known the truth, would he not be glad over the fact that his brother had never forgotten him for an hour, but had loved him to the end? Suddenly a new fear struck her, and she spoke, abruptly:

The emphasis on the last word was strong; it was plain that he suspected their brother Evarts of unfair dealing; she could not blame him for that; her own indignation was almost beyond control. It appeared that Mr. Forman had no intention of hiding his belief.

“What possible object could Evarts have had in keeping me in ignorance of all this?” was his next word.

She found it easier to reply from this standpoint than to try to keep up the pretence that Evarts was not in it; yet she felt the need for caution. Nothing was to be gained by widening unnecessarily the chasm that already separated the half-brothers. She began timidly:

“Long ago, before Derrick’s reputation had been cleared, for others, I know Evarts was afraid your brother would appeal to you, some time, for help that he—that Evarts did not think he deserved; and that you, because you were tenderhearted, would cripple yourself and injure him, by sending him money. Then afterwards—I don’t think Evarts ever placed as full confidence in that young man’s confession as the facts warranted—he never wrote a line himself to Derrick; he just lived along through the years, half distrusting him. Joseph, I hope you can forgive me, but that is what I honestly thought you were doing, yourself. Remember, I did not know that you had not been told the facts. Evarts must have judged you by himself, and decided that the less said about it the better. I don’t uphold him in it, though; and I can hardly realize even yet that any of this is new to you.”

“If I could only tell him!” This was the cry that suddenly broke from the man who was crushed under the feeling that he had been untrue to the trust imposed on him by his dying mother, and he could never explain to any of them.

Later there would undoubtedly be room for fierce indignation; later he would think of those two letters that would have changed everything, and that ought to have reached him. His sister felt sure that he would try to ferret out the truth. She knew that one letter had been directed to the old home, and that Joseph was not there, and that Evarts had charge of the daily mail. Could he possibly have—And then she shut her lips firmly, as if by so doing she could shut out thought; she must not think further in that direction; she must remember that Evarts at the time was only a head-strong, self-sufficient boy. And yet Joseph could not be blamed for being determined to know the truth. It was all beyond her management.

But after all, the uppermost feeling of her heart at the moment was the longing to comfort Joseph. He was more stricken than she had supposed he could be after all these years. That bitter cry, “If I could only tell him!” had thrilled her soul. Wasn’t there something she could say to help him? She began timidly:

“JOSEPH, you must not think of your brother Derrick’s life as spoiled; it was far from that. No outward trouble could spoil the life of such a man as he became. The work he accomplished out there among the miners is building a monument for him that will never crumble. He was a Christian who in a remarkable manner lived up to his beliefs.

“Sometime, when you feel like hearing them, I should like to read you extracts from some of his letters; they will tell you about his work better than I can. And then I have letters from a few of the men whom he helped, that I know you will like to read. They will bring the tears, but they will be tears of joy. Doesn’t it comfort you, Joseph, to find that, after all, it was of God? I mean that he overruled everything and made the dear boy’s short life a success in the truest sense?”

She knew that her brother was listening, although he said no word in response; something about him gave her the feeling that every nerve was strained to hear; she talked on.

“He wrote a great deal about your boy Derrick; the name pleased him very much; I don’t know how many times he referred to it. He said that, of course, the name was chosen for father’s sake, but he was in it, too; and he said he had decided to have that other Derrick live his life for him, the life that he had meant to live; and he believed he would manage it a great deal better than Derrick the second could have done it.”

“He didn’t say such things in a gloomy way at all; in fact, he didn’t seem ever to be gloomy. He was very happy over his daydreams. Once he asked me if I knew that Derrick third was going to be a grand, everyday Christian; he said the Commander had told him so. He had a way of speaking about the Lord Jesus that was different from any that I had ever heard. One of his choice names for him was ‘The Commander,’ and he always spoke exactly as though he were there beside him; in person, I mean. He used to begin in the middle of things. One Sunday evening he wrote like this: ‘We were out on the hills together all the morning, my Commander and I, and the visit we had refreshed my soul.’ You see he was, a great deal of the time, far away from church services of any kind except such as he conducted himself, and this particular Sabbath he afterward called his ‘ordination day.’ He said he was set apart that day by his Commander for a special work. It was on that Sabbath afternoon that he held his first service. This is the way he began telling about it: ‘“Let’s go back,” said the Commander, “and gather the boys and talk with them and sing with them and pray with them; of course they will let you; I’ll take care of that part; don’t you be afraid.” So we went back, and sure enough the boys were more than willing to listen. I told them about the Commander, and how I followed his lead, every time, and I read some words that he said to them out of “The Book.”’ He always spoke of the Bible as ‘The Book,’ beginning both words with capitals. Then he told about singing for them. Do you remember what a singer he was, Joseph, even when he was a little boy? He said the air out there among the mountains was grand to sing in. After a while they sang with him, and the joy that it gave him when they began to sing from the heart was wonderful to hear about. Oh, you must read some of his letters! I never had anything come into my life that I enjoyed so much; and it was more than enjoyment; they helped me to live; seems as though I could hardly have got through with some of the things I had to, without them.”

Her voice broke a little, and it was several minutes before she spoke again, this time in a changed tone:

“I believe I will tell you about the book he wrote; a whole volume in manuscript; nicely bound it is, too, and inscribed:”

“Written on purpose for him; a kind of diary I think, from what he told me; he said he wrote a little or a good deal, every day according as the mood seized him. Of course, I have never read a line of it; you see, it was meant for no eye but the boy’s.”

It was the first word Mr. Forman had spoken since the story began, and the restrained eagerness in his question was almost pitiful to hear. His sister made haste to answer:

“Oh, no; not yet; he knows nothing about it. You see, it was sent to me after Derrick went to heaven, with the direction that I was to keep it for his name-boy until he was seventeen, or somewhere about that age; then, if I had come to know him well and judged that he would care to have a book written for him alone, by his Uncle Derrick, I was to give it to him; or if, at that time, or later, it should seem to me that his Uncle Derrick would better not be mentioned to him, I was just to burn the book and say no word. It puts a great responsibility on me, doesn’t it? I was a good deal worried about it for a while. That was the chief reason why I persisted in wanting to come here this winter, instead of spending the winter at some Old Ladies’ Retreat, as Evarts thought might be best. I felt that I would have to get well acquainted with the boy, in order to fulfill my trust; but I hadn’t been here a week before I began to feel satisfied that he would get the book and prize it, too. I did not mean to tell anybody about it, and I don’t hardly know why I have done so now, only I felt moved to; but you will keep my secret, of course.”

It was every word that the poor man felt able to utter. It seemed to him that he could not make her understand, even if he had been willing to try, what it would be to him to have one line of his very own from the brother whom he had missed and mourned all his life. Yet she understood better than he thought. When she spoke again her voice was tremulous.

“Joseph, I think it must be hard for you to forgive me for not telling you some of these things before. You can see how I misjudged you when I confess that I did not think you would care to hear them, and I shrank from the thought of trying to talk everything over with you. I know now that I was a coward. I have a package of letters that you will be sure to want. Every other line is about you, and you will see how true and steady and strong was his love for you. One of the letters was written but a few days before his death. It was sent to me by one of his dear boys, a miner who was with him during all that last night and who added a few misspelled lines straight from his own sad heart. ‘The Commander was right there beside him, ma’am, all night long’; that was the way he told it. ‘We boys couldn’t see him, but he did; he told me so; and I knew it was so; and after a spell he took him away; and we boys know he has got him safe, and we’ll see him again.’”

She stopped abruptly; there were other portions of that letter which she knew heart; but she was crying softly, and could not have added another word.

“How much of all this does Evarts know?” Mr. Forman asked, at last. “Why did he die? Evarts said they called it an accident, but he had no doubt that it was a drunken spree of some sort.”

Aunt Elsie’s tears were suddenly dried; indignation came to help steady her voice.

“Evarts had no right to say a thing like that. He knows nothing but the bare facts, and even those it seems he has distorted. There was an accident; a mine caved in; several of the men were injured, but Derrick gave his life to save a boy, the young son one of the mine owners, who had gone down with one of the workmen. Derrick went down, after the accident, and brought the twelve-year-old boy up in his arms. But another portion of the mine caved in just as they reached the entrance. The boy was safe, but Derrick’s head was struck. I suppose I am partly to blame for Evarts’ ignorance; I could not seem to bring myself to talk over details with him, though I thought he understood. He has been strangely prejudiced all through the years; he could not seem to get his own consent to believe anything but the worst of Derrick. Don’t you remember that as children they never could agree about anything?”

But Mr. Forman could not discuss her brother with her, could not, it seemed to him, say another word. Perhaps it was well for both of them that they were interrupted.

Aunt Elsie, as she stooped for her crutch, said low to him one word more that gave the final touch to the interview:

Had she done good, or harm? This was the question that the poor lady lay awake to consider. She had spoken more plainly of her brother Evarts than she had meant to; but, after all, was it any plainer than honesty demanded? Joseph would be very angry with Evarts. Could she blame him for that? He would be sure to inquire why he had been kept in ignorance of facts so vital, having to do with his own brother. He would be sure to ask pertinent questions about those letters which had never reached him, and Evarts would be angry, and blame her for having “raked up the old disgrace.” Perhaps there would be an open rupture in a family that had never been really united. Ought she to have kept silence? But that would leave a good man to go on thinking that his brother, whom he loved, was a disgrace and a failure, instead of being a brother of whom he had a right to be proud. She could never have done that. She assured herself that people were not called upon to sacrifice the good name of one member of the family merely for the sake of keeping peace. Joseph ought to know the truth; if it made trouble, they had nothing to do with that. Then she went all over the ground again, and yet again, as people will, sometimes, even after they had resolutely settled troubling questions. Those two letters haunted her. One she knew was written in the very beginning of the troubles, just before the boy Derrick had followed his guest as far as New York, and after waiting there in feverish anxiety for word from Horace that would set everything straight, had received the letter which overwhelmed him; all the horror of despair which it awakened had been poured out to this young brother whose help had never yet failed him. She had seen a copy of the letter; Derrick had sent it to her once to prove how earnestly he had tried, and failed. The other letter was written years later, after the boy had given up all hope of reconciliation with his family, and yet had yearned after this one brother.

Just what he said in that letter his sister did not know, save that he wrote her, long afterwards, that the appeal he made, not for material help of any kind, but for brotherliness and fellowship, was such that “Joe wouldn’t have been able to get away from it save for something like a vow that he must have made to cast him off entirely.” There had been years during which this same patient, longsuffering sister had been too angry with her brother Joseph to have anything to do with him or his family, all on account of his treatment of that letter, which now it appeared had been lost. But in that phrase lay hidden the haunting question. Had it? Was it reasonable to suppose that two letters written to the same person several years apart had both been lost in the mails, while to that same person other mail had come and gone through the years without disturbance? It was possible, of course; for the honor of another she could hope with all her heart that it was; but she could not make herself believe it. She knew the exact date at which that second letter was sent, and she knew that she was ill at the time, and Evarts had made one of his flying visits to look after the property, and had himself driven to town for the mail on the two days in which it might have come; and Joseph at the time was at his Grandfather Stuart’s, sixty miles away. Why had she always kept diaries of the years to make her hopelessly certain of dates, and why must she creep softly out of her bed at midnight to make sure that she was right in her calculations? The watchful Ray in the little “closet” heard the thump of the crutch and was on the alert.

“No, dear. I’m just an old fusser, and I had to know about a date that was bothering me; I’ve found it, and I was right, all the time; it is too bad to have waked you up. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.”

There was another thing that the poor lady could not get out of her mind that night, and that was: How was she going to forgive Evarts Forman for having helped to weave family tragedy that need never have been?

Sometimes during the course of that restless night her thoughts came back to the boy, Derrick. She wanted to have a little further talk with him; she believed that the time had come when she might at least tell him about the book, his book; and if he did not care to possess it just yet she would offer to take care of it for him until he did. Would he give her another opportunity to talk about his uncle? Or had she said that to him which would make him more shy of her in the future?

She need not have worried about that. Derrick Forman, Third, who never did anything moderately, knew when he went to his room that evening after their long talk that he had adopted his Aunt Elsie. He assured himself that she was no more like Aunt Caroline than a diamond was like a lump of mud, and he was going to make up to her in every way that he possibly could for the loss of Uncle Derrick.

It was only two days afterward, while Aunt Elsie in the little family room was trying to decide whether or not to retire to her room, ostensibly to write a letter, but in reality to give her brother and sister a chance to talk over their daily problems without the embarrassment of having a listener, that Derrick appeared, book in hand.

“Hello!” he said, “I’m in luck; you are here and you’re not doing a thing! Do you suppose you could give a fellow a lift out of another hole?”

Both the father and mother began a protest: Aunt Elsie ought not to be troubled with his problems; he should wait until Ray was at liberty. But his aunt interrupted them eagerly. She would like nothing better than to try.

“If it should happen to be one of the holes into which I tumbled myself,” she said, gayly, “there is no telling what I might do. But you young people of to-day have so many new-fangled ones that I’m not sure—”

By this time she was glancing down at the page of the book he carried, and broke off to exclaim:

“Why, dear me! here is one of our old Moral Science questions. We argued about it all one recitation hour.”

“Science. Somebody’s Moral Science, I forget his name; but that was the name of our text book.”

“Not so many as they have in these days,” she flashed back at him. “But this book of yours is just the old questions in new dress.”

IT WAS after the lesson for the next day had been carefully gone over and argued out, and while Aunt Elsie was debating with herself as to the wisdom of referring to their former conversation, that Derrick asked a question which settled the point.

“Aunt Elsie, do you mean that Uncle Derrick never came home at all, after that time when he went away, a boy?”

