The four encountered gayly. "Ah, not this time," Aline said. "I came only to meet my aunts; they had locked the gate! But I _will_ call, very soon."

They walked up to the next corner, the sisters confusingly instructing Mrs. Chester how to take a returning street-car. Leaving them, she had just got safely across from sidewalk to car-track when Cupid came pattering after, to bid her hail only the car marked "Esplanade Belt."

As he backed off--"Take care!" was the cry, but he sprang the wrong way and a hurrying jitney cast him yards distant, where he lay unconscious and bleeding. The packed street-car emptied.

"No, he's alive," said one who lifted him, to the two jitney pa.s.sengers, who pushed into the throng. "Arm broke', yes, but he's hurt worst in the head."

There was an apothecary's shop in sight. They put him and the four ladies into the jitney and sent them there, and the world moved on.

At the shop he came to, and presently, in the jitney again, he was blissfully aware of Geoffry Chester on the swift running-board, questioning his mother and Aline by turns. He listened with all his might. Neither the child nor his mistress had seen or heard the questioner since the afternoon he was locked out of the garden.

Nearing that garden now, questions and answers suddenly ceased; the child had spoken. Limp and motionless, with his head on Aline's bosom and his eyes closed, "Don't let," he brokenly said, "don't let _him_ go 'way."

To him the answer seemed so long coming that he began to repeat; then Aline said----

"No, dear, he shan't leave you."

The sisters had telephoned their own physician from the apothecary's shop, and soon, with Cupid on his cot, pushed close to a cool window looking into the rear garden, and the garden lighted by an unseen moon, Mrs. Chester, at the cot's side awaited the doctor's arrival. The restless sisters brought her a tray of rusks and b.u.t.ter and tea, though they would not, could not, taste anything themselves until they should know how gravely the small sufferer--for now he began to suffer--was hurt.

"Same time tha'z good to be induztriouz"--this was all said directly above the moaning child--"while tha'z bad, for the sick, to talk ad the bedside, and we can't stay with you and not talk, and we can't go in that front yard; that gate is let open so the doctor he needn' ring and that way excide the patient; and we can't go in the back garden"--they spread their hands and dropped them; the back garden was hopelessly pre-empted.

They went to a parlor window and sat looking and longing for the front gate to swing. They had posted on it in Corinne's minute writing: "No admittance excep on business. Open on account sickness. S. V. P.

Don't wring the belle!!!"

Cupid lay very flat on his back, his face turned to the open window.

He had ceased to moan. When Mrs. Chester stole to where, by leaning over, she could see his eyes they were closed. She hoped he slept, but sat down in uncertainty rather than risk waking him. In the moonlit garden Aline and Geoffry paced to and fro. To see them his mother would have to stand and lean over the cot, and neither good mothers nor good nurses do that. She kept her seat, anxiously hoping that the moonlight out there would remain soft enough to veil the worn look which daylight betrayed on her son's face whenever he fell into silence.

The talk of the pair was labored. Once they went clear to the bower and turned, without a word. Then Geoffry said: "I know a story I'd like to tell you, though how it would help us in our project--if we now have a project at all--I don't see."

"'Tis of the _vieux carre_, that story?"

"It's of the _vieux carre_ of the world's heart."

"I think I know it."

"May I not tell it?"

"Yes, you may tell it--although--yes, tell it."

"Well, there was once a beautiful girl, as beautiful in soul as in countenance, and worshipped by a few excellent friends, few only because of conditions in her life that almost wholly exiled her from society. Even so, she had suitors--good, gallant men; not of wealth, yet with good prospects and with gifts more essential. But other conditions seemed, to her, to forbid marriage."

"Yes," Aline interrupted. "Mr. Chester, have you gone in partnership with Mr. Castanado--'Masques et Costumes'? Or would it not be maybe better honor to me--and yourself--to speak----"

"Straight out? Yes, of course. Aline, I've been racking my brain--I still am--and my heart--to divine what it is that separates us. I had come to believe you loved me. I can't quite stifle the conviction yet.

I believe that in refusing me you're consciously refusing that which seems to you yourself a worthy source of supreme happiness if it did not threaten the happiness of others dearer than your own."

"Of my aunts, you think?"

"Yes, your aunts."

"Mr. Chester, even if I had no aunts----"

"Yes, I see. That's my new discovery: you've already had my a.s.surance that I'd study their happiness as I would yours, ours, mine; but you think I could never make your aunts and myself happy in the same atmosphere. You believe in me. You believe I have a future that must carry me--would carry us--into a world your aunts don't know and could never learn."

"'Tis true. And yet even if my aunts----"

"Had no existence--yes, I know. I know what you think would still remain. You can't hint it, for you think I would promptly promise the impossible, as lovers so easily do. Aline, I would not! 'Twouldn't be impossible. It shall not be. My mother is helping to prove that even to you, isn't she--without knowing it? I promise you as if it were in the marriage contract and we were here signing it, that if you will be my wife I never will, and you never shall, let go, or in any way relax, your hold--or mine--on the intimate friendship of the coterie in Royal Street. They are your inheritance from your father and his father, and I love you the more adoringly because you would sooner break your own heart than forfeit that legacy." He took one of her hands. "You are their 'Clock in the Sky'; you're their 'Angel of the Lord.' And so you shall be till death do you part." He took the other hand, held both.

Cupid turned his face from the window and audibly sobbed.

"Oh, child, what is it? Does it pain so?"

He shook his head.

"Doesn't it pain? Is it not pain at all? Why, then, what is it?"

"Joy," he whispered as the doctor came in.

L

The child's hurts were not so grave, after all.

"He may sit up to-morrow," the doctor said. The fractured arm was put into a splint and sling, and a collar-bone had to be wrapped in place; but the absorbent cotton bandaged on his head was only for contusions.

"Corinne!" Mlle. Yvonne gasped, "contusion"! Ah, doctor, I 'ope tha'z something you can't 'ave but once!"

"You can't in fatal cases. Mrs.--eh--those scissors, please? Thank you."

"Well, Aline, praise be to heaven, any'ow his skull, from ear to ear 'tis solid! Ah, I mean, of co'se, roun' the h-outside. Inside 'tis hollow. But outside it has not a crack! eh, doctor?"

"Except the sutures he was born with. Now, my little man----"

"Ah, ah, Corinne! Born with shuture'! and we never suzpeg' that!"

"Ah, but, Yvonne, if he's had those sinz' that long they cann' be so very fatal, no!"

Partly for the little boy's sake three days were let pa.s.s before Aline made her announcement. There was but one place for it--the Castanados'

parlor. All the coterie were there--the De l'Isles, even Ovide--butler _pro tem_.

"You will have refreshments," he said, with happiest equanimity; "I will serve them"; and the whole race problem vanished. Melanie too was present, with an announcement of her own which won ecstatic kisses, many of them tear-moistened but all of them glad. As for Mme.

Alexandre and Beloiseau, they announced nothing, but every one knew, and said so in the smiling fervency of their hand-grasps.

All of which made the evening too hopelessly old-fashioned to be dwelt on, though one point cannot be overlooked. It was the last proclamation of the joyous hour, and was Chester's. He had bought--on wonderfully easy terms--_vieux carre_ terms--the large house and grounds opposite the Chapdelaine cottage, and there the aunts were to dwell with the young pair.