David lifted the warm little finger to his lips and kissed it swiftly.

"Where are you going?" he asked, as she slipped away from him and stood poised in the doorway.

"I'm going to put on something appropriate to the occasion," she answered.

When she came back to him she was wearing the most delicate and cobwebby of muslins with a design of pale purple pa.s.sion flowers trellised all over it, and she gave him no chance for a moment alone with her all the rest of the evening.

Sometime later she showed him Eleanor's parting letter, and he was profoundly touched by the pathetic little doc.u.ment.

As the holidays approached Eleanor's absence became an almost unendurable distress to them all. The annual Christmas dinner party, a function that had never been omitted since the acquisition of David's studio, was decided on conditionally, given up, and again decided on.

"We do want to see one another on Christmas day,--we've got presents for one another, and Eleanor would hate it if she thought that her going away had settled that big a cloud on us. She slipped out of our lives in order to bring us closer together. We'll get closer together for her sake," Margaret decided.

But the ordeal of the dinner itself was almost more than they had reckoned on. Every detail of traditional ceremony was observed even to the mound of presents marked with each name piled on the same spot on the couch, to be opened with the serving of the coffee.

"I got something for Eleanor," Jimmie remarked shamefacedly as he added his contributions to the collection. "Thought we could keep it for her, or throw it into the waste-basket or something. Anyhow I had to get it."

"I guess everybody else got her something, too," Margaret said. "Of course we will keep them for her. I got her a little French party coat. It will be just as good next year as this. Anyhow as Jimmie says, I had to get it."

"I got her slipper buckles," Gertrude admitted. "She has always wanted them."

"I got her the Temple _Shakespeare_," Beulah added. "She was always carrying around those big volumes."

"You're looking better, Beulah," Margaret said. "Are you feeling better?"

"Jimmie says I'm looking more human. I guess perhaps that's it,--I'm feeling more--human. I needed humanizing--even at the expense of some--some heartbreak," she said bravely.

Margaret crossed the room to take a seat on Beulah's chair-arm, and slipped an arm around her.

"You're all right if you know that," she whispered softly.

"I thought I was going to bring you Eleanor herself," Peter said. "I got on the trail of a girl working in a candy shop out in Yonkers. My faithful sleuth was sure it was Eleanor and I was a.s.s enough to believe he knew what he was talking about. When I got out there I found a strawberry blonde with gold teeth."

"Gosh, you don't think she's doing anything like that," Jimmie exclaimed.

"I don't know," Peter said miserably. He was looking ill and unlike himself. His deep set gray eyes were sunken far in his head, his brow was too white, and the skin drawn too tightly over his jaws. "As a de-tec-i-tive, I'm afraid I'm a failure."

"We're all failures for that matter," David said. "Let's have dinner."

Eleanor's empty place, set with the liqueur gla.s.s she always drank her thimbleful of champagne in, and the throne chair from the drawing-room in which she presided over the feasts given in her honor, was almost too much for them. Margaret cried openly over her soup. Peter shaded his eyes with his hand, and Gertrude and Jimmie groped for each other's hands under the shelter of the table-cloth.

"This--this won't do," David said. He turned to Beulah on his left, sitting immovable, with her eyes staring unseeingly into the centerpiece of holly and mistletoe arranged by Alphonse so lovingly.

"We must either turn this into a kind of a wake, and kneel as we feast, or we must try to rise above it somehow."

"I don't see why," Jimmie argued. "I'm in favor of each man howling informally as he listeth."

"Let's drink her health anyhow," David insisted. "I cut out the Sauterne and the claret, so we could begin on the wine at once in this contingency. Here's to our beloved and dear absent daughter."

"Long may she wave," Jimmie cried, stumbling to his feet an instant after the others.

While they were still standing with their gla.s.ses uplifted, the bell rang.

"Don't let anybody in, Alphonse," David admonished him.

They all turned in the direction of the hall, but there was no sound of parley at the front door. Eleanor had put a warning finger to her lips, as Alphonse opened it to find her standing there. She stripped off her hat and her coat as she pa.s.sed through the drawing-room, and stood in her little blue cloth traveling dress between the portieres that separated it from the dining-room. The six stood transfixed at the sight of her, not believing the vision of their eyes.

"You're drinking my health," she cried, as she stretched out her arms to them. "Oh! my dears, and my dearests, will you forgive me for running away from you?"

CHAPTER XXV

THE LOVER

They left her alone with Peter in the drawing room in the interval before the coffee, seeing that he had barely spoken to her though his eyes had not left her face since the moment of her spectacular appearance between the portieres.

"I'm not going to marry you, Peter," Beulah whispered, as she slipped by him to the door, "don't think of me. Think of her."

But Peter was almost past coherent thought or speech as they stood facing each other on the hearth-rug,--Eleanor's little head up and her breath coming lightly between her sweet, parted lips.

"Where did you go?" Peter groaned. "How could you, dear--how could you,--how could you?"

"I'm back all safe, now, Uncle Peter. I took up nursing in a hospital."

"I didn't even find you. I swore that I would. I've searched for you everywhere."

"I'm sorry I made you all that trouble," Eleanor said, "but I thought it would be the best thing to do."

"Tell me why," Peter said, "tell me why, I've suffered so much--wondering--wondering."

"You've suffered?" Eleanor cried. "I thought it was only I who did the suffering."

She moved a step nearer to him, and Peter gripped her hard by the shoulders.

"It wasn't that you cared?" he said. Then his lips met hers dumbly, beseechingly.

"It was all a mistake,--my going away," she wrote some days after. "I ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as strong as Dante was, when he 'showed himself more furnished with breath than he was,' and said, 'Go on, for I am strong and resolute.'

I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to have.

"I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I know Uncle Jimmie needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so.

"I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give her back Peter, if I could,--but I can not. He is mine, and I am his, and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don't think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did.

"Don't men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women love it is not like that with them.