“Yes, I mean that; he never saw the old home again. Before the cloud was lifted from his name he said he didn’t want to come. You see, he thought that nobody believed in him. Afterwards, when he might have come, father was gone, and he felt as though he couldn’t bear it, to come back and miss him. It was about that time that your uncle began to write to me, regularly. Oh, dear, how I did enjoy those letters! I want to show you some of them, some time; especially that one he wrote about the boy who ruined his life, or at least did what he could toward it; nobody can ruin a life that has been given to the Lord, as his was.”

“Was he—different from other boys about that, Aunt Elsie?” questioned the seventeen-year-old boy, with a shade of embarrassment. He did not know just how to frame a question on such a subject. “I mean, he always a—well, a church member?”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t; he was a good, noble-minded boy who tried about as hard as any of them to do right; but he said it was his trouble and the dreadful sense of loneliness which grew upon him, that led him at last to accept the friendship of Jesus. He told me all about it a little while afterward. I guess nobody ever before wrote to just a sister such long, beautiful letters as he did to me; but you see I was all he had; father and mother and all the rest of them narrowed down to just me. It seems too bad. If your father—well, if they two had only understood each other, it would have been a great blessing to both. I thought it would break my heart altogether when those letters stopped coming. It was different with me from what it is with most girls; he was the only one who ever loved me much, except, of course, mother and father; but I was lame from my very babyhood, you may say, and homely, and shy; I wasn’t a bit like your Aunt Caroline, ever; and he, being alone, and taking a homesick sort of liking to the first real letter I wrote him, just adopted me in place of all his other kin, except you.”

“Yes, he took the most amazing interest in you from the very first time he heard of you. Every little thing I could gather about you from any source I had to repeat to him. It was your name that especially interested him at first, and also one or two little things that I wrote about you; when you were just a tiny baby you used to remind us of your grandfather; and as you grew older you had a quaint little way of tossing back your hair and lifting up your chin, that was so exactly like him it was funny to see. I described it all to your uncle, and it seemed as though he could never hear enough. Then, of course, he was naturally interested in Joseph’s boy; he loved your father, Derrick, with the kind of love that brothers do not often get, and he seemed to include you in the same feeling. He began, before you were two years old, to dream out your life for you, and pray it out. I can show you letters that will go straight to your heart. Since I have seen you here in your home and have grown to feel that I really know you, I have wondered if your Uncle Derrick didn’t understand you a little better than any one else does.”

Her eyes had softened and taken on a dreamy, tender look. Young Derrick, studying her face, respected the silence into which she had dropped. When she spoke again her voice was lower and showed a stronger effort at self-control.

“He sent me gifts, some of them very nice, and after he was gone, there was a box sent to me of treasures that he had gathered through the years; but I would have given them all up in a minute for the sake of a little while with him. I was to go out to him, Derrick, to live. The plans were all made, even to the day that I was to start. I was to join friends of his at Chicago, and he had the route all mapped out; the places where I would stop on the way, and every detail arranged for my comfort. I have never told anybody about this before. He wanted it so. That is, he advised me not to explain anything to the others until a day or two before I was to start. They were all gone from the old place at that time, every one but me; I was living there alone with my good companion and friend, Hannah Potter. I think Derrick had a feeling that some of the family would try to persuade me out of going, if they knew it long before, but they couldn’t have done it; I was in eager haste to go; I thought about it day and night. He was quite a few years older than I, but he never seemed so to me; being separated from him when he was just a boy, he seemed to me always to stay so, while I knew that I had grown old fast. I think I had some such feeling as a mother might have; I looked forward to helping him; doing for him in all kinds of little ways; I knew I could make a home for him, and that was what he had missed. Then came the awful accident; and, after that, the end. Our Father in heaven had ‘made home’ for him, but I was left outside. I felt that I had lost the only one in the world who would ever love me.”

With that last word her voice broke, and again there was silence in the room. Derrick swallowed hard and tried to speak, but at first no words would come. He had never been so moved in his life; the pathetic story of his uncle’s wronged, desolate, loveless life, and the sudden realization of his own part in the injustice done even to his memory had made a profound impression. The boy had gone about with it on his mind for two days; now here was this added touch in the heart-break of a lame old woman with whitening hair, who said that she had lost the only one in the world who would ever love her. Not much she hadn’t! She should never have a chance to say that again, anyhow. Suddenly he burst forth with words:

“I say, Aunt Elsie, can’t you take me for your boy? I’ll do my level best to make up to you for—for everything; and I’ll try with all my might to be the kind of man Uncle Derrick was, honor bright, I will.”

Said Aunt Elsie to herself as she limped to her room that night, “The dear boy! I’ll give him the book to-morrow.”

It was left for Jean to do a little scoffing in a good-natured way. “The entire family gone wild over Aunt Elsie,” she said, talking to Ray, but for the special benefit of Florence and Derrick; the latter stood with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly at intervals while he waited for Ray to sew on a button. “You and mother adopted her, from principle, of course, before she got here; no one expected anything else of you two; then Florence tumbled headlong after her as soon as it was found that she could hem invisibly, and darn, and pucker, and do no end of wonderful things with her needle, not to speak of her bits of choice old lace to be borrowed on occasion. And here’s Derrick her devoted slave on account of Latin! Also because she studied ‘Moral Science,’ whatever that was, in her girlhood; but what am I to do? I’ve no dresses to make over, or good enough to be adorned, and I don’t have Latin this year.”

They laughed, of course; there seemed to be no other reply for such folly; though Florence, with a touch of indignation, protested against being accused of self-interest; for her part, she did not see how anybody could help loving Aunt Elsie; such a cheery, capable, self-forgetful—

Jean interrupted: “Hear her use up the adjectives; there will be none left for my prize essay. But there is only one thing left for me to do in this family: I must plan something extraordinary; an elopement would be nice if I only knew how to bring my part about; I could be rescued at the last moment from the jaws of the tempter—is that a good simile, Ray?—by the ubiquitous Aunt Elsie; and years afterward, when I learned that the man was a forger, and burglar, and several other villainous things, I should fall on my knees before her in gratitude, and adore her forever after; that is the way they do in books. Dick, if Aunt Elsie approves, you might call for me at Sherwin’s about four, and we can make that promised call on the Arden girls, about the programme you know; be sure you ask Aunt Elsie first, though.”

With this parting thrust Jean vanished, laughing as she went, and was presently seen hurrying down the street.

Derrick echoed her laugh, although there was a heightened color on his face; but Florence spoke her annoyance:

“I can’t think what has happened to Jean; when Aunt Elsie first came she got on with her much better than I did, and now she is really almost rude to her sometimes. Aunt Elsie takes it so patiently, too, and is always bright and pleasant with her. I don’t know how to account for the way the child acts.”

Derrick had already departed; there was no one to reply but Ray, who said, by way of excuse, that Jean had to have her fun, and that it must be remembered that she did not mean more than half she said, when she was in one of her semi-sarcastic moods. But Ray, too, was puzzled; she had been the first to notice the change in Jean; certainly her present line of action was very unlike her.

Aunt Elsie had now been a member of the family long enough for all to get their bearings, and, with the exception of Jean, they had not only ceased to sigh over the family upheaval, but openly rejoiced in the new member’s presence. “What would we do without Aunt Elsie!” was a sentiment that in varying forms of expression was now constantly heard in the household, but never from Jean.

That young woman, as she waited at the corner for her car, on the afternoon in question, shook herself irritably, as if to shake off some annoyance. It was her way of expressing dissatisfaction with herself. As often as she was betrayed into expressions of annoyance, thinly veiled in playfulness over the present state of things in her home, she was ashamed of it.

“I need not have said that to Dick,” she told herself. “I need not have said any of it, for that matter,” and it humiliated her to think that she had again broken the resolution to “hold her tongue.”

It is doubtful if she understood herself any better than her family did. Had she realized that her uncomfortable frame of mind sprang from an ugly root named “Jealousy,” she would have been appalled; had any one told her this she would probably have indignantly denied it; yet in plain prose, she was jealous of her aunt’s influence over Dick, who had always seemed to belong almost exclusively to her. The two were so nearly of an age that they had taken their daily outings in the same baby carriage at the same time; and had been all but inseparable ever since. The fact that Jean was a few months older had seemed to give her a kind of dominance over her brother; at least he had followed her lead or fallen into line with her good-naturedly when their views crossed, nearly all his life. This, until very lately; she could not understand the change in him; within a few weeks on two or three notable occasions he had not only differed from her entirely, but persisted in carrying out his own ways, even when they ran directly athwart hers. This he did with such cheerful assurance as to exasperate his sister still further. Not knowing how else to account for it, she decided to attribute it all to the influence of the aunt of whom he had suddenly become so fond; and she resented it.

“It is so ridiculous!” she said, with an angry toss of her head, as the tardy car still kept her waiting. “He seems to be actually infatuated with that lame old woman whom he called, when she first came, ‘the homeliest critter he ever looked at!’ Ray and Florence think he is ‘so changed’; I should think he was! Of course, I am glad for some things; it is nice that he doesn’t want to stay out nights any more, nor go to places that father does not like; but—couldn’t he have done that for all our sakes, I should like to know! Just as though she was the only person in the world who cared for him! I believe I shall end by—” but here she suddenly checked herself; she had almost said she would end by hating that old woman! She did not mean that, of course; she was not even going to let herself think it for a moment; Aunt Elsie was all right enough for those who liked her; and there seemed to be plenty of them! Well, she had no objections; why should she have? But as for bowing down herself, to worship at the same shrine, she was never going to do it, and they need not expect it; not if Aunt Elsie should say, every hour in the day, that “Jean had a voice she loved to listen to.” What did she know about voices? The only thing she wanted of her was to let Dick alone.

As a matter of fact, it was altogether another influence that was dominating her brother’s life and working its inevitable change in his character. Long before this time he had received his book, and read and re-read it. The smile with which he had first received it at his aunt’s hand, after having heard its story, had in it a touch of superiority.

It was pathetic to see how much she thought of that diary of Uncle Derrick’s; he would take the greatest possible care never to let her see that it couldn’t by any possibility mean so much to him. It was fine, of course, to have a whole book written solely for one’s self, and if his uncle had known how to write half so well as Aunt Elsie thought he did, there would be interesting things in it about the new country and the pioneer times in which he lived; but as for its being so very wonderful, why, of course—Here he shrugged his shoulders and laughed a little. All the same, trust him for helping Aunt Elsie to think that he considered it the most wonderful book that was ever written.

This, before he had read a line of it. Before he had read half a dozen pages he had begun to realize that at least it was different from any book of which he had ever heard.

IT WAS a book that laid bare a heart; the heart of one who loved him with a love such as he had not imagined a man ever gave to any boy but his very own. “If he had been my father,” Derrick thought, as he read with bated breath, “he could not say more than that!” And the very next sentence seemed to voice his thought.

“You think that is extreme for just an uncle? Ah, but you don’t know, dear boy Dick—I am sure they call you Dick, they did me—that you are my boy, my very own; I have adopted you with my soul; there can not be any stronger tie than that. You see, you are all I have; you take the place to me of father, mother and brother; I have lost them all. There were reasons why I never had wife and children, so, my soul’s son, I have adopted you. I could wish that your name were Timothy, for I know I have the feeling for you that Paul had for his son. You read the Bible, don’t you, my boy? You will find what I mean if you study the love of those two. My boy, I want you to live my life for me, do my work in the world, be myself as I meant to be, and missed. Oh, I meant to do so much for father! I had such glorious plans to enrich his life! I failed him utterly; I made a mistake, but you will not; you will carry out for your father and your mother and your home all that I meant to do for mine, and didn’t; and you will do infinitely more; I feel in my very soul that you will be a better Derrick Forman than I could ever have been; don’t you dare to disappoint me, Dick; it would kill me.”

Derrick, the boy, drew an amazed, almost a frightened, breath. What a strange idea as though he could take another boy’s life and live it for him!

“It’s a lot more than I can do to live my own in the way it ought to be lived!” he muttered; but he read on, like one fascinated. Very soon he came to understand that the life of the man he was asked to represent had been hidden in another life.

“The fact is, Dick,” the record ran, “that I am dead; did you realize it? I have known it in a vague sort of way for a long time, but I don’t believe I ever realized it fully until this morning when I read it in the Book: ‘Ye are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ I stopped and laughed. ‘Why, of course!’ I said. ‘What a dolt I am not to have known that before! It was told me plainly enough, only I didn’t take it in.’ Ever since I was a youngster learning to read out of father’s big Bible at home I have known the verse: ‘If any man be in Christ he is a new creature.’ Well, I am ‘in Christ.’ I am as sure of that as I am that I breathe; I surrendered to him, body, soul and spirit; all I was, all I am, all that I ever will be are his. Then, of course, the old Dick Forman is dead! Good! He wasn’t worth much; I am glad he is gone. I’m ‘a new creature,’ I live, ‘yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’ ‘That sounds egotistical,’ do I hear you say? Yes, but I didn’t say it—that’s Bible, a blessed fact guaranteed by Christ himself. Now, you see, if you are to live my life for me the part that I missed must have this same experience; you must be a ‘new creature,’ Dick; the old one isn’t worth shucks! I don’t want to live his life; don’t you be persuaded into trying it; hide your life, hide it ‘with Christ in God’; only then will you begin to live. Oh, Dick Forman, my boy, my very self, given another chance! You will do this for me, won’t you?”

