MISS LOCHINVAR




[Illustration: Janet looked up and down the house which was to be her
home. (See page 19.)]




  MISS LOCHINVAR

  _A STORY FOR GIRLS_

  BY
  MARION AMES TAGGART

  _Illustrated by
  W. L. Jacobs and Bayard F. Jones_

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
  1902




  COPYRIGHT, 1902
  BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

  _Published September, 1902_




  TO
  POLLY AND JO
  IN THE WEST.




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                      PAGE

      I.--“YOUNG LOCHINVAR IS COME OUT OF THE WEST”               1

     II.--“HE ALIGHTED AT NETHERBY GATE”                         13

    III.--“SO BOLDLY HE ENTER’D THE NETHERBY HALL”               28

     IV.--“AMONG BRIDESMEN AND KINSMEN AND BROTHERS AND ALL”     43

      V.--“AND, SAVE HIS GOOD BROADSWORD, HE WEAPONS HAD NONE”   56

     VI.--“HE RODE ALL UNARM’D, AND HE RODE ALL ALONE”           71

    VII.--“OH, COME YE IN PEACE HERE, OR COME YE IN WAR?”        88

   VIII.--“HE STAYED NOT FOR BRAKE AND HE STOPPED NOT
              FOR STONE”                                        102

     IX.--“‘THEY’LL HAVE FLEET STEEDS THAT FOLLOW,’ QUOTH
              YOUNG LOCHINVAR”                                  115

      X.--“FOR A LAGGARD IN LOVE AND A DASTARD IN WAR”          133

     XI.--“THERE NEVER WAS KNIGHT LIKE THE YOUNG LOCHINVAR”     146

    XII.--“’TWERE BETTER BY FAR TO HAVE MATCHED OUR FAIR
              COUSIN WITH YOUNG LOCHINVAR”                      159

   XIII.--“‘NOW TREAD WE A MEASURE,’ SAID YOUNG LOCHINVAR”      172

    XIV.--“SO FAITHFUL IN LOVE, AND SO DAUNTLESS IN WAR”        188

     XV.--“ONE TOUCH TO HER HAND, AND ONE WORD IN HER EAR”      202

    XVI.--“HAVE YE E’ER HEARD OF GALLANT LIKE YOUNG
              LOCHINVAR?”                                       216

   XVII.--“THERE WAS MOUNTING ’MONG GRAEMES OF THE
              NETHERBY CLAN”                                    233

  XVIII.--“WITH A SMILE ON HER LIPS AND A TEAR IN HER EYE”      247




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                        FACING PAGE

  Janet looked up and down the house which was to
      be her home                                    _Frontispiece_

  “My dear little niece, you don’t know how glad I am
      to see you”                                                37

  The story-telling party                                        81

  “You brutes! To treat a little dog like that!”                106

  A ringing cheer announced Jan the victor                      124

  The impromptu ball began without the loss of a moment         181

  “You’re not going to be blind, not one bit!” said Jack        219

  The last glimpse of Jan                                       259




MISS LOCHINVAR

CHAPTER I

“YOUNG LOCHINVAR IS COME OUT OF THE WEST”


The big dining-room looked a trifle dreary in spite of the splendor of
its appointments; in spite, too, of the fact that there were enough
children’s faces around the long table to have brightened it. But
though the six owners of these faces ranged between the happy ages of
sixteen and three, and were all healthy young folk, they lacked the
blithe look they should have worn, and so failed in illumining the
stately room.

The youngest member of the house of Graham, a pretty child, had
wrinkled her brow until it looked like a pan of cream set in a very
breezy dairy. This was because the nurse-maid stood behind her chair,
an indignity little Geraldine--known as Jerry--resented bitterly,
though it recurred at each breakfast and lunch hour. She showed her
resentment by deliberately putting her spoon, full of oatmeal and
cream, into her mouth upside down every time the maid’s eyes strayed
for a moment, and also, painful though it be to record, by stretching
her kid-shoed foot around her high chair in sly and unamiable attempts
to kick her humiliating attendant.

