"Yes," said his wife, "seven years."

"_Oh!_" said the Liberry Teacher, with a quick catch of sympathy at her heart.

Just as long as she had been working for her living in the big, dusty library. Supposing--oh, supposing she'd had to live all that time in such suffering as this poor Allan had endured and his mother had had to witness! She felt suddenly as if the grimy, restless Children's Room, with its clatter of turbulent little outland voices, were a safe, sunny paradise in comparison.

Mr. De Guenther did not speak. He visibly braced himself and was visibly ill-at-ease.

"I have told most of the story, Isabel, love," said he at last. "Would you not prefer to tell the rest? It is at your instance that I have undertaken this commission for Mrs. Harrington, you will remember."

It struck Phyllis that he didn't think it was quite a dignified commission, at that.

"Very well, my dear," said his wife, and took up the tale in her swift, soft voice.

"You can fancy, my dear Miss Braithwaite, how intensely his mother has felt about it."

"Indeed, yes!" said Phyllis pitifully.

"Her whole life, since the accident, has been one long devotion to her son. I don't think a half-hour ever pa.s.ses that she does not see him.

But in spite of this constant care, as my husband has told you, he grows steadily worse. And poor Angela has finally broken under the strain. She was never strong. She is dying now--they give her maybe two months more.

"Her one anxiety, of course, is for poor Allan's welfare. You can imagine how you would feel if you had to leave an entirely helpless son or brother to the mercies of hired attendants, however faithful. And they have no relatives--they are the last of the family."

The listening girl began to see. She was going to be asked to act as nurse, perhaps attendant and guardian, to this morbid invalid with the injured mind and body.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "NO," SAID MRS. DE GUENTHER GRAVELY. "YOU WOULD NOT. YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE HIS WIFE"]

"But how would I be any better for him than a regular trained nurse?"

she wondered. "And they said he had an attendant."

She looked questioningly at the pair.

"Where does my part come in?" she asked with a certain sweet directness which was sometimes hers. "Wouldn't I be a hireling too if--if I had anything to do with it?"

"No," said Mrs. De Guenther gravely. "You would not. You would have to be his wife."

IV

The Liberry Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She caught her breath. But catching her breath did not seem to affect anything that had been said. Mr. De Guenther took up the explanation again, a little deprecatingly, she thought.

"You see now why I requested you to investigate our reputability?" he said. "Such a proposition as this, especially to a young lady who has no parent or guardian, requires a considerable guarantee of good faith and honesty of motive."

"Will you please tell me more about it?" she asked quietly. She did not feel now as if it were anything which had especially to do with her. It seemed more like an interesting story she was unravelling sentence by sentence. The long, softly lighted old room, with its Stuarts and Sullys, and its gracious, gray-haired host and hostess, seemed only a picturesque part of it.... Her hostess caught up the tale again.

"Angela has been nearly distracted," she said. "And the idea has come to her that if she could find some conscientious woman, a lady, and a person to whom what she could offer would be a consideration, who would take charge of poor Allan, that she could die in peace."

"But why did you think of asking me?" the girl asked breathlessly. "And why does she want me married to him? And how could you or she be sure that I would not be as much of a hireling as any nurse she may have now?"

Mrs. De Guenther answered the last two questions together.

"Mrs. Harrington's idea is, and I think rightly, that a conscientious woman would feel the marriage tie, however nominal, a bond that would obligate her to a certain duty toward her husband. As to why we selected you, my dear, my husband and I have had an interest in you for some years, as you know. We have spoken of you as a girl whom we should like for a relative----"

"Why, isn't that strange?" cried Phyllis, dimpling. "That's just what I've thought about you!"

Mrs. De Guenther flushed, with a delicate old shyness.

"Thank you, dear child," she said. "I was about to add that we have not seen you at your work all these years without knowing you to have the kind heart and sense of honor requisite to poor Angela's plan. We feel sure you could be trusted to take the place. Mr. De Guenther has asked his friend Mr. Johnston, the head of the library, such things as we needed to supplement our personal knowledge of you. You have everything that could be asked, even to a certain cheerfulness of outlook which poor Angela, naturally, lacks in a measure."

"But--but what about _me_?" asked Phyllis Braithwaite a little piteously, in answer to all this.

They seemed so certain she was what they wanted--was there anything in this wild scheme that would make _her_ life better than it was as the tired, ill-paid, light-hearted keeper of a roomful of turbulent little foreigners?

"Unless you are thinking of marriage--" Phyllis shook her head--"you would have at least a much easier life than you have now. Mrs.

Harrington would settle a liberal income on you, contingent, of course, of your faithful wardership over Allan. We would be your only judges as to that. You would have a couple or more months of absolute freedom every year, control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it.

You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his mother has nothing to fear for him."

Mr. De Guenther stopped with a grave little bow, and he and his wife waited for the reply.

The Liberry Teacher sat silent, her eyes on her slim hands, that were roughened and reddened by constant hurried washings to get off the dirt of the library books. It was true--a good deal of it, anyhow. And one thing they had not said was true also: her sunniness and accuracy and strength, her stock-in-trade, were wearing thin under the pressure of too long hours and too hard work and too few personal interests. Her youth was worn down. And--marriage? What chance of love and marriage had she, a working-girl alone, too poor to see anything of the cla.s.s of men she would be willing to marry? She had not for years spent six hours with a man of her own kind and age. She had not even been specially in love, that she could remember, since she was grown up. She did not feel much, now, as if she ever would be. All that she had to give up in taking this offer was her freedom, such as it was--and those fluttering perhapses that whisper such pleasant promises when you are young. But, then, she wouldn't be young so _very_ much longer. Should she--she put it to herself crudely--should she wait long, hard, closed-in years in the faith that she would learn to be absolutely contented, or that some man she could love would come to the cheap boarding-house, or the little church she attended occasionally when she was not too tired, fall in love with her work-dimmed looks at sight, and--marry her? It had not happened all these years while her girlhood had been more attractive and her personality more untired. There was scarcely a chance in a hundred for her of a kind lover-husband and such dear picture-book children as she had seen Eva Atkinson convoying. Well--her mind suddenly came up against the remembrance, as against a sober fact, that in her pa.s.sionate wishings of yesterday she had not wished for a lover-husband, nor for children. She had asked for a husband who would give her money, and leisure to be rested and pretty, and--a rose-garden! And here, apparently, was her wish uncannily fulfilled.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" inquired the Destinies with their traditional indifference. "We can't wait all night!"

She lifted her head and cast an almost frightened look at the De Guenthers, waiting courteously for her decision. In reply to the look, Mr. De Guenther began giving her details about the money, and the leisure time, and the business terms of the contract generally. She listened attentively. All that--for a little guardianship, a little kindness, and the giving-up of a little piece of life n.o.body wanted and a few little hopes and dreams!

Phyllis laughed, as she always did when there were big black problems to be solved.

"After all, it's fairly usual," she said. "I heard last week of a woman who left money along with her pet dog, very much the same way."

"Did you? Did you, dear?" asked Mrs. De Guenther, beaming. "Then you think you will do it?"

The Liberry Teacher rose, and squared her straight young shoulders under the worn net waist.

"If Mrs. Harrington thinks I'll do for the situation!" she said gallantly,--and laughed again.

"It feels partly like going into a nunnery and partly like going into a fairy-story," she said to herself that night as she wound her alarm.

"But--I wonder if anybody's remembered to ask the consent of the groom!"

V