Derrick closed the book with a bang and laid it as far away from him as he could; was strangely moved, he was half awed, half indignant. “The man was insane!” he muttered. Yet he knew better. He had been a good Bible scholar in Sabbath school; those quoted verses were familiar to him; intellectually, at least, he understood something of their meaning but he had never thought of such a thing as applying them to himself. After a little he opened the book again; he re-read those same pages; he put the book from him several times, declaring that he would read no more; the most of it was simply the ravings of a lunatic. After a while he said he would wait until he was older; boys like him could not be expected to be interested in such queer notions; his Uncle Derrick lived so much alone that evidently his ideas had become misty, unreal, unintelligible. There were days together when the boy did not open the book, but passed it hurriedly, with a wish that he could forget it; there were hours when he hid it, and told himself that he would never touch it again, and always he went back to it and read again the very portions that had disturbed him. At times he was genuinely angry over the appeals in that uncanny book. He said that Uncle Derrick had no right to die and leave such a book to him; it was like trying to steal a fellow’s individuality. “A new creature,” quoted his memory, and he sneered; he didn’t want to be a new creature; he was well enough satisfied as he was. “Ye must be born again,” said a voice to his inner consciousness; said it plainly, solemnly. He looked about him, startled; there had been no real voice, he knew that; but it had seemed very real; and those were not the words of his dead uncle, it was Jesus who said that!

There came an evening when Derrick Forman, in the privacy of his locked room, got to his knees, with the written book spread open before him, and solemnly gave himself, body, soul, and spirit, to his uncle’s God for time and for eternity. It had been a hard struggle, unusually hard, for one so young and so well taught. Yet, perhaps, it was on account of the teaching that he was so slow in reaching a decision. Already temptations had assailed him which he knew must be overcome if he was to become the kind of man that his uncle’s Commander called for.

“But I’m glad of it,” he told himself on the night when he made his great decision; “I’m glad it means out-and-out, downright, everlasting business; I hate a half-and-half anything.”

Very soon he made the surprising discovery that he was happy in his new life. He had not looked for that; at least, not yet, not for years and years, probably. He had expected to make sacrifices and meet crosses; he considered himself prepared for those, but the glow of new and genuine joy was unexpected and took hold of him with power. He began to understand some of the sentences in his book that had seemed like the extravagances of a diseased brain; he spent much time reading that book, studying the Bible quotations in it, hunting in the public library for other books from which his uncle had quoted as though they were familiar friends; he locked his manuscript book with his Bible in his private drawer and took them out together; he began to see that the life portrayed in the one had been lived as a commentary on the directions of the other. Still, he was chary of his new experience; it was not a matter to be talked of; at least, not yet. He told his mother a little about it one evening when they two were alone, and was astonished and touched to note that she cried; she told him they were tears of joy; and that she felt as though it didn’t matter much now how many troubles they had. He had not supposed that his mother would care so very much. The next morning when they walked down town together he managed to make his father understand what had come to him as a result of a step that he had taken, and he knew that he would never forget the words his father spoke in reply; nor the look on his face, a little later, when he straightened himself and threw back the shoulders that had begun to droop, as he said:

Ray did not have to be told; she seemed to know by intuition what great event had taken place. She lingered in the hall a moment after the others had passed into the sitting-room—they had all just come in from Sabbath evening service—and reaching up to her tall young brother kissed a lingering, tender kiss, as she said: “My soldier brother enlisted for life; I know I shall always be proud of him.” Yet nothing had occurred at church, nor during the walk home, to tell her that he had chosen a new Commander.

But with Jean, his heretofore confidante all occasions, Derrick played shy. He could not decide how to tell her about this momentous change which had come to him. A “new creature?” Yes, the phrase described it singularly well, but to feel it, know it, was one thing, and to describe it or account for it in terms that Jean would understand was quite another. He had a feeling that Jean would not want to understand; he and she had stood on the same plane as regards these matters; they had exchanged witticisms over the weaknesses of many professing Christians, especially among young people; they had agreed that Ray was not like any of the others, but was “unnecessarily good,” and, in short, had made the entire subject an embarrassment when one came to talk about it from a standpoint that the other had not seen. He decided finally not to say anything to her about it; if his life did not tell her, without words, he assured himself that it would not be much of a life; anyhow, he must wait and see.

And so, Jean did not understand; she only felt in her brother a subtle change difficult to define; she was not even sure that she approved it; Dick had always suited her well enough just as he was; she was able to see in it only the influence of the new member of the family, and this she instinctively resented.

“It is simply ridiculous,” she told herself, half angrily, “for him to be infatuated with that lame old woman, whom he called the homeliest person he ever looked at! That’s nothing against her, of course; I don’t think myself that she is so terribly homely, and she is kind, and unselfish, and all that, but then—I don’t see what has made the change in him! Of course, I am glad that he doesn’t want to stay out nights as he used to, nor go to places that father doesn’t quite like, but why couldn’t he have stopped all that long ago for all our sakes instead of waiting until that old woman—” Even unspoken words failed her, and she stopped abruptly; then, after a moment, added, aloud: “I believe I shall end by—” But she had to stop again; she had almost said she would end by hating that old woman; of course, she was not going to say, or do, any such thing; but as for falling down to worship her as the others were almost doing she never should, and they need not expect it; she was sure of one thing; she did wish Aunt Elsie would let Dick alone.

It might have been a restless dissatisfaction, born of the feeling that in some undefined way she had lost her boon companion, which made the usually sweet-spirited Jean appear at great disadvantage during this period of her life. She seemed suddenly to have grown self-assertive and obstinate. What she would and would not do grew daily more pronounced, and culminated, one afternoon when she must make a journey across town for her music lesson, in a fixed resolve to wear neither rubbers nor raincoat; no, nor carry any umbrella; though Florence assured her earnestly that even the cat could see that it was going to rain.

“I’m not a cat,” was Jean’s reply. “I don’t know why you should quote her to me; and I’m not going to bundle up like a rheumatic old maid when it doesn’t rain a drop.”

“Jean, dear,” came gently from Ray, “do wear your sandals, won’t you? Because you know those shoes you have on are really very thin, and if you should get caught in a shower—”

It is possible that but for Aunt Elsie’s eager second to this suggestion the young girl’s reply might have been different. As it was, she ignored her aunt entirely, and said in charming mimicry of her sister’s tone and manner: “Ray, dear, I won’t do any such thing. I hate rubbers to walk in, and I have nearly a mile to walk. I do wish we had cross-town cars somewhere near this point.”

There followed for those left at home an uncomfortable afternoon. Ray watched the swift-moving clouds with poorly concealed anxiety, and Florence openly worried. Jean was by no means strong; she took cold easily, and a cold with her always meant a more or less serious illness. Florence, at the window watching the growing evidences of storm, lamented that “mother” had not been at home to issue positive orders to that reckless child. Why hadn’t Ray asserted authority as the oldest sister and insisted on her taking at least an umbrella?

“She will ruin her hat, and it is the one with a plume, of course; it will serve her right, too. There! it’s begun! do hear the pour down! and there’s mother! she ran in at the basement door just in time to escape dash!”

Mrs. Forman’s first word was about Jean. Had she gone prepared for the storm? It had been gathering for several hours; why hadn’t they insisted on at least an umbrella?

It proved to be no passing shower; the rain fell in torrents until the streets were flooded, and then, after a while, settled into a steady downpour. The Formans comforted one another as well as they could; they said that it was a good thing it had rained so terribly hard; Jean would, of course, wait until the storm was over, or until some one came for her; she would never think of starting out in so wild a storm without even an umbrella. As soon as Derrick arrived he was laden with raincoat, rubbers, and injunctions, and started forth again. But Jean, her reckless mood continuing, had grown tired of waiting, and started out during a lull in the storm, making herself believe that she could get home before it began again, or at least get across town to a car line that would take her home by a circuitous route. In this way Derrick missed her. Before she was a block from the music school the rain was upon her again in full force. Even then she persisted; it was of no use to turn back, she assured herself; she was wet to the skin already, she might better keep on than sit in wet clothes waiting. But she had not gone much farther when she regretted that decision; the wind seemed to her to be rising every moment; it was all she could do to keep from being blown quite into the road. She had now reached a street lined on either side with wholesale houses, whose closed and gloomy fronts told her that the day was done, and furnished her with not so much as an awning under which to hide. She struggled on, feeling the water soak into her thin-soled, cloth-top boots; yonder, two blocks away, was the high school; if she could only reach it, Derrick might still be there and he could do something. She had only a carfare with her, and this she believed made it impossible for her to call a taxi. All her hopes centred in Dick, and he, poor fellow, was making all possible speed homeward in the hope of finding his sister safely arrived there. Alas for Jean, the high school was as closed and silent and aloof as though hundreds of eager feet had not but an hour or two before raced down its many steps and sped away from the storm. She could not find even the janitor, and it seemed to her that she could never walk those long, long blocks facing that dreadful wind, and being pelted by the merciless rain.

BUT she accomplished it; drenched to the skin and too much exhausted to give an account of her adventures or to answer the eager questions of Derrick and Florence. The mother cut the questionings short, and herself undressed and wrapped in blankets the shivering girl, while Ray ran for hot water and Aunt Elsie herself limped to the kitchen to prepare a hot drink. They all worked swiftly and skillfully to avert what they feared, and did not succeed. Before morning it had become evident that Jean was seriously ill. With the first glimmerings of dawn the family physician’s machine waited at the door, while its owner made an unusually long call. In spite of all that skill and prayer could do, Jean grew steadily worse; there were three dreadful days in which, without words passing between them, it was understood in the family that a life hung in the balance; followed by an awful one in which friends from outside went about the still house on tiptoe, and explained in whispers to anxious inquirers in only three words: “She is sinking.” Then, suddenly, all unexpectedly she rallied, and in a few hours the word went forth that she had come back as by a miracle from the verge.

During all this time and in the anxious weeks that followed Aunt Elsie was the very embodiment of rest and hope to every member of the family. Her face remained calm even during those first terrible days; she was able to smile a “good-morning,” and to say in cheerful tones, “She isn’t a bit worse than she was last night; the doctor says so; and that is real encouraging, you know.”

Through those early, fateful days Aunt Elsie had chiefly busied herself for the comfort of those who watched, leaving to them the chance to wait on the trained nurse, and do the little that they could under her direction for their darling, and then to wait and hover about, and interview the doctor, and know to the minutest detail from minute to minute what was being done; while downstairs, rooms got themselves put in order in unobtrusive ways, the open grate fire was fed at just the right moment, Mr. Forman’s big easy chair was always standing invitingly near in case he should be able to use it, and the couch near it, with fresh pillows and a light cover, was waiting to entice Mrs. Forman to drop down on it for a few minutes of rest. When Ray, conscience-smitten over the heavy burdens of the little maid in the kitchen, would rush down to help, she would find everything serene and Rebecca voluble: “There ain’t a thing for you to ’tend to, Miss Ray, not a blessed thing; you just run back and stay with her all you can, poor dear! and you needn’t to worry about anything down here; your aunt peeled the potatoes, fixed a salad and done all the extras, and she is coming to season the soup the way you like it; she’s a comfort, Miss Ray, she is that!”

Ray, as she sped back to the sick room, echoed Rebecca’s conclusion with a full heart. In this time of stress what could they do without Aunt Elsie! They had reason to emphasize this as the days passed; the slow thump of the lame woman’s crutch was heard from all parts of the house, and evidences of her thoughtful ministrations were everywhere. When the immediate danger was past, and all that the sick one needed was skillful care, Aunt Elsie rose up in a new capacity, joyfully installing herself as “head nurse,” and insisting that the worn-out mother and elder sister should take much-needed rest. She had discovered a way, she declared, by which she could get up and down stairs once a day without hurting her a bit; indeed, she believed that the exercise would do her good; hadn’t she been trying it since Jean was sick? One day she went up and down three times; and she was alive yet and good for any amount of nursing. She proved it in the weeks that followed. Outside of Jean’s room the house assumed normal conditions. Mr. Forman returned to the desk where he spent his days, Florence took up her work again in the city library, Derrick got the consent of himself to go back to school, and Jean was left very largely in Aunt Elsie’s care. Her mother was so manifestly exhausted by the heavy strain that had been upon her, following as it had years of undue strain and anxiety, that Jean was among the first to urge strenuously for her complete freedom from care. Ray was installed head of the culinary department, and by common consent Aunt Elsie reigned in the sick room. And contrary to Ray’s fears, Jean not only made no objection to this arrangement, but seemed to like it; she had evidently lost the strange aversion she had shown for her aunt. Certainly there could never have been a more satisfying attendant upon a convalescent; Aunt Elsie was alert, and cheerful, and competent; ready to read aloud in any book desired, or tell bright stories of the long ago, or gossip about the daily doings and sayings of the neighborhood, or be entirely silent, according to the whim of the moment. It was during one of those periods of silence that Jean, who had been quiet for a longer time than usual, suddenly asked:

“Aunt Elsie, that day when I was the worst, did you think I was going to die?”

It was a very unexpected question; up to that time she had not spoken of her illness except in the most general terms, and by common consent the family had avoided any reference to those dreadful days when her life seemed slipping away. Her aunt hesitated a moment uncertain just how she should reply, but at last said frankly:

“Why not? Every one else did. They thought I did not understand, but I did; I knew all about it. I heard the doctor tell father, out there in the hall, that I couldn’t live until morning.”

“I know, dear; and at first I feared so, too; but the feeling passed, and I looked to see you better in the morning.”

“And I was; Aunt Elsie, I wish I knew why you looked for it, when all the rest—didn’t.” There was the half-fretful insistence of the still irresponsible invalid in her tone, and her aunt reached a swift conclusion as to what would be best for her.

“If you won’t toss about and keep the covers flying,” she said cheerily, “I’ll try to explain the way I felt. You have known of answers to prayer, haven’t you? I had one that night. I had been praying for you for, oh, a long time; I had a definite hope—I might almost say plan—for your future, and your going away so early would have overturned it all; so I asked the Great Physician to take your case into his own hands, as he did so often when he was on earth, you know. I prayed that prayer about all the time during those three days; always, of course, meaning that if it was not his way I didn’t want it; but I asked him to make it plain to me if I was not to pray for that any more; and so, that night when you were at the worst he told me.”

“Told you what? I don’t understand; you don’t mean he said real words to you, and you heard him? Of course you don’t! I don’t understand it at all!”

