"Larry, I think your Ruth is the dearest thing I ever laid eyes on,"

declared Tony next day to her brother. "Her name ought to be t.i.tania. I'm not very big myself, but I feel like an Amazon beside her. And her laugh is the sweetest thing--so soft and silvery, like little bells. But she doesn't laugh much, does she? Poor little thing!"

"She is awfully up against it," said Larry with troubled eyes. "She can't stop trying to remember. It is a regular obsession with her. And she is very shy and sensitive and afraid of strangers."

"She doesn't look at you as if you were a stranger. She adores you."

"Nonsense!" said Larry sharply.

Tony opened her eyes at her brother's tone.

"Why, Larry! Of course, I didn't mean she was in love with you. She couldn't be when she is married. I just meant she adored you--well, the way Max adores me," she explained as the tawny-haired Irish setter came and rested his head on her knee, raising solemn worshipful brown eyes to her face. "Why shouldn't she? You saved her life and you have been wonderful to her every way."

"Nonsense!" said Larry again, though he said it in a different tone this time. "I haven't done much. It is Uncle Phil and Aunt Margery who are the wonderful ones. It is great the way they both said yes right away when I asked if I could bring her here. I tell you, Tony, it means something to have your own people the kind you can count on every time. And it is great to have a home like this to bring her to. She is going to love it as soon as she is able to get downstairs with us all."

Up in her cool, s.p.a.cious north chamber, lying in the big bed with the smooth, fine linen, Ruth felt as if she loved it already, though she found these Holidays even more amazing than ever, now that she was actually in their midst. Were there any other people in the world like them she wondered--so kind and simple and unfeignedly glad to take a stranger into their home and a queer, mysterious, sick stranger at that!

"If I have to begin living all over just like a baby I think I am the luckiest girl that ever was to be able to start in a place like this with such dear, kind people all around me," she told Doctor Holiday, senior, to whom she had immediately lost her heart as soon as she saw his smile and felt the touch of his strong, magnetic, healing hand.

"We will get you out under the trees in a day or two," he said. "And then your business will be to get well and strong as soon as possible and not worry about anything any more than if you were the baby you were just talking about. Can you manage that, young lady?"

"I'll try. I would be horrid and ungrateful not to when you are all so good to me. I don't believe my own people are half as nice as you Holidays. I don't see how they could be."

The doctor laughed at that.

"We will let it go at that for the present. You will be singing another tune when your Geoffrey Annersley comes up the Hill to claim you."

The girl's expressive face clouded over at that. She did not quite dare to tell Doctor Holiday as she had his nephew that she did not want to see Geoffrey Annersley nor to have to know she was married to him. It sounded horrid, but it was true. Sometimes she hated the very thought of Geoffrey Annersley.

Later Doctor Holiday and his nephew went over the girl's case together from both the personal and professional angles. There was little enough to go on in untangling her mystery. The railway tickets which had been found in her purse were in an un-postmarked envelope bearing the name Mrs. Geoffrey Annersley, but no address. The baggage train had been destroyed by fire at the time of the accident, so there were no trunks to give evidence. The small traveling bag she had carried with her bore neither initial nor geographical designation, and contained nothing which gave any clew as to its owner's ident.i.ty save that she was presumably a person of wealth, for her possessions were exquisite and obviously costly. A small jewel box contained various valuable rings, one or two pendants and a string of matched pearls which even to uninitiated eyes spelled a fortune. Also, oddly enough, among the rest was an absurd little childish gold locket inscribed "Ruth from Geoffrey."

She had worn no rings at all except for a single platinum-set, and very perfect, diamond and a plain gold band, obviously a wedding ring. The inference was that she was married and that her husband's name was Geoffrey Annersley, but where he was and why she was traveling across the United States alone and from whence she had come remained utterly unguessable. Larry had seen to it that advertis.e.m.e.nts for Geoffrey Annersley were inserted in every important paper from coast to coast but nothing had come of any of his efforts.

As for the strange lapse of memory, there seemed nothing to do but wait in the hope that recovered health and strength might bring it back.

"It may come bit by bit or by a sudden bound or never," was Doctor Holiday's opinion. "There is nothing that I know of that she or you or any one can do except let nature take her course. It is a case of time and patience. I am glad you brought her to us. Margery and I are very glad to have her."

"You are awfully good, Uncle Phil. I do appreciate it and it is great to have you behind me professionally. I haven't got a great deal of confidence in myself. Doctoring scares me sometimes. It is such a fearful responsibility."