The eldest, a boy of sixteen, breakfasted in silence, with a sullen
air of aloofness from his family, and a secretive expression foreign
to his naturally frank and handsome face. The three girls, and one boy
ranging between him and Jerry, seemed rather to regard the meal as
something to be gone through with before they were free to attend to
matters interesting to each, than as a happy hour spent together before
separating for the day.

The mother of this numerous brood was pretty and graceful, but she
looked harassed, and as though she lived in perpetual fear of missing
an appointment--which was indeed the case.

Mr. Graham was a broker. Sydney, the oldest boy, said it took all his
father’s time to “be a broker and not broke,” and this was strictly
true. He was immersed in business too deeply to leave time or thought
for much else. He had an expensive family, and though he was accounted
a rich man, the uncertain ways of stocks in rising and falling always
made it possible for him to become a comparatively poor one. So in the
stress of laying the foundations of a handsome inheritance for his six
sons and daughters he had little chance to make their acquaintance,
though he was an indulgent father, and looked forward to the day, which
did not dawn, when he should have leisure to know them.

It was Mr. Graham who suddenly aroused his inert family to keen
interest in what was going on around them.

“What day of the month is this--the thirteenth?” he asked, as his eye
fell on the date-line of his newspaper, served with his coffee.

“Yes; to-morrow is the day for us to dine with the Robesons,” said his
wife.

“To-morrow is the day for our niece to arrive,” retorted Mr. Graham.
“Don’t forget to have her met, in case it slips my memory to-morrow
when Henry drives me down.”

“Our niece! Arrives! What can you mean?” cried Mrs. Graham, in shrill
surprise, as she dropped her fork with a clatter which would have
called down a reprimand on Jerry.

“I told you, didn’t I?” asked Mr. Graham, with an uneasy recollection
that he had not mentioned the matter, having a cowardly doubt as to
how his tidings would be received. “It’s my sister’s little girl--my
sister Jennie, you know, who married and settled out west in Crescendo.
Jennie’s husband has made her very happy--he’s a first-rate fellow--but
he hasn’t made her, nor any one else, including himself, rich. I
imagine they have to scramble along on rather slender provision for
a large brood; they have a big family. I don’t hear from Jennie very
often, and she never complains, but her last letter--it came nearly
two months ago--had a tone of sadness, and betrayed more than she
realized of anxiety. I answered it, and I told her to send her oldest
girl--Joan--Jane--no, Janet--Janet on here to us to go to school with
our girls this winter. She’s about Gwen and Gladys’s age. She won’t
be any trouble to us, and I fancy it will be considerable help to her
mother. So Jennie’s husband wrote me that the child would come, and
she’ll be here to-morrow.”

Gwendoline, the oldest girl, who was fifteen; Gladys, the second
one, who was thirteen; seven-year-old Genevieve, and Ivan, a boy of
nearly eleven, stared at each other and at their parents in dumb
amazement. Mrs. Graham flushed with annoyance; only the presence of the
waitress and little Geraldine’s despised custodian restrained her from
expressing that annoyance forcibly. As it was, she said: “I can not
understand, Mr. Graham, how you could have added the care of another
child to me, who have six of my own to look after, without so much as
consulting me in the matter!”

“But you don’t look after us, mamma,” said Ivan, quite cheerfully,
and with no idea of complaining. “You are too busy with all your
committees and teas and clubs and things. So she won’t be any bother,
and maybe she’ll be nice.” Ivan--who despised his Russian name, and had
succeeded in compelling his family to call him Jack as soon as he had
learned the names were equivalent to each other--was a warm-hearted,
hot-tempered, honest little fellow, who did not seem to belong to the
city splendors. “Jack had reverted,” his father said, “to his ancestral
stock”; one could easily imagine him happily driving cows on his
grandfather’s farm among the New Hampshire hills.

“I admit, my dear, that it was not quite fair to spring this little
girl on you, as Jack would say, but I think the boy takes the true view
of it. One girl more or less will not matter in a family like this one,
and all the difference she will make will be a third bill to me for
tuition at Miss Larned’s school,” said Mr. Graham, trying to speak with
an assurance he did not feel.