“No,” she said, irritably. “I say words of course; I say ‘Our Father’ sometimes, and I used to say, ‘Now I lay me’—But I never felt as though any of it amounted to anything, or was really heard.”

“Then I don’t believe I can make it plain to you. I did not hear any voice, nor expect to; that does not seem to be his way; at least, not now; but my anxiety left me, and in its place came a quiet sense of assurance. I had not the least desire to pray that prayer any more; instead, I said, ‘Oh, Father, thank you!’ When I heard that the doctor had said you would not live until morning, I said, softly, ‘Yes, she will; the Physician who never loses a case has taken charge of this one.’ I was so sure that I went to Derrick’s room and told him to go to bed and to sleep, that you would be better in the morning. But I can’t explain the experience to you any better than that; and I really don’t expect you to understand it; some things have to be lived, before we can understand them. You must just learn how to pray, dearie, and see for yourself how he answers his children.”

“What would you have thought if I had died that night?” asked skeptical Jean; but her aunt only smiled quietly and asked:

“And you mean that you were just as sure as that? Well, anyhow, I didn’t, it seems.” She was already ashamed of her cavil, but she could think of no better way of saying so.

It was nearly a week afterwards that Jean, with her Aunt Elsie on guard, was supposed to be settled for her afternoon nap. Instead, she fidgeted, and declared herself not one bit sleepy. At last her aunt proposed to read her to sleep.

“No,” she said, promptly, “I don’t want to be read to; I want to talk; there is a question I want to ask. Do you think people who are really going to die—right away, I mean—ever feel any other way than afraid?”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” was the prompt reply. “Why, your grandfather was no more afraid than you would be of going into your father’s room; and I have been with others who felt in the same way; old people and young, even little children who were afraid of the dark. One who loved the Lord would not be afraid to go to him, you know.”

She had determined to make her reply as lengthy as she reasonably could, in order that Jean might not weary herself with much talking. Her hope was, also, that if she kept her voice low and evenly modulated her charge would presently grow drowsy, but Jean spoke in her most wide-awake tone:

“Well, I was afraid; I was awfully afraid! I don’t mean that day when I was at the worst; I didn’t seem to care then what became of me; I suppose I was too sick to think; but that first night I knew I was going to be very sick; I could feel it all through me; I thought, too, that I should probably die, and I was never so frightened in my life! Mother said I was burning with fever, but it seemed to me that I could feel the drops of perspiration inside of me, made of fear. Aunt Elsie, it was awful! It frightens me now whenever I think of it. Now, this is what I want to say.” She hurried on realizing that her aunt was about to interrupt and urge her not to talk any more. “I’ve got to say it; I never shall get to sleep if I don’t. I know I am getting well now, real fast, but then, of course, I shall have to die, some day, and it might be very soon, you can’t ever tell; and I keep wondering if it really is possible, I mean when one is well and not in any danger, to get hold of something that would keep one from having that awful fear.”

“It certainly is, dearie.” Aunt Elsie’s voice was as calm and her manner as assured as it might have been over an assurance of the next morning’s sunrise. “One who loves the Lord Jesus Christ has no call to be afraid over being sent for to go to live with him in the place he promised to prepare.” Jean interrupted:

“But that is just it; I don’t love him; you can’t make yourself love a person! I might say I did a thousand times over, in words, but that wouldn’t alter anything.”

Aunt Elsie regarded the pale-faced large-eyed girl on the bed with a kind of wistful tenderness in her eyes; the child had come so near, so very near, to changing worlds, and had evidently not understood how to take the first steps toward making a safe journey! She must make it plain to her now, even though there had to be more talking.

“That is true,” she said, quietly. “You cannot make yourself love anybody, but you can tell the rightful Ruler of this world that you have decided to serve him, and him only, all the days of your life; and if you do this with an honest determination to carry out your resolve he will attend to the rest. You see, it is different from any human love; he agrees, just as soon as you make deliberate choice of him as King, to make such instant changes in your feelings that you will never again be able to say you do not love him.”

Jean made an impatient movement among the pillows and spoke quickly: “Aunt Elsie, that doesn’t seem possible! How could just deciding to obey somebody make one all over new?”

“It doesn’t, dearie, it doesn’t at all; the deciding is only the part which the Lord gives to you; he does the rest. How he does it I can’t explain; we don’t have to understand how things are done, you know, before we can believe that they are done. Jesus Christ said if we were ever to belong to his kingdom we must be born again; and he also said that if we would attend to our part he would see that that great thing was done. Why not do your little part, dearie, and leave him to attend to his?”

There was silence in the room for several minutes, then Jean drew a long sigh, as she said:

“It seems small and mean to think of doing a thing that you don’t want to, merely because you are scared at the thought of dying. I don’t think I could be such a coward as that. I don’t want to be a church member, and I don’t want to read the Bible; not regularly; it doesn’t interest me; and I would lots rather read real good stories and such things; and—oh, well, there are lots of things that Christian people think they must do that I don’t want to do, and a perfect jam of things that they think they mustn’t do that I want to; now, how could it make me any better to pretend that I didn’t think and feel just that way?”

While she talked, Aunt Elsie took swift counsel of her Lord. Here was a lamb who clearly needed instruction in order to safely make the fold, but she was growing tired and nervous; she ought not to argue, she ought to be sleeping.

“Don’t pretend anything, dear,” she said. “We mustn’t talk much longer now, but I want to ask you just two questions. Have you always wanted to do just exactly the thing that your father wanted you to do, and to leave undone what he wanted left?”

“No,” said Jean, promptly, “I haven’t; not by a good deal! But that—” Her aunt interrupted:

“Wait, dearie, here is the other question: Did your not wanting to follow his directions release you from the duty of obeying?”

“No,” said Jean again, and she laughed, a little shamefaced laugh; even in her weakness she was quick-witted; she could not help seeing just where her admission placed her.

“THEN,” said Aunt Elsie, pushing her advantage, “you see there is no pretence nor cowardice about it; there is just a plain common-sense decision called for, and if he shouldn’t do the rest, according to promise, why—he would be the one to blame. Now, perhaps, we have talked as long as we ought, for this time; if we keep real still I think you can drop to sleep.”

Quiet reigned in the room for several minutes, during which the watcher prayed, with all her soul, for the lamb outside the fold. Then came Jean’s voice again:

“Aunt Elsie, I want to ask one more question. Do you honestly think that people—young people, I mean, with life all before them—could have really good times in the world if they had agreed to think always first about pleasing God? I know Ray is happy, but there is no use in pointing her out to me because she is different from other people; she always was; I couldn’t be like her if I tried for a hundred years; I don’t know another girl like her anywhere. She never seems to fuss over things, and be almost cross because she is trammelled by her professions; but that is the way Lucile Watson is, and several others that I know, who seem to be trying at it, and making poor headway. I don’t believe that I—” Here Aunt Elsie interrupted:

“Derrick?” repeated Jean, in wonder. “Dick, do you mean? Why, does he—is Dick—what do you mean?”

“He is the happiest boy I know anything about,” said Aunt Elsie. “Just bubbling over with joy from morning till night—since you began to get well.”

“But is Dick—do you mean that he is—that he has done—what you said must be done?”

“He has given himself to Jesus Christ, enlisted for life, and I don’t think I ever knew a more decided soldier, nor a happier one.”

“Dick!” Jean said, in wonder, and at the same time enlightenment in her tone; this then was what had wrought that mysterious change in him which had half vexed and wholly puzzled her. It was not Aunt Elsie with whom he was in love, but—Jesus Christ! “Dick!” she said again, softly, this time with awe in her tone; and she asked no more questions, said not another word, although it was long before she fell asleep.

Neither she nor her aunt referred to that particular conversation again; at least not for many a day. As a matter of fact it was months afterwards, when Jean, in radiant health and in love with life, recalled a sentence that she had used that afternoon, and asked:

“What could you have thought of me, Aunt Elsie, didn’t you think I talked like a lunatic, or an idiot?”

“I thought,” said her aunt, with a quiet smile, “that you talked like a person who was not acquainted with Jesus Christ.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” said Jean. “I didn’t know anything about him nor about religion, either; but I thought I did; I considered myself very wise, and I had drawn my conclusions from looking on at those who professed to know him, too. I think, after all, that the blame for such mistaken ideas rests very largely with Christians, don’t you? They don’t act as though they believed that the Christian life was the best and happiest life to live, even in this world; honestly, now, do you think they do?”

“A great many do not,” her aunt admitted, thoughtfully. “And a great many others of us are false witnesses part of the time. I’ll tell you what I think is the only thing that you and I can do about it; that is, try each day to live in such a way that people looking on can not truthfully say that of us.”

“I know it,” said Jean, humbly. “That is truly the way I want to live. You see, I was so mistaken about it! I thought I must be a Christian in order to get ready to die; after the awful warning I had had, I realized that I simply must not risk having another such experience; but I could not make myself understand that there would be anything along the way but a lot of crosses for me to tug at. I just long to live so that the girls will understand how much they are missing in not choosing the same road.”

She stooped to kiss her aunt’s homely radiant face, and give her the winsomest of smiles as she flitted away, and presently they heard her clear voice sounding though the upper hall:

“How much you love that hymn, don’t you?” Florence said, looking out from her room to smile on the bright-faced girl.

“Yes,” said Jean, “I do; it gives me a kind of thrill to sing it. I used to be afraid it; I liked the tune and could not help humming it, but the words seemed impossible. Do you remember that night you were going to a party in your glorified gown, and I kept singing,”

“You said I was mixing things? That is the way I felt about it, although I could not keep from humming it; but that was because I was in love with the tune; the words repelled me; I thought it must be awful to have to live with the thought of dying right before one all the time; that is what I thought religion ought to be!” She laughed gleefully. “It’s anything but that, isn’t it? Dying is just an experience, somewhere along the road, that isn’t pleasant, in itself, because it is associated with sickness and pain; but, after all, it is only for a minute, compared with all the days and years; and the living part all along is glorious, isn’t it?”

“It ought to be,” Florence admitted, gravely; and her eyes, as they followed her young sister, had a wistful look. As she closed her door she said within herself: “She has a different religion from mine, some way; I wonder why it is?”

Following hard upon the joy and gratitude of the Forman family over Jean’s complete recovery came the burden of bills, and bills, and bills! so although nothing could take away that joy, it was tempered with anxiety. Straining every nerve as they had been doing before in order to meet their daily expenses and have a margin left to apply toward that fateful mortgage, it was not possible to get through the days, and especially the nights, without being stared at by that insistent question: “How are we to manage those extra expenses entailed by sickness?” It was good for Jean that she was still a young girl upon whom responsibilities of any sort had never pressed, else it might have been hard for her to live up to the radiant joy that seemed to enfold her. It would have been so easy for the Jean whom they had known, to sink into gloom over the thought that her unusual attack of obstinacy was in part responsible for these extra burdens. Fearing something of this kind, the entire family had earnestly enjoined one another not to talk over financial anxieties before Jean. Neither did they, of course, say anything intentionally about such burdens before Aunt Elsie. One who had nothing of her own, but was dependent upon relatives for her daily living, was the last person before whom to talk of the cost of living. By common consent the responsible members of the family had agreed that she should never hear a word which might make her think that her coming to them had added a feather’s weight to their daily budget.

“Mother, hasn’t she any money?” Florence had asked one day, after they had been cautioning one another about letting their guest know of their financial stress.

“Very little, I think, dear; your father never knew much about the settling up of the estate, but your Uncle Evarts told him that there was only a paltry sum left for Elsie; not enough to clothe her decently, he said, to say nothing of her board.”

“Well,” Florence had said, after a thoughtful silence, “Uncle Evarts needn’t worry his precious self; as long as this family has any crusts to eat she is more than welcome to her share, isn’t she, mother?”

Mrs. Forman’s response had been hearty, closing, as it so often did, with the refrain: “It really doesn’t seem as though we could ever again get along without her.”

Yet the anxieties pressed; the wrinkles on Mr. Forman’s forehead grew deeper; he spent fewer evenings with his family, but sat apart working over columns of figures or gravely staring at them, evidently lost in troubled thought. His sister, from the farther end of the living-room, often watched him furtively, wondering how she could learn, without seeming officious, just what was the pressure that they were evidently trying to keep from her. Without having been consciously enlightened by any of them, she was beginning to have a strong conviction that it had to do with money matters. They did not talk economy, at least before her, but they practiced it; and she, being quick of eye and keen of hearing, had seen and heard enough since she had been a member of the family to convince her that careful economy even in the smallest matters was the rule of the house. Of course, she could understand that sickness, with its endless train of expenses, had greatly increased the regular budget, but still there seemed to her an added distress that these long-foreseen bills did not account for.

It was Derrick, the heedless, who finally enlightened her without in the least intending to do so. He tapped at her door one afternoon, pushed it open in response to her invitation, and with a quick glance around announced, in a disappointed tone, “She isn’t here!”

“Not yet,” his aunt said, smiling, “but she will be, before long. That is, if you are looking for Ray? You generally are, you know. Come in and wait for her; she has gone with Kendall to look at the negatives for those class pictures.”

Derrick dropped into the chair indicated as he said, with a discontented air, that Kendall was a good deal of a nuisance; he seemed to be always wanting Ray at the very same minute that he wanted her himself.

“I suppose, though, instead of growling, I ought to be counting my mercies because he hasn’t carried her off bodily to some other house. I can’t always be properly sorry over their numerous delays, for being glad he hasn’t got her yet.”

Here surely was an opportunity for Aunt Elsie. “What is it that is delaying them now?” she asked, with the air of one who was simply keeping up her end of the conversation.

“Oh, the everlasting hindrance, of course; money, or the lack of it. When I get really to work in this world, if I can’t earn money enough to do the things that ought to be done, I’ll go—” He stopped suddenly and laughed. His aunt smiled appreciatively.

“You can’t ‘go hang yourself,’ after your favorite method,” she said, cheerfully, “because you don’t belong to yourself any more. What is to be done in such case?”