"It is, but you are going to be equal to it. The confidence will come with experience. You need have no lack of faith in yourself; I haven't.

There is no reason why I should have, when I get letters like this."

The senior doctor leaned over and extracted old Doctor Fenton's letter from a cubby hole in his desk and gave it to his nephew to read. The latter perused it in silence with slightly heightened color. Praise always embarra.s.sed him.

"He is too kind," he observed as he handed back the letter. "I didn't do much out there, precious little in fact but what I was told to do. I figured it out that we young ones were the privates and it was up to us to take orders from the captains who knew their business better than we did and get busy. I worked on that basis."

"Sound basis. I am not afraid that a man who can obey well won't be able to command well when the time comes. It isn't a small thing to be recognized as a true Holiday, either. It is something to be proud of."

"I am proud, Uncle Phil. There is nothing I would rather hear--and deserve. But, if I am anywhere near the Holiday standard, it is you mostly that brought me up to it. I don't mean any dispraise of Dad. He was fine and I am proud to be his son. But he never understood me. I didn't have enough dash and go to me for him. Ted and Tony are both more his kind, though I don't believe either of them loved him as I did. But you seemed to understand always. You helped me to believe in myself. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, coming to you when I did."

Larry turned to the mantel and picked up a photograph of himself which stood there, a lad of fifteen or so, facing the world with grave, sensitive eyes, the Larry he had been when he came to the House on the Hill. He smiled at his uncle over the boy's picture.

"You burned out the plague spots, too, with a mighty hot iron, some of them," he added. "I'll never forget your sitting there in that very chair telling me I was a lazy, selfish sn.o.b and that, all things considered, I didn't measure up for a nickel with d.i.c.k. Jerusalem! I wonder if you knew how that hit. I had a fairly good opinion of Larry Holiday in some ways and you rather knocked the spots out of it, comparing me to my disadvantage with a circus runaway."

He replaced the picture, the smile still lingering on his face.

"It was the right medicine though. I needed it. I can see that now.

Speaking of doses I wish you would make Ted tutor this summer. I don't know whether he has told you. I rather think not. But he flunked so many courses he will have to drop back a year unless he makes up the work and takes examinations in the fall."

The senior doctor drummed thoughtfully on the desk. So that was what the boy had on his mind.

"Why not speak to him yourself?" he asked after a minute.

"And be sent to warm regions as I was last spring when I ventured to give his lord highmightiness some advice. No good, Uncle Phil. He won't listen to me. He just gets mad and swings off in the other direction. I don't handle him right. Haven't your patience and tact. I wonder if he ever will get any sense into his head. He is the best hearted kid in the world, and I'm crazy over him, but he does rile me to the limit with his fifty-seven varieties of foolness."

CHAPTER IX

TED SEIZES THE DAY

The next morning Ted strolled into his uncle's office to ask if the latter had any objections to his accepting an invitation to a house-party from Hal Underwood, a college cla.s.smate, at the latter's home near Springfield.

The doctor considered a moment before answering. He knew all about the Underwoods and knew that his erratic nephew could not be in a safer, pleasanter place. Also his quick wit saw a chance to put the screws on the lad in connection with the tutoring business.

"I suppose your June allowance is able to float your traveling expenses,"

he remarked less guilelessly than the remark sounded.

The June allowance was, it seemed, the missing link.

"I thought maybe you would be willing to allow me a little extra this month on account of commencement stunts. It is darned expensive sending nosegays to sweet girl graduates. I couldn't help going broke. Honest I couldn't, Uncle Phil." Then as his uncle did not leap at the suggestion offered, the speaker changed his tack. "Anyway, you would be willing to let me have my July money ahead of time, wouldn't you?" he ingratiated.

"It is only ten days to the first."

But Doctor Holiday still chose to be inconveniently irrelevant.

"Have you any idea how much my bill was for repairing the car?" he asked.

Ted shook his head shamefacedly, and bent to examine a picture in a magazine which lay on the desk. He wasn't anxious to have the car incident resurrected. He had thought it decently buried by this time, having heard no more about it.

"It was a little over a hundred dollars," continued the doctor.

The boy looked up, genuinely distressed.

"Gee, Uncle Phil! It's highway robbery."

"Scarcely. All things considered, it was a very fair bill. A hundred dollars is a good deal to pay for the pleasure of nearly getting yourself and somebody else killed, Ted."