"Say, kids, who are you, anyway?" His tone was quite unprofessional.

"It is not necessary to divulge our identity," and with Gyp's arm firmly in her grasp Pat beat a hasty retreat. Safe outside in the corridor they fell into one another's arms, torn between tears and laughter.

With mingled disgust and disappointment the Ravens decided then and there to let love follow its own blind, mistaken course.

"Miss Gray can die an old maid before I'll ever face another creature like that!" vowed Gyp, and Pat echoed her words.

"No one ever gets any thanks for meddling in other people's affairs, anyway," Peggy Lee offered.

"Nice time to tell us _that_," was Gyp's irritable retort.

That evening Miss Gray, charming in a soft lavender georgette dress, which her clever fingers had made and remade, wondered why her four young charges were so glum. There was nothing in the world _she_ loved so much as a symphony orchestra. She sat back in her chair, close to the edge of the box, with a happy sigh, and studied her program. Everything that she liked best, Chopin, Saint-Saens, and Wagner--Siegfried's Death.

Gyp, eyeing her chaperon's happy anticipation, indulged in a whispered regret.

"Doesn't she look pretty to-night? If that horrible creature only hadn't been----" The setting would have been so perfect for the denouement. She sprawled back, resignedly, in her chair, smothering a yawn. A flutter of applause marked the coming in of the orchestra. There was the usual scraping of chairs and whining of strings. Then suddenly Miss Gray leaned out over the box-rail, exclaiming incoherently, her hands clasping and unclasping in a wild, helpless way.

An opening crash of the cymbals covered her confusion. The four girls were staring at her, round-eyed. They had not believed Miss Gray capable of such agitation! What _ever_ had happened----

"An old friend," she whispered, her face alternately paling and flushing. "A very dear--old--friend! The--the third--violin----" She leaned weakly against the box-rail. The girls looked down at the orchestra. There--under the leader's arm--sat the third violinist--and a white streak ran from his forehead straight back through his coal black hair!

As though an electric shock flashed through them the four girls straightened and stiffened. A glance, charged with meaning, passed from one to another. Gyp, remembering the moment of confidence between her and Miss Gray, slipped her hand into Miss Gray's and squeezed it encouragingly.

Not one of them heard a note of the wonderful music; each was steadying herself for that moment when the program should end. Their box was very near the little door that led behind the stage. Gyp almost pushed Miss Gray toward it.

"Of _course_ you're going to see him! _Hurry._ You look so nice----" Gyp was so excited that she did not know quite what she was saying.

"Oh--_hurry!_ You may never see him again."

Then they, precipitously and on tiptoe, followed little Miss Gray.

Though it did not happen as each in her romantic soul had planned, it was none the less satisfying! In a chilly, bare anteroom off the stage, at a queer sound behind him resembling in a small way his name, the third violinist turned from the job of putting his violin into its box.

"_Milly_," he cried, his face flaming red with a pleased surprise.

"George----" Miss Gray held back, twisting her fingers in a helpless flutter. "I--I thought--when you sent--the--flowers--and the verses--that maybe, you--you still cared!"

Just for a moment a puzzled look clouded the man's face--then a vision in the doorway of four wildly-warning hands made him exclaim quickly:

"Care--didn't I tell you, Milly, that I'd never care for anyone else?"

"He took her right in his arms," four tongues explained at once, when, the next day, the self-appointed committee on romance reported back to the other Ravens. "Of course, he didn't know we were peeking. He isn't exactly the type _I'd_ go crazy over, but he's so much better than that undertaker! And going home Miss Gray told us all about it. It would make the grandest movie! She had to support her mother and he didn't earn enough to take care of them both, and she wouldn't let him wait all that time; she told him to find someone else. But you see he didn't. Isn't love funny? And then when her mother finally died she was too proud to send him word, and I guess she didn't know where he was, anyway, or maybe she thought he _had_ gone and done what she told him to do and married some one else. And she believed all the time that he sent her those flowers--I s'pose by that say-it-with-flowers-by-telegraph-from-any-part-of-the-country method.

Oh, I _hope_ she'll wear a veil and let us be bridesmaids!"

But little Miss Gray did not; some weeks later, in a spick-and-span blue serge traveling suit, with a little bunch of pink roses fastened in her belt, she slipped away from her dreary boarding house and met her third violinist in the shabby, unromantic front parlor of an out-of-the-way parsonage; the parson's stout wife was her bridesmaid--so much for gratitude!