“I’ll go earn more,” he finished, gayly. He was trying to live up to the spirit of the hint she had once given him, that “random speeches partaking of the character of slang could easily be given too much license, if one were not careful.”

Up to that time he had not realized that he habitually talked in metaphors more or less related to the slang family. He had begun to watch himself, with a view to breaking the habit, but he considered it “awfully nice” in Aunt Elsie not to be always preaching at a fellow.

“Good!” she said, heartily. “But do Ray and Kendall need a great deal of money before they can marry?”

“I don’t know how much, not being a marrying man, myself; but, anyhow, it takes more than Kendall has; or at least Ray thinks it does. It isn’t Ken’s fault; he would get married to-morrow if he could coax Ray into it; it isn’t the fault of either, I suppose; I guess it is just plain common-sense prudence. Sometimes I think I hate common sense, and prudence, too.”

“But they are so awfully unhandy,” he said, whimsically. “You see, it’s this way with Ken; he’s got a mother that he wants to do everything for, and then some; I like him for that. She is jolly, too, and good pluck; things were sailing along pretty smoothly until she got sick, all of a sudden, and stayed sick. Oh, she got better, you know, but not well; and she won’t ever be well again; and they have a little house, comfortable and nice for well people, but not large enough for three when one of them is sick; see? That is what Ray thinks; Kendall doesn’t agree with her; he is tired of doing without Ray, you know; and he has planned everything out dozens of times, he told me so; but Ray won’t. It isn’t that she wants a big house and all that, for herself; not she! you know Ray—but she says if they get married, his mother will insist on giving up her own nice big room to them, and going into a little, tucked-up one, and doing without dozens of things that she ought to have, and all that. I just believe she is right; sickness costs a lot of money, you know, and she doesn’t think Ken ought to have any more expense than is necessary.”

“Oh, no, the house isn’t his, they rent; but it is as large as Ken can afford at present. He gets a pretty good salary, and they think the world of him; everybody says he is bound to rise, and in time he will be a partner; but he has had an awfully hard time. He took care of that sick brother of his; you know about him? Well, he did everything for him for years and years; just at the time when he might be expected to have his hands full doing for his mother and himself. It has taken him three years to get the bills paid up; hospital, you know, and the funeral, and all the rest of it; Ken has been splendid. Besides all that, I guess Ray feels that father couldn’t—” Just here the loyal Derrick came to a full stop. It would never do to tell Aunt Elsie that Ray didn’t think father ought to have another cent added to his present burden. “Gee whiz!” he said to himself, “I almost told her that father couldn’t afford a wedding; I ought to be muzzled! But it can’t do any harm to talk to her about Ken’s puzzles.” Suddenly he launched forth again:

“I tell you what, Aunt Elsie, s’pose, just for the fun of it, that I had money to toss about wherever I liked; couldn’t I do a big thing right now! It makes my mouth water to think what fun I should have. I know a house where Ray would rather live than in a palace. You’ve heard about our old home on Dupont Circle? But you’ve never been out there, have you? It’s a dandy place, all right; trees, you know, and a big lawn, right in town! The house is nice; lots of rooms, and it’s for sale, don’t you think! Dirt cheap, too, they say, for anybody who can pay money down; the man who owns it has lost his wife, and has a sick daughter, and is going to break up and go to England, where his son lives; so he wants to get rid of the house—turn it into money, because he doesn’t want the bother of looking after it. Jimmie Breese told me all about it; I was out there with him to-day; went through the house; I don’t remember it from living there; I was just a little kid, you know, when we moved. Jimmie’s aunt wants to buy it; Jimmie says if she could raise the money she would take it; but she can’t; and it’s only to be had for cash down. I asked Ken why he didn’t buy it, and he laughed and said he was thinking of buying up the moon, instead. Now, you see, what I would do if I were rich. I should plank down the whole big lump, and say to Ray and Kendall, ‘Bless you, my children; sail right in and get married next week if you want to; there’s your house waiting for you.’ Wouldn’t that be jolly fun?”

He had talked on rapidly, with a touch of recklessness, eager, especially, to make his aunt forget his blundering reference to his father. But he did not succeed; as soon as he paused for breath she asked a direct question:

“Is it Ray’s delayed marriage that is making your father look so grave and troubled, just now?”

The boy flushed and hesitated. In his mind was the question: “How is a fellow who means to be always on the square to answer that?”

“Y-YES’M,” he said at last, “or—well, some; and then—father has worries of his own. Mortgages are kind of worrisome things, I guess; a man has to keep thinking about them.”

“Now you have put your foot in it, old blunderbuss; the idea of Aunt Elsie not knowing that there was a mortgage on the house!” It seemed to the boy that he had known it ever since he was born.

“Oh, yes,” he said, trying to speak carelessly, “there’s a mortgage, of course; there always is I guess, on houses; they’re there when you buy ’em, aren’t they?”

But Aunt Elsie declined to be drawn into a discussion on real estate transfers; she quietly asked another question:

Oh, didn’t he! Why, he was sure he had known that ever since he began to read, and write, “units, tens, hundreds, thousands”; of course he must reply.

“I’ve heard it mentioned—it is eight thousand I believe—but—” No, he wouldn’t say that. Catch him telling that the great trouble was the old thing was due, and had passed into other hands, and the mean skinflint who held it now wanted every penny of it at once.

He sprang up with an excellent appearance of haste as he exclaimed: “Why, dear me, is that clock striking three? I shall be late at the gym, and it will be Ray’s fault, won’t it?”

She let him go without further questioning; she had learned almost all that she needed to know.

All of which will explain why, on the third evening after this talk, Aunt Elsie, instead of following Mrs. Forman and the girls to the family sitting-room after dinner, boldly halted in front of the little room at the end of the hall which, by courtesy, was called the library, but was in reality the place where the head of the house hid himself when he was too busy or too sad to join the family circle. Mrs. Forman noted with dismay the stopping of the crutch before that already closed door—Mr. Forman had excused himself before dinner was quite over.

“I’m sorry your aunt stopped there,” she said, “your father will not feel equal to sitting with her to-night.”

“Perhaps she will cheer him up,” was Jean’s hopeful reply. “I’m sure she can, if any one can.”

Mrs. Forman’s only reply was a sigh; she understood so much better than Jean how hard a thing that would be to do on this night of all others. It had been her plan to slip away from the family as soon as she could do so unnoticed, to sit beside the stricken man for a while, in silence, just to let him feel her sympathy. There were no words that she could speak until he had time to adjust himself to his burden. She was as yet the only one in the family who knew that Mr. Forman’s last effort to raise money had failed, and that in a very few days they would be homeless. What words were there to speak to a man so stricken? His wife knew what a brave struggle he had made, even to appealing once more, because of her urging, to his brother Evarts, a thing that he had said he would not do; and the result had been that as he read the reply with set lips and a face so white it frightened her, he looked up to say: “Louise, remember, if the alternative is the poorhouse for us both, we will take that; we must never appeal to him again.”

Mrs. Forman, as she sat waiting, wished that she had explained the present situation to Aunt Elsie, who must know very soon now, and she would have left the poor man to this one hour of needed solitude, if she had understood.

The caller did not wait to knock but opened the door and advanced quickly, not apparently noticing the haggard face turned to see who the intruder was; he arose at once with the instincts of a gentleman pushed forward an easy chair for her use.

“I thought it was Louise,” he said, because it seemed necessary to say something.

“No, Louise and the others went to the living-room and I thumped on down here because I wanted to talk to you a minute. I won’t hinder you long, but I can’t help seeing that something is troubling you, and I wondered if I couldn’t be of some help.”

He smiled faintly. “Yes,” he said, “I am troubled, there is no use in denying it; I am in great trouble, but there is nothing you can do to help; yet it is a comfort to realize how quickly you would help, if you could.”

“Well, now, don’t be so very sure that I can’t help a little; you haven’t tried me. I don’t really know anything about it, but I would be willing to make a big guess that money is at the bottom of your present trouble; I think it is, about half the time, with men. Now, I want to say that I have a little of my own saved up, and I would like nothing better than to spend it in helping you out. If you will just tell me I am right, and how much you need just now, I’ll go at once and give you a chance to rest a while; you look as though you needed it.”

He was very pale and almost mortally tired; he had slept but little for the past two nights, and it had seemed to him but a few moments before that he could never smile again; yet a smile hovered over his face at thought of this dear old woman coming with her bits of savings that she probably had tucked away in some locked upper drawer, to help him out of trouble! It was a tender smile and warmed his heart; he had not known that she had any money at all, and one of his bitter sorrows had been that he could no longer do for her the little that he had been able to do. His grateful acknowledgment came promptly.

“It does my very soul good, Elsie, to feel how true is your sympathy, and how willingly you would help me; but I am only too glad if you have been able to save a little for yourself; hold every penny of it for your personal use; my money troubles are much too large to be helped by it.”

He looked his surprise; he thought they had all been careful not to talk “mortgage” before her; still, what could it matter now? “Yes,” he said, “that is the climax. The mortgage on this house is overdue; it has recently come into the possession of a man who will not wait, for even a few days. But I could not do anything if he would; I have tried all the possibilities and have failed. Two years from now there will be a little money coming to me that, if I had it now, would save our home; but I can’t get it. The fact is the man wants the house, he would rather have it on the terms he can arrange than the money; it has doubled in value since I bought it, and the street has improved very greatly; it is worth his while to get hold of the property, and he knows it.”

“Well,” Aunt Elsie said briskly, “I should tell him he couldn’t have it; my advice is that you take the money to him to-morrow morning when you go to the store; if he is afraid of checks you might stop at the Metropolitan Exchange and get it for him in gold.”

Mr. Forman gazed at his sister with a dazed, half-frightened look. Had she suddenly become insane, or was this a miserable attempt at pleasantry?

“Just what I say; if you want this house, pay him the money you owe on it to-morrow morning; whether you want to keep it or not, I should think you would take up the mortgage and get rid of him.”

He rose up and came over to her, his pale face growing even paler yet with a new anxiety.

“Elsie,” he said, speaking low and soothingly as he might to an excited child, “I wish you would not bother about this; you do not understand mortgages, and you do not need to think of it any more; I shall manage, somehow.”

“But the best way to manage it is to pay off the mortgage, Joseph; surely that is simple enough, a child could understand it.”

“Very well, get rid of it.” Then, suddenly, her manner changed. She began to realize that he was actually frightened. Instead of the crisp business-like tone hers became gentle.

“Sit down, Joseph, and don’t get to worrying about me; I’m neither crazy nor ‘gone daft,’ as our Scotch grandmother used to say. It is all very simple. I happen to have this money lying by, waiting to be used, and here is a chance to use it. I wish I had known about the mortgage a good while ago, it might have saved you some anxious hours; and the sooner we fix it up now the better. If you will tell me just how to make out the check I’ll hobble away and give you a chance to rest a bit; I can see that you are all tuckered out.”

“Elsie,” he said in strong excitement, “I cannot take your money—I can’t! Why should you think for a moment that I could do such a thing? I did not dream that you had any money; but if I had, I would not have borrowed it for the world! I don’t know when I could pay you; the hope that I have for two years ahead may fail; all my hopes and plans have, for years; I cannot depend on anything financial, and to risk all that you have in that way would be folly in you, and infamous in me.”

He had walked back towards his desk as he began to speak; now he dropped into his chair and laid his head, face downward, on the desk. His sister reached for her crutch and came over and laid her hand on his head in a way his father used to have.

“Joseph,” she said gently, “you don’t understand; let me tell you. This money that I offer is really yours; I did not earn it nor save it; it is trust money, Joseph, for me to use as I think the one who made it would like to have it used; and that was our brother Derrick; you have read the letters he wrote to me about you; can you think of any one in the world he would rather give it to than you? I have some money of my own, as I said, but this I am offering has nothing to do with mine; but suppose that it had, and that it took my last penny, don’t you think I would be glad to have you take it for such a purpose? Think of the home that you have made for me! Think of what you and Louise and the children have done for me all these months. Do you remember that I have been here about nine months, cared for and watched over with thoughtful loving kindness, never for a single moment allowed to fancy myself in the way—made to feel as though I were your very own? Joseph, for the first time since father went away I have had a real home. What is money compared with that?”

They talked longer, they went over all the ground again and again, down to minute details. They lingered so long that Mrs. Forman’s anxiety reached the point where she had resolved to break in upon them at once and compel her husband to rest, when they suddenly appeared.

It had been for years the custom of the Forman family to gather in the living-room immediately after early dinner for family worship, unless circumstances prevented. But many were the circumstances that prevented. Especially had this been the case of late years, as the social duties and engagements of the young people increased, and the daily cares of life began to press more and more heavily upon the heads of the house, until for nearly a year the passing over of this service had been more common than its observance. But they still had a habit of loitering about for a while, to see, as Derrick once expressed it, “whether this is the night that we have prayers.” They had done so on this evening, waiting much longer than usual, because each felt an unspoken anxiety for the absent father, and, to the young people, there was an indescribable tenseness in the air as though something, they did not imagine what, was about to happen. Something had happened! One look at their father’s face revealed it. The moment he had established Aunt Elsie in the armchair that Derrick sprang to offer her, he turned toward them, his face shining, his voice gladly solemn:

“Louise, and children, a wonderful deliverance has come to us this night; to me it seems nothing less than a miracle. Our home that I believed only an hour ago was gone from us forever is saved. The Father in heaven has looked down in pity upon this blundering earthly father of yours and has sent us deliverance at the hand of this dear sister; God bless her! Let us pray.” He knelt beside Aunt Elsie’s chair with her hand clasped in his, and there was not a member of his family who ever forgot that prayer.

