"He is a little pale about the ears," Jimmie conceded, "but I think that's the result of hard work and not enough exercise. He spends all his spare time trying to patch up Beulah instead of tramping and getting out on his horse the way he used to. He's doing a good job on the old dear, but it's some job, nevertheless and notwithstanding--"

"Is Aunt Beulah feeling better than she was?" Eleanor's lips were dry, but she did her best to make her voice sound natural. It seemed strange that Jimmie could speak so casually of a condition of affairs that made her very heart stand still. "I didn't know that Uncle Peter had been taking care of her."

"Taking care of her isn't a circ.u.mstance to what Peter has been doing for Beulah. You know she hasn't been right for some time. She got burning wrong, like the flame on our old gas stove in the studio when there was air in it."

"Uncle David thought so the last time I was here," Eleanor said, "but I didn't know that Uncle Peter--"

"Peter, curiously enough, was the last one to tumble. Dave and I got alarmed about the girl and held a consultation, with the result that Doctor Gramercy was called. If we'd believed he would go into it quite so heavily we might have thought again before we sicked him on. It's very nice for Mary Ann, but rather tough on Abraham as they said when the lady was deposited on that already overcrowded bosom. Now Beulah's got suffrage mania, and Peter's got Beulah mania, and it's a merry mess all around."

"Is Uncle Peter with her a lot?"

"Every minute. You haven't seen much of him since you came, have you?--Well, the reason is that every afternoon as soon as he can get away from the office, he puts on a broad sash marked 'Votes for Women,' and trundles Beulah around in her little white and green perambulator, trying to distract her mind from suffrage while he talks to her gently and persuasively upon the subject. Suffrage is the only subject on her mind, he explains, so all he can do is to try to cuckoo gently under it day by day. It's a very complicated process but he's making headway."

"I'm glad of that," Eleanor said faintly. "How--how is Aunt Gertrude?

I don't see her very often, either."

"Gertrude's all right." It was Jimmie's turn to look self-conscious.

"She never has time for me any more; I'm not high-brow enough for her.

She's getting on like a streak, you know, exhibiting everywhere."

"I know she is. She gave me a cast of her faun's head. I think it is lovely. Aunt Margaret looks well."

"She is, I guess, but don't let's waste all our valuable time talking about the family. Let's talk about us--you and me. You ask me how I'm feeling and then I'll tell you. Then I'll ask you how you're feeling and you'll tell me. Then I'll tell you how I imagine you must be feeling from the way you're looking,--and that will give me a chance to expatiate on the delectability of your appearance. I'll work up delicately to the point where you will begin to compare me favorably with all the other nice young men you know,--and then we'll be off."

"Shall we?" Eleanor asked, beginning to sparkle a little.

"We shall indeed," he a.s.sured her solemnly. "You begin. No, on second thoughts, I'll begin. I'll begin at the place where I start telling you how excessively well you're looking. I don't know, considering its source, whether it would interest you or not, but you have the biggest blue eyes that I've, ever seen in all my life,--and I'm rather a judge of them."

"All the better to eat you with, my dear," Eleanor chanted.

"Quite correct." He shot her a queer glance from under his eyebrows.

"I don't feel very safe when I look into them, my child. It would be a funny joke on me if they did prove fatal to me, wouldn't it?--well,--but away with such nonsense. I mustn't blither to the very babe whose cradle I am rocking, must I?"

"I'm not a babe, Uncle Jimmie. I feel very old sometimes. Older than any of you."

"Oh! you are, you are. You're a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of your previous experience."

"'When he was a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?'" she quoted quickly.

"Exactly. Only I'd prefer to play the part of the King of Babylon, if it's all the same to you, niecelet. How does the rest of it go, 'yet not for a--' something or other 'would I wish undone that deed beyond the grave.' Gosh, my dear, if things were otherwise, I think I could understand how that feller felt. Get on your hat, and let's get out into the open. My soul is cramped with big potentialities this afternoon. I wish you hadn't grown up, Eleanor. You are taking my breath away in a peculiar manner. No man likes to have his breath taken away so suddint like. Let's get out into the rolling prairie of Central Park."

But the rest of the afternoon was rather a failure. The Park had that peculiar bleakness that foreruns the first promise of spring. The children, that six weeks before were playing in the snow and six weeks later would be searching the turf for dandelions, were in the listless between seasons state of comparative inactivity. There was a deceptive balminess in the air that seemed merely to overlay a penetrating chilliness.