“But to us, papa!” cried Gladys, reproachfully. “It will mean more
than that to us. Gwen and I will have to introduce her to the girls;
she will expect to go about with us, and just fancy a poor girl from a
little Western town in our set!”

Gwendoline--Mrs. Graham had had the happy thought of naming all her
daughters with the same initial, repeating that of their family
name--Gwendoline laughed scornfully at her sister’s remark. “I believe
I should rather enjoy livening up those girls,” she said. “I honestly
don’t see how she could have worse manners than some of them if she
came off an Indian reservation. You know, I just despise those silly,
giggling, affected girls, with their grown-up nonsense. They’re not all
like that, though. But then the nice ones would understand and make
allowance for her being a girl from a little town--nice people always
understand, I’ve noticed that. But what I think is she’ll be a nuisance
around the house. Goodness knows, I don’t want one single person more
to make a noise and get under foot when I want to do things!”

“Oh, all you care for is writing, or daubing, or singing, or spouting
plays!” began Gladys, wrathfully; but little Genevieve, whom they
called Viva, interrupted her: “I wish she wasn’t so big. Are you
certain sure, papa, she’s as old as Gwen and Gladys? Because there
doesn’t be any one to play with me in this house.”

“She is fourteen,” said Mr. Graham. “And, Gwen and Gladys, I wish
you to remember that this Janet Howe is your own cousin, my sister’s
child, and I want you to treat her kindly and make her happy. Many’s
the scrape her mother got me out of when I was a boy at home. There
never was a better sister than Jennie; no boy could have dreamed
an improvement on her. I always preferred her as a companion to my
brothers; she could row, fish, and bait her own hook and take off her
fish when she had caught them, too!--and she was as sweet-tempered and
loving as the day was long. I often wish you children were the friends
Jen and I used to be! But you each go your own way, and neither cares a
pin for any one else’s interests. Perhaps it is the result of living in
New York instead of in the peaceful town where I was born.”

The children rarely had heard any reference to their father’s early
days, and they listened to this outburst with an interest that made
them forget their grievance for a moment. Then Jack spoke: “Do you
suppose that this girl is as nice as her mother, papa?” he said. “Do
you suppose she can bait a hook and sail a boat?”

“Those things are not always inherited,” his father answered, laughing.
“There is not much chance to fish or sail in the middle of a prairie,
and Crescendo is a prairie town. But I have no doubt that your cousin
Janet will be as nice a little girl as you could find anywhere. I can’t
conceive of Jennie having any other than a nice daughter, and I am sure
you will be very grateful to me for getting her here.”

“I shan’t be,” said Gladys, decidedly. “I can’t possibly go about with
a Wild West Show, papa.”

“Gladys,” said her father, in a tone his children rarely heard. “You
forget to whom you are speaking, and that you are speaking of my
dearest sister’s daughter. Let me hear one more syllable like that, or
see one glimmer of that spirit toward your cousin Janet, and you will
be sent to a boarding-school, where you will not go about with any
one. I shall invite whom I please to my own house, and my daughters
will treat them with courtesy. Remember what I say, and you, too,
Gwendoline, Sydney, Jack, and Viva.”

Gwen laughed good-naturedly. “I won’t treat her badly, papa, though you
can’t expect me to be precisely glad she is coming,” she said.

Gladys looked sullen, but Jerry saved the day by stretching her arms
very wide, a piece of bread in one hand, her dripping teaspoon in
the other. “I will love her,” she announced, speaking for the first
time; she had been turning from one to the other during this exciting
conversation. “I will div her my o’meal po’dge, out of er spoon wight
side up. An’ I’ll let Tsusan ’tand ahind her tchair,” added the small
hypocrite, nodding her golden curls benignly, and turning to smile
beatifically at her nurse-maid.

It was impossible not to laugh at this noble exhibition of generosity,
and with this laugh the breakfast party broke up.