It was a wonderful evening they had together after that. There were many things to be talked over, and many plans to make for the immediate future. Matters that by tacit consent had been held in abeyance because if they were to move, somewhere, all would be different, now came to the front and insisted on being considered. Most of them Aunt Elsie heard for the first time, and enjoyed to the full this being taken into the real and intimate family circle, never to be, kindly and graciously, even tenderly, shut out from it any more.

Yet it was, of course, the “deliverance” that was uppermost in their thoughts.

“It is wonderful, isn’t it,” Jean said, lingering at the door of Derrick’s room for their last words together. “It does seem like a miracle, as father said; and to think that it should have come through Aunt Elsie! Professor Norton announced to-day that the age of miracles was long past; I guess if he had been through what we have, and then been here to-night, he would know better.”

“Especially if he had seen father’s face,” added Derrick. “Do you know what I thought of when I looked at him: ‘And all that sat looking steadfastly on him saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.’”

AUNT ELSIE had become a woman of affairs; on the day following the “miracle,” while the family were adjusting themselves anew to the delights of the home which so nearly went from them, she stayed in her room writing a letter of some length, the details of which she went over most carefully. When it was finished, she made a journey to the kitchen and pared apples for the little maid, while she, most happy to serve her helper, sped with the letter to the nearest post-box. On the Friday following, Aunt Elsie interviewed Kendall Forsythe, while he waited in the little reception room for Ray, who was going out with him for the evening. Long before this, Kendall had adopted her; she was “Aunt Elsie” to him as entirely as she was to Ray; although, owing to his busy life and home responsibilities, they saw but little of each other.

“Is nobody here?” she asked, looking carefully down the room. “What a piece of good fortune! I wanted to see you alone to ask a favor.”

“Of me? How delightful! Please consider it granted if it comes within my limited powers.”

“That wasn’t the way I ought to have begun; I meant first to discover whether you ever had any daytime to bestow on commonplace people who have nothing to do with regular business.”

“Occasionally I do,” he said, genially. “For instance, to-morrow afternoon I happen to have some unoccupied hours, and I have just been bemoaning the sadness of my fate that they should fall on a day when Ray is especially occupied every minute. Can I use them in your service? If so, command me.”

“That depends; I wonder if you have enough courage to take care of an old woman with a crutch, who has to be helped in and out of street cars and up and down steps, and is a nuisance generally?”

“Try me,” he said, gayly. “My mother considers me a very careful escort, and I should like exceedingly to give you a proof of her excellent judgment.”

“Then I will confess that I have a childish desire to go on a secret expedition. I’ve heard so much about the house where Jean and Derrick were born that I want to see it with my own eyes. They say it is vacant and for sale, so one could get permission to look at it; Ray has told me a good deal about the rose gardens and the outlook from her room; I just want to see it all, myself; but I can’t ask my brother, or even the girls, to take me out there, because, besides seeming foolish, it would be hard on them.”

Her amused listener hastened to assure her that it would be a pleasure to him to take her through the fine old place, and the views, especially from the east and west windows, were worth seeing; they would go to-morrow.

“But how could we manage it, I wonder?” she said, with the eagerness of a child. “I can’t tell you how careful they all are not to talk about that place to one another; even Derrick and Jean, who were too young when they left it to have much personal recollection, hardly ever speak of it before the others, because they do not want to recall old times to them. It seems my brother had planned that the place should at some time be given to Ray, and it makes it especially hard on that account. I should feel real mean to seem to be going there just out of idle curiosity.”

“I understand,” he said. “We must manage it; let me think. How would you like to take a trip to the park to view the new Lincoln Monument? That is in the same general direction, and it is quite a fad just now to ride out there to see the statue.”

She had only time to assure him that she would be delighted, and to receive his promise to attend himself to all the details, when Ray came flying down stairs, with apologies for delays.

The house was mildly excited, next day, by the departure of Aunt Elsie on a sightseeing expedition, escorted by Kendall Forsythe. They made a noticeable couple; Mr. Forsythe, who had descended from a long line of ancestors belonging to the privileged and cultured class, and who, to all outward appearances, belonged himself to the fashionable world, accompanied by Aunt Elsie, in her severely plain and unmistakably not tailor-made suit. She might, however, have passed very well for a favorite servant grown old in the employ of his family.

Florence Forman looked after them, with a frown of annoyance on her pretty face as she said: “Aunt Elsie ought to have a new suit; that queer woman who lived near them and made all her clothes because she needed the work did not know how to fit a coat any more than I do! and Kendall is such a gentleman! Mother, do you suppose she has left herself money enough for clothes?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Forman said. “She assured your father that she had plenty for all her needs; although it must be confessed that her idea of what she needs might differ from yours; but I wouldn’t worry about the set of her coat to-day; Kendall is a gentleman in every respect.”

Ray, who was just starting out to her afternoon pupils, was troubled from a different standpoint:

“Doesn’t it seem almost pitiful that Aunt Elsie had to appeal to Kendall for her little outing? I confess it has never occurred to me that she might like to go through the business streets and out to the park; I wonder if we are all selfishly busy with our own affairs; we younger ones, I mean,” she made haste to add.

“Don’t worry,” said Jean, the cheerful; “Kendall can do it lots better than we could; he’ll give her a good time.”

But it was Aunt Elsie who took the initiative, and gave her escort surprises. She was thoroughly interested in all the sights she saw and sounds she heard; she examined the new statue critically, and compared the features with those in the best prints she had seen; and she remarked that she was glad the man was made of bronze and did not mind standing there forever to be gazed at. Then she asked if Henry Westlake’s office wasn’t somewhere near this park entrance. She would like very much to stop at his office for a minute, if Kendall didn’t mind. She used to know Henry when he was a boy and came to the farm for the week-end; and she hadn’t seen him since.

Kendall was a trifle embarrassed; he knew Henry Westlake, certainly; at least by reputation; he was a very great lawyer, perhaps the greatest one in the city, and a man of remarkable ability in other than legal matters; his opinion was very much sought after by business men, even when no legal question was involved. So, of course, he was a very busy man; Mr. Forsythe doubted if he was ever seen in business hours, except by special appointment.

“Perhaps not,” Aunt Elsie said, serenely, “but it would do no harm to try, would it?” Whereupon Mr. Forsythe resolved at all hazards to try. The youth who received them in the great man’s outer office was patronizing.

“Appointment, I suppose?” he said, inquiringly, to Mr. Forsythe, who looked at Aunt Elsie.

“Oh, no,” she said, “no appointment; I just want to see him a minute, if I can.” Then the clerk smiled a very wise smile and volunteered that his chief was extremely busy, even more so than usual, as a very important case was called for the next day.

“Very well,” said Aunt Elsie, cheerfully; “Just ask him if he can see me, will you? If he can’t, no harm will be done.” Whereupon the amused clerk coughed to conceal a laugh.

“Cards?” he questioned of Mr. Forsythe, who was aware that at least two of the half-dozen clerks at work beyond the alcove had stopped their pens to gaze and listen. Aunt Elsie answered:

“No, I haven’t any cards; I don’t make calls, as a rule. Kendall, have you a bit of paper that I could write my name on?” And that young man, too thoroughly the gentleman to show outward discomposure, yet conscious of feeling that it would be a relief to kick the now grinning youth down the outside stairs, offered the reverse side of his business card to Aunt Elsie who wrote her name and address in a bold, firm hand. Had they followed the grinning youth to the presence of his chief they would have found him grave and respectful.

“I beg pardon, sir,” he said, speaking as one who knew he must not waste time. “A persistent old woman from the country insisted on my bringing in her name; I told her it was useless, but—”

He had not time for more. The busy man glared at the intruder from under heavy eyebrows, glanced at the name on the card and exploded his surprising order: “Show Miss Forman in immediately.”

“I won’t hinder you but a minute, Kendall,” Aunt Elsie said, as she limped away to obey the summons; but it was many minutes before she reappeared; so many indeed, that her perplexed escort had time to imagine all sorts of uncomfortable situations, among them the possibility that Aunt Elsie, in her ignorance of business had made a serious mistake, and the amazing eight-thousand-dollar check was involving her and the Formans in more trouble; perhaps Mr. Westlake had written to her about it, and she had determined to see him in person. But when she at last appeared her composed manner was reassuring, though all she said was: “I’ve tried your patience, I’m afraid; he kept me longer than I had any idea he would.” And when they were at last beyond the gaze of the now thoroughly puzzled clerk she had only this to add: “Henry looks older than a man of his age ought to; I’m afraid he is working too hard, and for this world only.”

She was as eager as a child about going over the fine old house on Dupont Circle; limping bravely up and down stairs and peeping into every nook and corner. She was much more at home in the house than was Kendall, although he had been a guest there in his childhood.

“This is Ray’s room,” she said, seating herself comfortably on the wide window seat. “I don’t wonder that they talk yet about the view! It is fine, isn’t it? She likes this room better than any she ever had, and one can see why; it is like her, some way. Down there is the rose garden she told me about; it needs a lot of work done in it. She loves to work over flowers, doesn’t she?”

“I think so,” Kendall said, absent-mindedly; he was thinking about a very different house and trying to decide whether or not to confide in Aunt Elsie and claim her as an ally. Suddenly he decided: “I’m especially interested in houses just now, Aunt Elsie; I am thinking of moving.”

She turned suddenly from the rose garden and fixed her keen gray eyes upon him, as she exclaimed: “You are?”

“Yes,” he said. “My mother and I.” Then he explained in detail how an exceptional opportunity had presented itself; they were feeling somewhat cramped for room, and had been for some time trying to plan for a change; but he was paying all the rent it seemed to him he ought to afford; and now had come this chance. A friend of his, who owned several houses, had one on a pleasant street, more convenient to his place of business, more desirable in several ways than his present home, and with two more rooms in it, that he offered to him for the same rent that he was now paying; it had been unexpectedly vacated after the usual season for renting was past, hence this unusual offer. Then he went on to explain that in addition to Ray’s reluctance to leave home while her father and mother were so burdened, there had been with her the fear that his invalid mother, though more than willing, even eager to claim her as a daughter, would suffer because of the smallness of his house, and the need she would feel for taking less room than an invalid ought to have. The two additional rooms in this prospective house, and all the rooms larger and pleasanter, would remove that difficulty, and as Aunt Elsie had graciously lifted the burden from the father, and had promised to continue to belong to the family, thereby relieving Mrs. Forman’s cares, did she not agree with him that the time had come at last for their marriage, and would she not use her almost unbounded influence with Ray to that effect?

Aunt Elsie gave him undivided attention, not once turning her eyes to the west window to watch the glory of a sky getting ready for sunset; her face was alive with interest and sympathy.

“I understand all about it, Kendall,” she said, when at last he came to a period and waited for her word. “I don’t in the least wonder that you are in a hurry to get Ray to yourself, and I think you have been patient and unselfish and like a son, in waiting. I do think that Ray can leave her mother better than she could have done a few months ago; and as for my brother, I may as well tell you now that I see a way to fix things so that he need not be burdened about money matters, as he has been all these later years. I did not understand it before, or I—well, never mind that now. But don’t move just yet, Kendall; wait a few months; and don’t take that house.”

He was bitterly disappointed; his hopes that had been mounting higher with every word she spoke, until that last sentence, now dropped to zero. He had been over the ground so often and so carefully with Ray, and her ideas he had been compelled to admit were so reasonable, that he felt sure the house where he now lived would be an insurmountable obstacle with her. What possible objection could her aunt have to the plan he proposed? Could she imagine that he was being deceived, and that once settled in the new house he would be called upon to pay a higher rent than he could manage? If she had any such idea he could convince her of her mistake in five seconds; the name of the man who had made him the offer would be sufficient answer in itself to any such fears. Moreover, he was himself a business man, and would, of course, have a lease duly signed. Perhaps she thought it beneath his dignity to accept an offer of that kind, as though he were an object of charity; but he could make that plain to her. The house would in all probability stand idle until another season unless some such offer was made; and the owner would rather have it rented at a lower figure than to stand vacant. It was all perfectly reasonable from a business standpoint, even though, at the same time, it was an exceptionally kind offer that he appreciated. Why did not she tell him what her objections were, so that he could, perhaps, remove them? Should he act upon those imaginary ones and proceed to enlighten her? Or must he let it all go? Not only Ray but the entire Forman family were in the mood to be greatly influenced by what Aunt Elsie might say.

She was watching his face with keen interest; suddenly she said: “I believe, after all, I shall have to tell you something, though I didn’t want to.”

“You see, I wanted to wait a while and talk to both of you together, but I don’t believe it can be managed. Instead, I think you and I will plan a nice little secret, and keep her out of it for a while. How will that do?”

“The fact is, Kendall, I want Ray to live here; this house just fits her; she belongs, and I can’t think of her as anywhere else. Besides, those communicating rooms over there will be perfection for your mother. I can see just how she could be established in them in peace and comfort. Then that rose garden needs Ray, if anything ever did; the whole house needs her, in fact; can’t you see for yourself that she belongs here?”

“Yes, I know; you are bristling with exclamation points; you think the old woman doesn’t know what she is talking about, but I do, and I’m having some of the good times that I missed in my girlhood. Now, listen: This house is mine, or will be as soon Henry Westlake can manage the business, and he promised to be quick about it. I bought the place as an investment; he says it is a finer bargain than any he knows of in this city; that the price it is offered for is less than it would bring at a forced sale, and property in this locality is steadily increasing in value, and I guess Henry knows as much about values—for this world, anyway—as any man living; so you see I’m safe enough; and if I choose to give the use of it free of rent for—well, we will say three years, to you and Ray as a wedding present, why shouldn’t I have that pleasure?”

