she went on, "Ernestine stopped here on her way home from New York. Her parents had died, but an old aunt lived in their house, and she was going to see her. I had always told her about Karl, but she had never met him, because when Ernestine and I were together so much, he was in Europe. So I wanted her to meet him--well, princ.i.p.ally because he was a good deal of a celebrity, and I thought it would be nice. I'll be real honest and confess it never occurred to me there would be anything exciting doing.

Well, Karl didn't want to come. First he said he would, and then he telephoned he was busy. So I just went over to the laboratory and _got_ him. I told him he was expected, and if he didn't come, mother and I never would forgive him. He washed his hands and came along, grumbling all the way about how one's relatives interfered with one's life--oh, Karl and I are tremendously frank, and then when he got here--well, I'll just leave it to mother."

"He did seem to be greatly impressed with Georgia's friend." said Mrs.

McCormick, consciously conservative.

"I never saw him act so stupid! Oh, but I was mad at him! I wanted him to talk about Europe and be brilliant, but he didn't do anything but sit and look at Ernestine. Fact of the matter is, Ernestine doesn't look quite like the rest of us. At least Karl thought she didn't, and evidently he made up his mind then and there he was going to have her. Ernestine left Chicago sooner than he thought she was going to, and what does he do but go after her--and get her! You see, all of Karl's ancestors weren't meek and gentle scholars and wise professors. Lots of them were soldiers and bloodthirsty brigands, and those are the ones he brags about most and in spite of his mind, and all that, those are the ones he is most like. I suppose it was in the blood to get what he wanted. I'm sure I don't know how he did it. Lots of men had wanted Ernestine, and she had the caring-for-her-art notion--she's made good tremendously, you know--but art took a back seat when Dr. Hubers arrived on the scene. That's all there is to it. I wouldn't call it a romance. It was more in the line of a hop, skip and jump."

She had pushed back her chair a little, but laughed now, reminiscently.

"Oh it was just too funny! Some of it was too rich to keep. Karl came here the day after he returned--wanted to hear me talk of Ernestine, you know. People in love aren't exactly versatile in their conversation. I did talk about her for two hours, and then I ventured to change the subject. 'Karl,' I said, 'what do you think of the colour they're painting the new Fifty-seventh Street station?'

"He had been sitting there in rapt silence and he looked up at me with a seraphic, far-away smile. 'Colour,' he said, dreamily, 'was there ever such a colour before?'

"'There certainly never was,' I replied, meaning of course the brick red of the aforesaid station.

"'That divine brown,' he pursued,' that soft, dark, liquid brown of unfathomable depth!' Now there," nodding laughingly at Beason, "you have a sample of the great Dr. Hubers' mighty intellect."

Beason hovered around, hoping for a few more stray words, but as Harry Wyman and Georgia were talking about some foolish newspaper affairs, he went to his room and tried to settle down to work.

A half hour later Wyman, who had also gone in to do a little studying, came out to where Georgia was looking over the other evening papers.

"Say," he laughed, "you've got to do something for that fellow in there--he's crazy as a loon. You've got him all stirred up, and if you don't go in and get him calmed down he won't sleep a wink to-night, and neither will I. He says Dr. Hubers is the greatest man in the world. He says he won't except anybody--no, sir, not a living human soul! He's been walking up and down the floor talking about it. Gee! you ought to hear him. He says he came to this university on purpose to get some work with Dr. Hubers, that his life will be ruined if he doesn't get it, and that he's going to make all kinds of a ten-strike, if he does. And you can't laugh at the fellow, for he's just dead down in earnest! He wanted me to come out here and ask you some questions--I can't remember 'em straight.

How he worked--whether he was approachable. Oh, he fired them at me thick. Say now, he would appreciate it, if you'd just go in and give him a little talk about your cousin. Kind of serious talk, you know. Why, he'd just hang on every word."

And Georgia, laughing--Georgia was strongly addicted to laughing--said if there was any man ready to hang upon her every word, that she, being twenty-seven and prospectless, must not let him get away.

She told Beason many things--some of them facts and some of them "higher truth," Georgia holding that things which ought to be true were higher truth. She told him how Karl had tried to burn down his father's house, when a very small boy, to see if something somebody had said about fire was true, how he dissected a strange and wonderful bird which came to the house on a visitor's hat, how he inspired a whole crew of small boys to run away from home as explorers, how he whipped a bigger boy most unmercifully for calling the Germans big fools. Georgia arranged for her cousin what she called a thoroughly consistent childhood. And then some less high truth about his working his way through college, getting money enough to go abroad, his absolute forgetfulness of everything when immersed in work--facts and higher truth tallied here.

"Karl's queer," she said. "He's roasted a good deal by the academic folks--pooh-hoos a lot of their stuff, you know. He seems to have a strange notion that science, learning, the whole business is for humanity. Unique conception, isn't it?"

After she went away, Beason said he had no doubt that when one came to know Miss McCormick, he would see, in spite of her lightness of manner, that she had many fine qualities.