“It is really very trying, Howard, to have a girl, of whom we know
nothing, and just the age of our girls, thrust upon our poor dears for
the entire winter, not to mention my part of the burden,” said Mrs.
Graham, as she followed her husband into the hall. “I really can not
blame poor Gwen and Gladys for feeling as they do. I should have said
more myself, but that I did not care to discuss family matters before
the servants, or encourage the children in their apprehensions, and
their tendency to disobey you.”

“Oh, it will be all right, Tina!” said Mr. Graham, easily. “We have
talked about it too long; a small girl of fourteen or so is not worth
so much discussion. I’ll meet you to-night at seven, if you like, at
Delmonico’s, and we’ll go to the theater after we dine. Henry can bring
down my evening clothes when he meets me. I have a directors’ meeting
after Exchange closes, and I can’t get home to dress before dinner.”

Mrs. Graham’s face cleared, as her husband felt sure that it would,
at this proposition, but she said reproachfully, as she kissed him
good-by: “You know our club has its semiannual dinner to-night, Howard,
and you promised to come later and hear the speeches.”

“Merciful powers! Don’t mention such trifles as an extra girl or two in
the house after that!” groaned Mr. Graham, in mock despair, as he got
into his overcoat. “I really believe I did!”

“When did you say that this Miss Lochinvar was to come out of the West,
father?” asked Sydney, delaying on his way through the hall. Throughout
the discussion at the table the eldest born had not spoken.

“To-morrow; will you go with one of the girls in the carriage to meet
her?” asked his father, looking up with a laugh for the apt nickname.

“Couldn’t possibly; I am booked for football with our team,” said
Sydney, resuming his way, having stopped as his father spoke. “I wish
Miss Lochinvar joy, though; if she has plenty of brothers and sisters
she’s likely to be lonesome in this crowd.”

Gwendoline and Gladys sauntered along as he said these words, and
stopped short with a peal of exultant laughter. “Miss Lochinvar! Well,
if that isn’t the very best name for her!” they cried in a breath. “We
shall always call her that. Isn’t Sydney too clever!” But in Gwen’s
laugh there was only pure amusement at the fun of the thing, while in
Gladys’s mirth there was a ring of spite.




CHAPTER II

“HE ALIGHTED AT NETHERBY GATE”


The question of meeting the little stranger from Crescendo was solved
by sending Nurse Hummel to the station, as probably any one of the
Graham family could have prophesied that it would be. Most things in
that household connected with a child fell into Nurse Hummel’s hands.
She had come to take charge of Sydney when he was a youth one month
old, with more nebulous features than are considered desirable for
perfect beauty. Consequently she had presided over the earliest moments
of the life of each of the succeeding Graham babies; had nursed them
with love no mere money could recompense through childish and more
serious illnesses, and cherished them with all the warmth of her big
German heart, early bereft of the love of her husband and her own only
little child.

To Nurse Hummel the Grahams repaired with their griefs, not to their
busy mother; and “Hummie” was so fond of them that while they were
small they did not realize that there were children whose mothers could
give them more attention than theirs did, and that mother-love is more
satisfactory than any other.

Mrs. Graham found at the last moment that she could not send Henry with
the horses all the way over to the West Twenty-third Street Ferry; but
Nurse Hummel was despatched, with instructions to select a hansom drawn
by a lively horse, and to come up-town by the way of Fifth Avenue, so
“Miss Lochinvar” would certainly enjoy her drive--probably enjoy it
more than if she had been shut up in the Grahams’ more elegant brougham.

The new cousin was not to arrive until afternoon, a fortunate thing,
for though it never occurred to either Gwendoline or Gladys to go to
meet her, they were most curious in regard to her, and very anxious to
be in the house when she reached it.

They were ensconced behind the long lace curtains of the library on the
second floor, perfectly hidden, yet seeing perfectly, when the hansom
drove up.

Janet Howe had not talked much during that drive, though Nurse Hummel
tried in her most motherly way to draw her out. She thought that the
little girl was bewildered into silence by the splendor, confusion,
and hubbub of the second city of the world, but though this was in a
measure true, it was not the main cause of Janet’s quietness.