Mr. Forsythe began another sentence, but she waved his words away with her hand: “No, don’t talk just yet; wait until I have finished. I have imagined all the things you could say about this house being too large and fine for young people who have their way to make, but that is nonsense; you needn’t use any more rooms than you want, and the size of the grounds won’t hurt you; if at the end of three years you are tired of the place, and want to leave it, not a bit of harm will be done; it can be easily sold at any time; and in case you should want to stay I am sure that arrangements could be made. Then, you will proceed to saying that it costs money to keep up such a place as this, and you can not afford it; you see, I have thought all your objections out, and none of them will stand. Let me tell you, I know a middle-aged man living out near the farm who inherited gardening, as a passion, and who would like nothing better for this life than to come here and look after this place, and who would do it for much less a month than you are paying now, for rent. I want you to agree to it, Kendall. I am an old woman, and I never had any one of my very own to do for, except father; Ray seems more like what a daughter of mine might have been than any one I ever saw; I would like so very much to make a present of this kind to her.”

“I have bewildered you, I know, by suddenly paying mortgages and buying property, when you thought I was very poor. There is a story connected with all that, which I may tell, some day; meantime, let me explain about the recent happenings. There is a sense in which the money is not mine; it is trust money. You must have heard of Derrick Forman, young Derrick’s uncle? It is his money that I am using; he wanted it used, some of it, for his brother Joseph’s children, but he chose to work through me, and left me to decide just who, and what, and when; only he had me wait until Derrick, his namesake was a certain age. I need not take your time to tell you more, just now; but haven’t I answered the most pressing of your questions and objections, and convinced you that I know what I am about? Oh, and there is one thing more; if you will let me have the pleasure of giving you a wedding present after this queer fashion, will you keep the location and size of the place and all the other details a secret from Ray until she is ‘Mrs. Forsythe?’”

“What I thought was this: You could explain to her that an old friend, not only of yours, but of her father and mother as well, had offered you a house, rent free for a term of years, as a wedding gift, but that for certain probably whimsical reasons had stipulated that your bride was to take the gift on trust, not knowing even the street on which the house was to be found until she was ready to take possession. Some such way, you know; you could fix it up, couldn’t you? And every word would be true; if I am not an old friend of all of you, what am I? With some such arrangement, you could establish your mother here before you were married, using your furniture for the necessary rooms, and that would give Ray the chance that every married woman likes, to select and arrange her own furnishings. I believe I’ll have to tell you, though, right here, that the furniture she chooses is to be part of my wedding present. Can’t we do it, Kendall?”

There was the strangest wistfulness in her voice; like a girl pleading for a rare and longed-for pleasure. Under ordinary circumstances her evident, almost childish, delight in her plan would have appealed to the young man before her; but just then he had been rendered almost incapable of calmly considering anything by the composed way in which this bewildering woman referred to his marriage as something definitely settled for the near future; and talked as glibly of their home together as though they were already husband and wife!

They talked longer, much longer; they went over wonderful details in a perfectly entrancing manner; they stayed so late on their strange outing that the entire Forman household had begun to be somewhat anxious before they appeared. The spirit in which they arrived and the impression that they made upon the group of questioners will be best explained by listening to Jean:

“Mother, do let us leave them to themselves and have dinner; they are so entirely satisfied with their proceedings, and so indifferent concerning the agonies we have been enduring on their behalf, that they are positively exasperating. As for finding out what they saw, or heard, or did, the famous Sphinx couldn’t compare with them! I’m hopeless.”

But it was very soon after that momentous excursion that preparations for the Forman-Forsythe wedding began in earnest; notwithstanding the fact that a portion of Mr. Forsythe’s plans sounded so much like what Jean called a “chapter from a three-volume novel” that, had they been presented by any other, the elect lady might have hesitated. Interest and excitement ran high in the family concerning that mysterious “friend,” who chose to be so eccentric in his offerings. Innumerable were the discussions and endless the surmisings concerning him. Aunt Elsie, who had lain awake nights to perfect her plan, was continually being appealed to as to what she thought of it.

“Why couldn’t he at least have let us know where the house is?” Jean demanded. “I don’t believe I would promise to live in a house that I had never seen, nor heard described!” But to all such objections Ray had one answer that abundantly satisfied her:

“Kendall has seen the house, he knows all about it, why isn’t that enough?” The fact was that Ray Forman, during those weeks of preparation, thought very little about that house, or any other. She had watched her father rise up from the incubus of that hateful mortgage and take hold of life and hope with fresh energy; she had received from Aunt Elsie the assurance that she had not the least desire to go away from “Joseph’s” household, but would be only too glad to belong to it as long as they would keep her; she had realized with a thankful heart that both Jean and Derrick had passed beyond the period when they needed an older sister’s constant watching care, having chosen for daily companionship One whose unerring guidance could be trusted; and now that a strange providence had offered Kendall a home suited to the needs of his mother, thus enabling them to get well started in life before heavy added expense would be necessary, she gave herself up to the joy of believing that now the time had come when she might conscientiously leave the dear old home and help make a new one; and the joy and hope of it passed away beyond and above such commonplaces as the kind of house they were to live in.

Standing out conspicuously among her causes for gratitude during those busy days was Aunt Elsie’s pledge not to go away from “mother.” So used was Ray to thinking of her aunt as a blessing and only that, especially to mother, that she had all but forgotten the days when they had looked forward with apprehension to her coming. Not so Jean, whose love of contrast was strong.

“Just think how we fussed about it!” she said, one day. “Does it seem possible that we could ever have groaned and growled so much over ‘sacrificing’ ourselves for the sake of Aunt Elsie! I mean us, Ray dear, never you, though you did the sacrificing, you blessed darling! I hope that mysterious house will have a decent room in it for your very own. Just think, you really haven’t had a room to yourself—large enough to be called a room—for a whole year.”

“I’ve never for an hour been sorry that Aunt Elsie had mine,” Ray answered, “and it wasn’t half so much of a sacrifice to give it up as you girls imagined. You don’t remember my room at 1200 Dupont Circle very well, do you, Jean? but Florence does. I loved that room, really loved it, and I resolved when I tore myself away from it never to let another room take hold of my heart as that did.”

It happened that Aunt Elsie on her way to the dining-room where the girls were at work, overheard this last sentence. With her hand on the door knob she turned suddenly and limped back to her own room in order to enjoy a gleeful laugh, as she thought of the room that was “really loved.” It was on that evening that she told Kendall Forsythe she was having “the time of her life, these days.” Also she was having a new gown for the wedding day; a pearl gray silk, with trimmings of her own old lace. Nor was the dress being made by that “poor girl” who had served her in such capacity for nearly half a century, because she would not for the world have hurt her feelings by employing any other. It is not certain that she would have done so even yet, save for the fact that the “poor girl” had gone home to her Father’s house where all her shortcomings were forever covered, and her feelings could be hurt no more.

The dress of the prospective bride was a study of beauty. It was quiet, of course, or it would not have fitted Ray, but “so soft, and clinging, and rich and fine!” These and other adjectives were tossed about by the rapturous Jean, as she witnessed the “trying on,” for family inspection. “It just matches Ray!” she declared, “I was so afraid she would have to wear some common, cheap thing! Aunt Elsie, you are a jewel; and that lace is simply ravishing! It is the very prettiest piece you have. Did you save it for Ray’s wedding dress?”

“It saved itself,” said the smiling aunt. “It trimmed Ray Shepard’s wedding gown a hundred years ago, and Ray Shepard was your great-grandmother’s younger sister; who should wear it but her namesake?”

Through all these absorbing interests and excitements, moved Father Time with steady feet, bringing the marriage day to its very eve. When the date for the wedding was being chosen, it was discovered that the day selected as probable came within one week of marking the year that Aunt Elsie had spent with them; whereupon Ray promptly moved forward the date for a week, thus making the event an anniversary of her coming.

The wedding gifts were in Jean’s special care, to receive and arrange for Ray to examine when she could. They were numerous, for Ray had many friends among the young people of her circle, and most of them remembered her with some choice token. There were no costly articles for the gift table. Uncle Evarts, in response to his invitation, had written a letter voluminous with regrets that a most important business engagement falling on the date of the wedding would prevent his coming, and his wife was detained by the illness of a grandchild. They sent their love and blessing, and hoped that Ray would be as happy as she deserved. They also sent six pretty silver coffee spoons, so tiny that Jean thought they might get lost even in after-dinner coffee cups! Aunt Caroline was reported as in the throes of one of her terrible sick headache sieges, the effects of which often made her unfit for travelling for several weeks. She caused to be sent a five-dollar gold-piece, with instructions to Ray to buy something she wanted, and mark it with her Aunt Caroline’s name. Jean managed to refrain from comment concerning these gifts from their wealthy relatives, but she permitted herself the comfort of a curling lip, as she placed them on the table, and made the apparently irrelevant remark that she wished she could rip the lace from the wedding dress and lay it beside them for a few minutes. Aunt Elsie understood, but answered her only with a tender smile. Aunt Elsie was being very glad over those same tiny spoons; she knew better than did any of the others that it was a proof of grace triumphant that they were there at all. She had feared that Uncle Evarts and his family would not be invited to the wedding nor could she blame her brother Joseph if he considered himself excused from such invitations to his house; feeling miserably sure, as he now did, of Evarts’ unfair dealings in the past. But, lo, it was Joseph who gave the final decision. “Invite him by all means, daughter; we can not right any past wrongs by hurting his feelings now.” It was simply an added proof that Joseph Forman, struggling as he had for days, even for weeks, with a resentment so bitter and a hurt so deep that he thought he could never meet his brother Evarts again and speak quietly to him as friend to friend, had risen victoriously above it. Aunt Elsie, looking on, knowing much about it all from the dead brother, shrewdly surmising what she did not already know, waited and feared and prayed and hoped, and now was glad. But she knew that she was glad, not so much for Evarts’ sake, as for Joseph’s.

It was not until the marriage ceremony had been performed, and the bride’s cake duly cut and passed, and the bride in travelling attire was beginning to think of the good-bys that must come before she and Kendall went out from the dear home together, that there appeared on the gift table up stairs a new package, a large, heavy envelope that filled Jean with astonishment.

“Where in the world—” she began; then Derrick, whose quick glance had followed her’s; “Hello! what is this? It wasn’t here an hour ago, where did it come from?”

“I can’t imagine; I never saw it before. There hasn’t been a mail since three o’clock, and I looked after that.”

“It hasn’t been mailed,” he said. “It must have come by a messenger; it is a legal document of some sort; look at the seal; and it is addressed to ‘Mrs. Kendall Forsythe’; there wasn’t such a person an hour ago. I wonder if it can be a joke? Who put it here?”

“How should I know? All I know is that it wasn’t on the table when I went downstairs, just before the ceremony. Dick, what if it should be something hateful, a kind of joke that would annoy her. Wouldn’t that be horrid?”

“If it is, she won’t see it nor hear of it,” Derrick said, resolutely. “We’ll show it to Kendall and—see here, the thing isn’t sealed; I’ll look at it myself, and if—Oh, hello! Why Jean Forman!”

“It is a deed transfer,” said the excited boy. “Yes, sir, it is! The whole rigmarole is here; the same thing said over half a dozen times, you know; and it’s for ‘Ray Forman Forsythe, her heirs and’—all the of it, and—Jean, it’s our house on Dupont Circle!”

“Nonsense!” from Jean. “How could it be? You are crazy, Dick Forman! ‘Much wedding cake has made you mad.’”

“Crazy or not I should hope I could still read! This is a deed of transfer, if I ever heard of one; and I heard of nothing else for a week; we had ’em in class; why, I even had to write—oh! I say—this is the greatest! Jean, this is from Aunt Elsie!”

After that, excitement in the gift room ran so high that Florence, who was helping to pack the bride’s travelling bag, came to see what was the matter. Brother and sister both talked at once, trying to explain, and finally pointed out the lines, that she might read for herself. As she read, her face grew white with excitement.

“What can it mean?” she cried. “What can it mean? It is our old home—and Ray’s name is here, and Aunt Elsie’s! I can’t understand it!”

Then all three went in haste for the bride and groom, almost literally carrying them by force to the gift room; talking the while so incoherently and so much in concert that not a suspicion of what they could mean reached Ray’s mind.

“Why, Jean, dear,” she said, laughing, “what is the matter? Have you all three gone daft?”

But when she read on the envelope her newly acquired name, and flushed over it, and laughed, a happy little laugh, and bent over the formidable document trying to make some sense from its strange-sounding legal phrases, and began to catch a glimmer of its possible meaning, and looked with startled eyes at her husband, and found him almost as amazed as herself, Aunt Elsie’s satisfaction in her carefully planned surprise ought to have been complete.

It is of no use to try to tell how that last hour, which had been more or less dreaded by all concerned, was spent. They could not have told, if they had tried. Almost the wedding itself, and the going out from the old home not to return, were forgotten in this new bewilderment and delight.

Perhaps it was well for all parties concerned that the clock moved steadily on without regard to legal transfers, or any such thing, and presently called out sharply the hour of ten; and the 10:40 train was the one that the bridal party were to take! After that, they left all the gifts and scurried about in haste.

According to Jean, on the following morning “before they had had a chance to discover that Ray was really married, it was all over and they were gone!”

The house had by no means settled into regular routine, nor grown in the least accustomed to the new order of things, when a diversion was caused by the appearance of Uncle Evarts; all unexpected, as usual, he came for one of his flying visits.

The missing of a train at a junction had compelled him to lie over, and he had found by taking a rather circuitous route he could run down and spend a few hours with them, and hear all about the bride. He was “so sorry” that he could not come in time for the wedding; but business was a terrible tyrant and a man who had a family to think about had to get up and hustle these days. Joe was at it, he supposed. Poor Joe! He wished he could make him understand how sorry he was not to be able to help him through this last scrape. Would he really have to lose the house? Mortgages were dangerous tools for poor people to play with; he himself had steered clear of them; it was always the best way. Uncle Evarts never waited for replies to his questions; in this case his sister-in-law was glad that he hadn’t; she was finding herself unwilling to talk over family matters with him. Next, he attacked the bride:

“So Ray is really married at last? Put it off a number of times, didn’t she? Well, marriage is a kind of lottery; the best we can do is hope that she will never have cause to regret hers. What is the plan? You and Joe going to take them in and look after them until they can stand on their own feet? Forsythe has nothing but his salary, has he? Not even a home of his own. Pretty precarious business to marry under such circumstances.”