CHAPTER XXIV

PLANS

"Oh, dear--how dreadfully fast time passes. It seems only a little while ago we were planning for the winter and now here comes Mrs. Hicks about new summer covers for the furniture, and Joe Laney wants to know if there's going to be any painting done and I haven't thought of any summer clothes--and with those two great growing girls! I suppose if we're going to the seashore we ought to make some reservations, too----"

and Mrs. Westley concluded her plaint with a sigh that came from her very toes.

John Westley, from the depths of the great armed chair where he stretched, laughed at her serious face. But the expression of his own reflected the truth of what she had said.

"It's the rush we live in, Mary. Why don't you cut out the seashore and find a quiet place--out of this torrent? Something--like Kettle." The mention of Kettle brought him suddenly to a thought of Jerry.

"Well, my Jerry-girl's year of school is almost up. What next?"

Mrs. Westley laid down her knitting. "Yes--what next?" she asked.

"Somehow, I can't picture Jerry going back to Miller's Notch and--staying there----"

"That's it--I've thought of it often. Have we been doing the girl a kindness? After all, John, contentment is the greatest thing in this world, and perhaps we've hurt the dear child by bringing her here and letting her have a taste of--this sort of thing."

John Westley regarded his sister-in-law's plump, kindly face with amusement. She had the best heart in the world and the biggest, but she had not the discernment to know that there were treasures even in Miller's Notch and Sunnyside, and, anyway----

"Isn't contentment, Mary, a thing that depends on something inside of us, rather than our surroundings?"

She nodded, speculatively.

"And I rather think my girl from Kettle will be contented anywhere.

She's gone ahead fast here. I was talking to Dr. Caton about her. He says she is amazingly intense in her work. I suppose that has come from her way of living there at Sunnyside. But what can the school there at Miller's Notch give her now?

"And what is there for a girl, living in a small place like that, after school? Contentment _does_ depend upon our state of mind, I grant, but one's surroundings affect that state of mind--so there you are! How is a girl going to be happy if she knows that she is far superior mentally to everything that makes up her life? Jerry will grow to womanhood in her little mountain village--marry some native and----"

Uncle Johnny ignored the picture.

"We can trip ourselves up at almost every turn, Mary. Aren't places really big or small as we ticket them in our own minds? If you think of Miller's Notch and Kettle by figures of the census, they _are_ small--but, maybe, reckoning them from real angles they're big--very big, and it's our cities that are small. To go back to Jerry--when I think of her I always think of something I said to Barbara Lee--that nothing on earth could chain a spirit like that anywhere--she was one of the world's crusaders. Oh--youth! If nothing spoils my Jerry, she'll always go forward with her head up! But _that's_ what has made me worry, more than once, during my "experiment." _Have_ we risked the girl to the danger of being spoiled? Will our little superficialities, so ingrained that we don't realize them, taint her splendid unaffectedness? I don't know--I can't tell until I see her back at Kettle--in that environment the like of which I've never found anywhere else. If she isn't the same shining-eyed Jerry plus considerable wisdom gleaned from her books and her school friends, I'll have it on my conscience--if she's the same, well, the winter's been worth a great deal to all of us! When I see her and watch her back there--I'll know. And that leads me to what I really came here to tell you." John Westley drew a letter from his pocket. "I had word from Trimmer--the Boston attorney. He's found traces of a Craig Winton who was a graduate of Boston Tech. He lived in obscure lodgings in a poorer part of Boston and yet he seemed to have quite a circle of friends of an intellectual sort. Some of them have given enough facts to be pieced together so as to prove, I think conclusively, that this chap is the one we're looking for. He was an inventor and of a very brilliant turn of mind, but unpractical--the old story--and desperately poor. He married the only daughter of a chemist who lived in Cambridge. His health broke down and he took his wife and went off to the country somewhere--his Boston friends lost track of him after that. Later one received a letter telling of the birth of a son."

"How interesting! Robert will be home in two weeks and then we can make the settlement."

"But, Mary--the search hasn't ended. He left Boston for the 'country'--that is very vague. And I don't like the tone of Trimmer's communication. He advises dropping the whole matter. He says that sufficient effort has been made to meet the spirit of the letter left by the late Peter Westley----"

"You will _not_ drop it, will you?"

"Indeed not. I wired him to put all the men he could find on the case.

And I am going to do some work on my own account."

"You?"

"Yes--I have a clue all of my own." He laughed, folding the letter and putting it away.

"Really, John?"

"Yes--a foolish sort of a clue--I can scarcely tell it to a man like Trimmer. It's only a pair of eyes----"

"I suppose if you're like all other sleuths you will not tell _me_ anything more," said Mrs. Westley, wondering if he was really in earnest. "When and where will your personal search begin?"