All the way during the last half of her two days’ journey--the first
half being given up to longing for the beloved faces and little house
which she had left behind--Janet had let her thoughts leap forward to
the dear cousins, the aunt and uncle who were awaiting her. She was
all ready to love them; she _did_ love them, for they were her
blessed mother’s kindred, who were so good to her in taking her into
their hearts and home, in letting her share the wealth she knew they
possessed, and in sharing one another with her. She knew the names and
ages of each one of them; that Sydney was very handsome and Gwen very
clever. All the Howes knew their Eastern cousins literally by heart,
for they occupied in the minds of the little folk in the plain house
in Crescendo a position something between an embodiment of perfect
kinship and the princes and princesses of the fairy tales. And Janet
knew and loved her Aunt Tina and her dearest Uncle Howard with positive
worship, heightened, if possible, by their kindness to her in offering
her this winter in New York. Her mother had talked to the children of
her happy girlhood with her brother, until every little brook, every
shaded path and meadow in the distant New Hampshire home, and every
trick of voice and manner of this favorite brother Howard were as
familiar to them as were their own lives and one another. Janet felt
quite sure that when she descended upon the platform in the station and
found all the Grahams drawn up in line to meet her, waving their hands
and laughing--for that was the way the Howes always welcomed a stray
guest to Crescendo--that she should be able to pick out each one with
perfect accuracy. She should make no mistake as to which was Sydney,
and which was Jack--she couldn’t very well, since there was nearly six
years’ difference between them--nor which was Gwen and which Gladys,
and quiet Viva, and dear little Geraldine, for whom she hungered most
of all because she was precisely the age of her own precious youngest
sister, her pet Poppet, as she called little Elizabeth. When she did
descend upon the platform on the Jersey City side, a trifle sobered by
the vastness of the station, the rush of the crowd, and the babel of
sounds, there was no line of merry young faces anywhere in sight, no
one that could be Uncle Howard or Aunt Tina, not even one who could be
Sydney, Gwen, or Gladys. Janet caught her breath with a sharp pain,
half fright, half bitter disappointment, and looked wildly around at
the mad-appearing passengers, tearing through the chilly station with
as frantic haste to catch the lumbering ferry-boat as if it had been as
fast as a Bandersnatch.

Just at that dreadful moment a woman in iron gray--all round, face,
body, gait, and all--came toward Janet, smiling with sufficient
expansiveness to cover the lack of several other smiles. “Is this
little Miss Janet Howe from Crescendo?” she asked, with just enough
of the German accent familiar in the West to make this meek, girlish
Lochinvar feel comforted.

“Oh, yes. Where are my aunt and uncle, and my cousins?” cried Janet.
“And who are you, if you please?”

“I am Nurse Hummel, and I’ve come to take you to your friends,” said
the rotund creature, with such assurance that “all was right in the
world” that Janet began to suspect herself of unreason in expecting her
relatives to meet her.

“None of them could get down here to-day, but that doesn’t matter.
You’ll soon find out that Nurse Hummel looks after all of you. I have
taken care of every Graham child of them all since Master Sydney was a
month old. Give me your check.”

Nurse Hummel led the way, and Janet followed, somewhat reassured, but
still with the lurking sense of disappointment. The capable woman gave
the check for Janet’s battered little trunk to a transfer express, and
put the child into a cab, drawn by the most frisky, high-headed horse
at the New York side of the ferry. Then she got in herself, not without
audible maledictions on joints that were less limber than in her youth.

When the interesting, but confusing, drive ended in the frisky horse
being pulled up so short before the Graham’s door that he almost sat
down on his pathetic, docked tail, Janet looked up and down the house
which was to be her home for many months. She saw a high, brownstone
structure, differing not at all, apparently, from a long line of such
edifices stretching westward from Fifth Avenue as far as she could see,
and eastward again across it. Not a sign of life could she espy; not a
curtain moved; not a face smiled at her; not a hand waved, still less
was there the shouting, gesticulating bevy of cousins on the front
steps which she had hoped to see.