"Qualities!" burst forth the enthusiastic Wyman. "Say--you just ought to hear the newspaper fellows talk about Georgia McCormick! I tell you she's a peach, and more than that, she's a brick. She's the divide-her-last-penny kind--Georgia McCormick is. And I want you to know that if ever any one had the joy of living stunt down pat, she's it. It's an honest fact that if she was put in the penitentiary and you went to see her after she'd been there awhile, she'd tell you so many funny and interesting things about the pen. that you'd feel sore to think you weren't in yourself. And _smart?_ And a hustler? Well, her paper's done some fool things, but it's had sense to hold on to _her_ all right-all right."

And Beason replied that of course Dr. Hubers' cousin was bound to be smart.

CHAPTER V

THE HOME-COMING

"Yes, suh, Chicago only two hours, suh," and the porter smiled broadly.

There was both memory and antic.i.p.ation in that smile.

The car was almost empty. Across the aisle a man slept peacefully; a little farther ahead a young lady read of the joys and sorrows of a knight and his lady who had lived some several hundred years before, and still farther on a lady all in black was looking from the window, evidently lost to sorrows of more recent date. As no one was paying any attention to the man and woman back there in the rear of the car it was perfectly safe, when the porter pa.s.sed on, for her hand to slip over into his.

He responded with that quiet, protecting smile which always made it seem no bad thing could ever come to her.

"Almost home, dear," he said, and then for a long time neither of them spoke. Many big forces flowed freely into the silence of that moment.

She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave.

"Suppose we had to say everything in words!"

"Suppose we had to walk on one leg!"

"Oh, but that--you know, Karl, it's a little like the rivers and the ocean. The words are the rivers flowing into the ocean of silence. Rivers flow into oceans--but do they _make_ them? And then the ocean gives back to the rivers in the things which it breathes out. There are so many reasons why it seems like that."

"Ernestine, where did you get all this? I sometimes think I'm not square with you at all. Why, I've been in all those places before! I saw the Bay of Naples long before I ever saw you--and yet I didn't really see it before at all. Don't you see? Eyes and appreciation and every decent thing I take from you. Where did you get it all, Ernestine?"

She pushed back a little curl which was always coming loose,--he loved that little curl for always coming loose.

"Perhaps I 'got it' from that way you have of looking at me--the way you're looking at me now; or maybe I got it from the way you say 'Ernestine'--the way you said it just now. But does it matter much what comes from which?"--with which bit of lucidity she wrinkled up her nose at him in a way which always vanquished argument and returned to the silence which seemed waiting to claim her.

He watched her then; he loved so to do that--just see how far he could follow. Ernestine seemed to draw things to her in a way very wonderful to him.

"You know, liebchen,"--as he saw that steady light of resolution shine through the veil of her tenderness--"it seems so queer to me that you really _do_ anything."

"Well for a neatly turned compliment--"

"I mean it seems so queer you should really _amount_ to anything."

"Now before you overwhelm me with further adulation, what _are_ you talking about?"

"I'm talking about your being an artist. I can't get used to your being anything but _Ernestine_! That day last spring when we went to see your Salon picture, and when those chaps were talking to you, and I realised that they just simply accepted you as one of them--that you belonged, and that that was all there was about it--I, oh I had such a funny feeling that day. And now, a minute ago, when I saw that look, I had it again."

"Why, Karl, you don't _mind_, do you?"

"No, it's just that it seems queer. You see you're such a wonderful sweetheart, it's hard to think of you as anything else. I'll never forget that day over there. Something just seemed to leap up within you. I--well I think I was a little scared--or was I awed? Something that was shining from your eyes made me feel things in my backbone."

"But you're glad?" she laughed.

"Of course I'm glad; and I'm proud. But it's--queer."

She smiled at him understandingly; the understandingness of her smile always went beyond her words. It was a beautiful face upon which he watched the play of lights, saw the changing currents of thought and dreams and purpose. But the thing most rare in it, that which made one quite forget accepted standards, was the steadfastness with which a certain great light shone through the aura of her tenderness. There were moments in which she transcended both her beauty and her beauty's weaknesses.

As the flower to the sun, naturally, quietly, inevitably, she had expanded under the breath of life. With the fullness of a rich nature she had responded to the touch of the spirit of living. Love loved her for what she had been able to take.

And in the year which had pa.s.sed, life, with tender rather than defacing lines, had put upon her face the touch of sorrow. Europe meant more to her than an Old World civilisation, more than tradition, beauty or art.

It even meant more than the place where she had spent those first dear months of her love. It meant to her the place where she had hoped with woman's dearest hope, and where she had given up the child which should have been hers. Her tenderest, deepest thoughts were not of the wonders and beauties she had seen; they were of the dreams within, of the holy happiness of first knowledge, and then the grief in giving up the much desired, which she had known only in antic.i.p.ation. The most cherished memories of their love were memories of those days in which he had comforted her, of the tenderness with which he had consoled, the strength with which he had upheld. Those hours had reached far into her soul, deepening it, giving her, as if in compensation, new channels for love, new understanding of those innermost things of life. But in those first days, even while the soul of the woman was deepening, the bruised heart was as the heart of a child. It was as a child she had been to him in those days, and he had comforted her as one would comfort an idolised child, whose hurt one strove to take wholly unto one's self. The memory of those hours knit them together as no other thing could have done.

Looking down at her face now he saw that look he had come to know--that far-away, frightened, wistful look. Very gently he laid his hand upon her knee.

"I am going to make you so happy. Life is going to be so beautiful," he said.

She smiled at him, but the tears were in it.