"I'm sorry I'm not more entertaining this afternoon," Jimmie apologized on the way home. "It isn't that I am not happy, or that I don't feel the occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I'm silent upon a peak in Darien,--that's all."

"I was thinking of something else, too," Eleanor said.

"I didn't say I was thinking of something else."

"People are always thinking of something else when they aren't talking to each other, aren't they?"

"Something else, or each other, Eleanor. I wasn't thinking of something else, I was thinking--well, I won't tell you exactly--at present. A penny for your thoughts, little one."

"They aren't worth it."

"A penny is a good deal of money. You can buy joy for a penny."

"I'm afraid I couldn't--buy joy, even if you gave me your penny, Uncle Jimmie."

"You might try. My penny might not be like other pennies. On the other hand, your thoughts might be worth a fortune to me."

"I'm afraid they wouldn't be worth anything to anybody."

"You simply don't know what I am capable of making out of them."

"I wish I could make something out of them," Eleanor said so miserably that Jimmie was filled with compunction for having tired her out, and hailed a pa.s.sing taxi in which to whiz her home again.

"I have found out that Uncle Peter is spending all his time with Aunt Beulah," she wrote in her diary that evening. "It is beautiful of him to try to help her through this period of nervous collapse, and just like him, but I don't understand why it is that he doesn't come and tell me about it, especially since he is getting so tired. He ought to know that I love him so dearly and deeply that I could help him even in helping her. It isn't like him not to share his anxieties with me.

Aunt Beulah is a grown up woman, and has friends and doctors and nurses, and every one knows her need. It seems to me that he might think that I have no one but him, and that whatever might lie heavy on my heart I could only confide in him. I have always told him everything. Why doesn't it occur to him that I might have something to tell him now? Why doesn't he come to me?

"I am afraid he will get sick. He needs a good deal of exercise to keep in form. If he doesn't have a certain amount of muscular activity his digestion is not so good. There are two little creases between his eyes that I never remember seeing there before. I asked him the other night when he was here with Aunt Beulah if his head ached, and he said 'no,' but Aunt Beulah said her head ached almost all the time. Of course, Aunt Beulah is important, and if Uncle Peter is trying to bring her back to normality again she is important to him, and that makes her important to me for his sake also, but n.o.body in the world is worth the sacrifice of Uncle Peter. n.o.body, n.o.body.

"I suppose it's a part of his great beauty that he should think so disparagingly of himself. I might not love him so well if he knew just how dear and sweet and great his personality is. It isn't so much what he says or does, or even the way he looks that const.i.tutes his charm, it's the simple power and radiance behind his slightest move. Oh! I can't express it. He doesn't think he is especially fine or beautiful.

He doesn't know what a waste it is when he spends his strength upon somebody who isn't as n.o.ble in character as he is,--but I know, and it makes me wild to think of it. Oh! why doesn't he come to me? My vacation is almost over, and I don't see how I could bear going back to school without one comforting hour of him alone.

"I intended to write a detailed account of my vacation, but I can not.

Uncle Jimmie has certainly tried to make me happy. He is so funny and dear. I could have so much fun with him if I were not worried about Uncle Peter!

"Uncle David says he wants to spend my last evening with me. We are going to dine here, and then go to the theater together. I am going to try to tell him how I feel about things, but I am afraid he won't give me the chance. Life is a strange mixture of things you want and can't have, and things you can have and don't want. It seems almost disloyal to put that down on paper about Uncle David. I do want him and love him, but oh!--not in that way. Not in that way. There is only one person in a woman's life that she can feel that way about.

Why--why--why doesn't my Uncle Peter come to me?"

CHAPTER XX

THE MAKINGS OF A TRIPLE WEDDING

"Just by way of formality," David said, "and not because I think any one present"--he smiled on the five friends grouped about his dinner table--"still takes our old resolution seriously, I should like to be released from the anti-matrimonial pledge that I signed eight years ago this November. I have no announcement to make as yet, but when I do wish to make an announcement--and I trust to have the permission granted very shortly--I want to be sure of my technical right to do so."

"Gosh all Hemlocks!" Jimmie exclaimed in a tone of such genuine confusion that it raised a shout of laughter. "I never thought of that."

"Nor I," said Peter. "I never signed any pledge to that effect."

"We left you out of it, Old Horse, regarding you as a congenital celibate anyway," Jimmie answered.