But she was not arriving unnoted. Behind the curtains on the second
floor five eager faces peered out to catch the first glimpse of her.
The Graham children saw a short girl, not quite as tall as Gladys, with
soft, rounding curves throughout her body; a face that was decidedly
pretty, but very pathetic; with big, wistful brown eyes, looking
as if they might quickly be hidden by tears; brown hair, curling
around a broad, white forehead; a skin with a hint of brown beneath
its whiteness, and full, red lips meeting in soft curves, fashioned,
unmistakably, for smiling, but now drooping at the corners in an
attempt to keep them from quivering. They saw also a brown skirt and
jacket, with reddish tints occasionally, showing wear, and revealing,
to more experienced eyes, the fact that they had originally been made
up with the other side of the goods out. A hopelessly unstylish hat
surmounted the beautiful masses of red-brown hair, and woolen gloves
completed a costume that made Gladys groan aloud at its confirmation of
her worst fears. But Gwen, truly artistic, and with truer standards of
judgment than her sister’s, unguided though they were, saw the facts
which the shabbiness of her new cousin’s garments could not conceal
from her more observant eyes.

“She’s awfully pretty, Gladys,” she said. “And she looks like a lady,
and she looks sweet, and--and--oh, I don’t know--trusty, like a dog.
And, dear me, she is really _awfully_ pretty; ever so much
prettier than either of us.”

Gladys gave a derisive sniff. “Pretty! Well, so she might be, if
she looked decent, but, for goodness’ sake, what clothes! Why, our
laundress’s girl looks better! Fancy taking such a guy to school! I
shall die of mortiffication.”

Gwen actually laughed. “Mor_tif_-fication, Gladys? Maybe bad
pronunciation is as bad as old clothes, if you stop to think about it.
And Mary Ellen Flynn does wear citified things, and frizzes and cheap
lace, and so on, but I don’t know that I think she looks better than
that girl down there. At any rate, I suppose there are other clothes
in New York, and if it would save your life, we might make her look
decent.”

“I think she looks as though she could fish and sail a boat, too,”
said Jack, who, while his sisters were frivolously discussing mere
externals, had been silently considering the new cousin from the more
important viewpoint of her possible inheritance of her mother’s talents.

In the meantime, Norah, the waitress, had admitted Nurse Hummel and her
charge, and poor Janet was heavy-heartedly climbing the long flight of
stairs, without a voice to hail her coming. “We always meet people
at home, Mrs. Hummel,” she said at last, in a trembling voice, as
she paused at the landing to turn back to her guide, following with
shortened breath. “Aren’t they glad to see me?”

“What nonsense; just nonsense!” declared Nurse Hummel, with the
increase of accent always perceptible when she was moved. “There iss
different customs, that’s all. Ve iss not der same as you in der
Vest. My younk ladies iss vaiting you in der library, alretty. Yet it
vouldn’t haf hurt if someone came out mit greetings vonce,” she added
to herself, half minded to be indignant for the coldness shown the
little stranger, whose sweet and charming ways had immediately won her
affection.

As Nurse Hummel’s solid tread, passing Janet’s light one in the hall,
fell on the ears of the group in the window, all but Jack and Viva
stepped hastily forward, anxious not to appear to have been indulging
in surreptitious curiosity.

Nurse Hummel opened the door. “My dears,” she said, “here iss your
cousin, quite safe, und as glad to see you as you are to see her.” And
she gently pushed Janet past her toward her relatives.

“How do you do?” said Gladys, in her most grown-up, and, as she fondly
flattered herself, most elegant air. “I hope you are not too tired
after your journey.” With which enthusiastic speech of welcome she bent
gracefully forward and lightly pecked Janet’s cheek, apparently not
seeing that the fresh young lips were ready to be met by hers.

Now Gladys’s affectations always exasperated Gwen beyond bearing, no
matter what called them forth, and she was really sorry for her cousin,
who looked as bewildered as hurt by this piece of nonsense. So it was
a commingling of temper and kindliness which made her own manner more
than usually simple and hearty as she put her arms around Janet and
kissed her, saying, “You look very nice, Janet, and I hope you will
like New York and us.”