When he paused for breath, Mrs. Forman decided that she must give him a crumb of information; it started him afresh:

“Oh, indeed! Going to housekeeping. Well, that’s sensible. A little place of their own, no matter how humble, is better than living on other people. But, didn’t I hear that he had a relative of some sort to support? Oh, a mother; and is she going to live with them? They will need several rooms, then. Where have they found a desirable place? Or haven’t they got so far as that yet?”

Mrs. Forman arose suddenly, ostensibly to close a window where the wind was blowing in; really, to decide just how to answer him. It gave Jean the opportunity for which she longed:

“Eh, what?” he said. “I beg your pardon, Jean, I didn’t hear distinctly, 1200 what?”

“Why! Oh, caretakers for some nabob, are they? Well, that isn’t bad, for a while. How long can they have that arrangement?”

“You don’t understand,” said Mrs. Forman, with a look of rebuke for Jean, who was laughing hysterically. “It is to be a permanent arrangement. Kendall has already settled two or three rooms and installed his mother there, with a maid to look after her comfort and Derrick to stay nights. Their wish was to get to housekeeping as soon as they returned, and Ray is going to select her own furniture by degrees.”

“But, Louise, you are talking in riddles! If I remember anything about this town, Dupont Circle is one of the finest residence districts. Isn’t it where you lived when Joe signed his name once too often, and went to pieces?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Forman said, with quiet voice, though the flush on her face betokened strong self-control. “You are quite right; it is our dear old home. We are so thankful to have it as one of Ray’s wedding gifts; we planned it for her long ago.”

“But what in the world? I beg your pardon, Louise, but this is most extraordinary! What relatives have we who could make such an amazing present as this? You don’t mean that the place is given to her out and out!”

Then the telephone summoned Mrs. Forman, and Jean’s lost opportunity returned:

“Yes, it is, Uncle Evarts; a regular deed, with whole yards of legal phrases, and her name, ‘Ray Kendall Forsythe,’ written out in full; the first time her new name was used. And it wasn’t Aunt Elsie’s only gift, either; you ought to see the perfectly lovely wedding dress trimmed with lace a hundred years old. Aunt Elsie gave the whole outfit, and she is going to furnish the house from attic to basement, she says, as a present to Kendall!”

“Aunt Elsie!” If written language could ever describe exclamation points one might try to tell how Uncle Evarts exploded those two words. Just those two, and then was silent; it being the first time on record that language failed him. Mrs. Forman made an earnest effort to explain. She did not wonder at his astonishment, they had all been simply overwhelmed by Elsie’s wonderful gifts; of course, they had not dreamed of such a possibility, and had not yet grown used to the thought; they knew that there was nothing too big for her heart, but that she could do things was almost unbelievable. But she might as well have saved her breath. Evarts Forman could not understand. He questioned and cross-questioned, and, after repeated assertions and attempts at explanations, Mrs. Forman felt tempted to say that he would not understand.

“Elsie!” he kept repeating, as one dazed. Why, that is absurd! It is impossible! Elsie has no money; a paltry sum, perhaps, not enough to dress her decently in a house where they pay any attention to such matters. Didn’t he know! Who settled up everything after father died, and paid all the bills, if he didn’t himself? Elsie buy a house on Dupont Circle! There was some strange mistake. Elsie knew nothing of business; she was the dupe of somebody who wanted to get the whole tribe of Formans into trouble. Where was Elsie? He must see to this at once. Joe ought to have known that all this was folly!

With Aunt Elsie herself he was decidedly sharp; he began by treating her like an audacious child, who had been meddling with what she did not understand and brought trouble upon them all. When he found that he could not frighten her into “common sense,” and that, instead, she composedly assured him that it was all quite true, she had advanced the money to pay off the mortgage, and had bought the old place on Dupont Circle for a wedding gift, he grew white with anger.

What did she mean by such talk? Had she any idea what a house on Dupont Circle cost? If she had had money hidden away all these years, what had she meant by deceiving them all and coming here to live on charity! But here a chorus of voices interrupted.

“Mother!” from Florence; “must we sit here and let Aunt Elsie be spoken to in that way?”

And Jean in the same breath: “‘Charity!’ Oh, mother, will you let him say that?”

Then Mrs. Forman’s voice, cold and dignified: “Evarts, you must not speak in that way to Elsie in our house. No greater blessing ever came to a home than came to ours with her; if she had not a penny in the world, as we thought she had not, we should be grateful for the privilege of sharing our last crust with her. You shall not insult us by speaking of charity.”

“Oh, well,” he interrupted, impatiently, “I am not after heroics; and I am not saying anything against her; she knows she is welcome to a home with any of us, of course; what I want to get at is this miserable business; she has been duped by somebody, made the victim of a huge imposition that involves the Forman name and honor; and I want to rescue us all, if you will give me a chance. When will Joe be home? He ought to have a little common sense left, and be able to help us out of this mix.”

Then Aunt Elsie’s quiet voice: “Really, Evarts, there is no occasion for all this excitement. I can explain whatever needs explaining in five minutes, if you will listen. You took it for granted that I had no money, without asking me any questions; I never told you so. As a matter of fact, I had a few thousand dollars that father invested for me years ago, the interest of which has always been more than I needed. Then Derrick sent me some money, from time to time, and I invested that, and was fortunate; it has grown a good deal.”

“I mean our brother Derrick.” His amazement was increasing. He was bristling with questions, but she hurried on:

“So, you see, I had money enough for what I wanted to do, and some left over. I came here to get acquainted with Joseph’s family; I will not deny that I had a purpose in doing so, and I have discovered what I wanted to know. But I did not know until a very short time ago that Joseph was in serious financial trouble; if I had, I should have moved before. They were so careful not to let the poor relation who had thrown herself upon their ‘charity’ feel herself a burden that they never even hinted to me the danger they were in of losing their home; I found it out by eavesdropping and accident. But about the business matters that trouble you, instead of waiting for Joseph let me make a suggestion. Go and talk with Henry Westlake about it all; he has had charge of my affairs for some time, and he is enough of a business man, I suppose, to suit even you.”

Which was precisely what Uncle Evarts did. He let the train at the junction go its way without him, and went as soon as he could to Judge Westlake’s office; only to find him in court for the day. But this business was much too serious to be put aside for small matter like that; so he lunched at restaurant, took a motor ride out to the park and around Dupont Circle, and in other ways got rid of time until court adjourned. Then he sent in his card; he knew the great man by reputation, but he used to know him as a boy. For that, or some other reason, he was promptly admitted. Preliminaries over, he poured out questions, and Judge Westlake answered as many of them as he chose.

Yes, it was true that Miss Elsie Forman had bought 1200 Dupont Circle; yes, she had paid cash down, it was not to be had on any other terms.

Oh, yes, it was as fine an investment as the city afforded. It was a whim on the part of the owner to get it off his hands at once for cash.

Yes, that was true, too; she had deeded it to her niece, Mrs. Ray Forman Forsythe, as a wedding gift.

It was then that Uncle Evarts lost his studied self-control and waxed eloquent and indignant. He wanted to know what kind of a man Judge Westlake thought himself to be, to take advantage of a woman utterly ignorant of business matters and of values and allow her to spend all she had—money which she had raked and scraped and hoarded through the years in order to have something for her crippled old age—on a wedding present! He went on, and on, and on, as Uncle Evarts had a lifelong habit of doing; he said the same things over again, and yet again, in more forceful ways, and added other thoughts as they came to him; many of them not especially complimentary to the judge, with whose composed listening he grew more angry every minute.

Up to this point in the interview Judge Westlake, as his custom was, had used as few words as circumstances would permit. Then he listened, sitting in silence for a moment even after the flow of words had ceased, and his caller sat glaring at him, waiting for what excuse he could possibly offer for his folly. Then the Judge stopped fingering the business papers on his desk, squared himself for a full view of his guest, and began:

“If you are quite through, Forman, there are a few things that I have decided to say to you. I knew you when we were boys together, you remember, and I knew your sister Elsie. I know her now. I also knew her brother Derrick, and believed in him even after you had entirely cast him off. So did your sister Elsie. I knew when she came to this city that she had a purpose in coming. She had certain suspicions which she wanted to have either removed or confirmed. She wanted to make the intimate acquaintance of your brother Joseph’s family, which was her chief reason for choosing his house as a place of residence, instead of an Old Ladies’ Home, which, I believe, you suggested to her. She has been able to carry out her desires, and has proved that her suspicions were founded on fact. She was for a term of years the sole regular correspondent of your brother Derrick; and through him she learned a number of things that helped her in reaching conclusions. I believe you are fully aware of your brother Joseph’s financial straits, which you also know, of course, were brought about through no fault of his own, but under circumstances that reflect honor upon his strict integrity. Your sister did not know about these matters, and the family did not enlighten her; they made sacrifices, as you have already hinted, in order to receive her, and they opened not only their home but their hearts to her. In view of this it is not surprising that she has adopted them all as her very own. Now it happens that she had certain trust monies which she was to bestow upon this particular family, if it should come to pass that they could—without knowing anything about them—meet the conditions. Those conditions have been abundantly met.”

“The mortgage, which, of course, you know has been a weight about your brother Joseph’s neck for years, was disposed of with a portion of that trust money; the house on Dupont Circle was bought with some of it, and will be furnished from the same fund; it is very large; I may possibly be overstepping the bounds of a business interview, yet I feel moved to relieve your natural anxiety for your brother’s welfare by assuring you that I am reasonably certain, because of that trust fund, that money matters will not be likely to trouble his future; and that young man, your nephew, who is also, of course you remember, the nephew and namesake of your brother Derrick—I may as well tell you that when he is through with university and theological seminary, and ready to enter upon his life work, he will not need to worry about salaries; the fact is he would be able to live a reasonably long life without any salary at all. This last statement I am making in strict confidence, young man himself has, as yet, no idea of any such thing.

“But I wanted to relieve your anxiety about all these relatives, and to convince you also that your sister Elsie has not reduced herself to beggary by these financial transactions. In fact, a note from her received this morning instructed me to give you proof that you had no need to worry about her. For reasons which, after what you have been saying to me, I am sure you will appreciate, I have determined to go beyond the letter of my instructions and tell you that Miss Elsie Forman is a very wealthy woman. The brother, Derrick Forman, to whom I have several times referred, had a remarkably well-developed business faculty; in that new country, to which he went after his family had lost confidence in him, he set to work with the energy that had characterized his early boyhood, and won the confidence of those who employed him. He bought a piece of land that doubled in value before he had owned it for six months, and from that point he went steadily forward. He seemed to have ability to foresee the future from a business standpoint in a way that was really remarkable. I was very early taken into his confidence in a business way, and it chanced that I was able to aid him occasionally in making investments. Then he became interested in miners, and through them in mines. The results, so far as the miners were concerned, were tremendous, and are not to be measured by any estimates that we know how to make in this world—your sister can tell you much about them; but with the financial part I am very well acquainted, as I had the honor of being his business adviser; he had heavy interests in more than one of the paying mines, and was himself the owner of one of the best. In short, Mr. Forman, your sister Elsie, entirely apart from this trust fund, of which I have told you, is by far the wealthiest woman in this city. There is no reason why she could not buy a whole block of houses on Dupont Circle, if they were for sale, and have plenty of money left to pay taxes.”

The man of affairs had talked on steadily, waving away at first, with an imperative hand, an occasional attempt at interruption; he was not a man to be interrupted when he chose to talk. As the story progressed his listener ceased to attempt even a question; he sat like one spellbound. He listened to the end. He said very little afterwards. He got himself away as soon as he could; he walked the length of three blocks in the opposite direction from that which he should have taken, lost in bewildering, whirling thought.

Then, as he looked about him and, realizing his mistake, began to retrace his steps, he drew a long breath, like one awakening from a dream, and said, aloud “What a consummate fool!” But whether he meant Judge Westlake, or his sister Elsie, or himself, this record does not state, in words.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The fortunate calamity

THE FORTUNATE CALAMITY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
THE ANNOUNCEMENT

CHAPTER II
PREPARATION

CHAPTER III
THE ARRIVAL

CHAPTER IV
THE “GLORIFIED” DRESS

CHAPTER V
A SENSE OF HONOR

CHAPTER VI
RAKING UP AN OLD DISGRACE

CHAPTER VII
THE RESCUED LIFE

CHAPTER VIII
DERRICK FORMAN, THIRD

CHAPTER IX
A DECISION, AND A STORM

CHAPTER X
DANGER, AND FEAR, AND ASSURANCE

CHAPTER XI
DIFFERENT ESTIMATES

CHAPTER XII
SOMETHING HAPPENED

CHAPTER XIII
AN ALLY

CHAPTER XIV
HOUSES, AND DRESSES, AND SPOONS

CHAPTER XV
“FOOLS”

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The fortunate calamity

THE FORTUNATE CALAMITY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I THE ANNOUNCEMENT

CHAPTER II PREPARATION

CHAPTER III THE ARRIVAL

CHAPTER IV THE “GLORIFIED” DRESS

CHAPTER V A SENSE OF HONOR

CHAPTER VI RAKING UP AN OLD DISGRACE

CHAPTER VII THE RESCUED LIFE

CHAPTER VIII DERRICK FORMAN, THIRD

CHAPTER IX A DECISION, AND A STORM

CHAPTER X DANGER, AND FEAR, AND ASSURANCE

CHAPTER XI DIFFERENT ESTIMATES

CHAPTER XII SOMETHING HAPPENED

CHAPTER XIII AN ALLY

CHAPTER XIV HOUSES, AND DRESSES, AND SPOONS

CHAPTER XV “FOOLS”