Janet raised her wet eyes to the tall girl above her, returning the
kiss with warmth and interest. “You’re Gwen, the clever one; I am
sure I shall just love you,” she said, and Gwen smiled with sincere
pleasure.

“Hallo, Jack! hallo, Viva!” cried Janet, partly restored to
cheerfulness by Gwen’s welcome, and glad to display her ready knowledge
of her family. “Come out here, and let me see you better. You don’t
know how I miss Bob and Nannie; they’re your ages. And Geraldine! If I
don’t love babies, then I don’t love anything on this whole earth! Do
you think I’d scare her if I kissed her? Is she shy? Poppet is--just at
first, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’s at all shy!” said Gladys. “She sees so many
people; mamma receives a great deal, and Jerry sees quantities of
people, because they always think they have to ask for the youngest.
She isn’t much to rave over; she’s a cross, spoiled little kid, I
think.”

Janet stared at this remark, both because she had been taught that
slang was not well-bred, and Gladys was so very fine-ladified, and
because she could not imagine any one taking that attitude toward her
baby sister. Jerry stamped her foot. “I’m not tross! You are tross,
Tladys Traham! I love dis new one better’n you.” And she turned with
an angelic smile to throw herself into Janet’s outstretched arms,
which closed on her as their owner gave a quick sob, fancying they held
Poppet to her breast.

“You’re a darling, pretty, little petsy-cousin,” declared Janet, with
such unmistakable sincerity that Jerry melted still more.

“An’ you’re a darlin’, pretty, _bid_, pets’ tousin,” she retorted.
And from that instant Janet had one devoted adherent in her new home.

“Why do they call you Miss Lochinvar?” asked Viva, suddenly. She had
been considering Janet with her own grave thoughtfulness, and her
question fell like a bomb upon the ears of her shocked sisters.

Janet looked quickly from one to the other of her two elder girl
cousins.

“I hope you won’t mind, Janet; Syd called you that the morning we heard
you were coming, and it was so nice we couldn’t help adopting it,” said
Gwen, her color mounting high. “He didn’t mean it unkindly; neither did
we. It was only because you were coming ‘out of the West,’ you know.
You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, I don’t mind. Why should I?” replied Janet, with an uneasy little
laugh. “Young Lochinvar carried everything before him. It is rather
complimentary. And you might as well call me Jan. They always do at
home; Janet seems so long. Though, of course, if you like it better, it
doesn’t matter.”

“No; Jan is cozy, and it suits you somehow,” said Gwen. “Don’t you
want me to take you to your room? You must be tired, and feel all over
cinders; I always do after I have been traveling.”

“Thanks. Is Aunt Tina away?” asked Janet timidly.

“Oh, mamma is out; she has no end of things to attend to; she isn’t at
home much,” said Gladys. “We are all dreadfully busy; I never have a
moment myself! Papa dines here--no, he doesn’t either! Papa and mamma
dine out to-night. Well, that’s just the way. You’ll find New York
rather different from a little town.”

“You’ll find New York very nice, and full of all sorts of things; it’s
too big to be all one way,” said Gwen, filled with an unsisterly desire
to shake Gladys’s high-and-mighty air out of her, as she saw the blank
look of loneliness that came over the pretty, sensitive face before
her. “Come up-stairs with me.--Gladys, you may tell the girls I won’t
be around to-day.--Viva, you go with Hummie and Jerry.--Come on, Jan.”

Janet followed the one friendly person, except the big nurse Gwen
called “Hummie,” whom she had met in this strange household. Gwen put
her arm around the little brown figure, and Jan returned her pressure,
yet she kept her eyes down on the way up-stairs, lest Gwen should see
the tears, and she could not help feeling that she had passed through
a sort of mental Russian bath, plunging from the warm affection of her
own humbler home, and her loving anticipations of this new one, into
the actual chill of her welcome to it.




CHAPTER III

“SO BOLDLY HE ENTER’D THE NETHERBY HALL”


Janet could not repress a cry of pleasure as Gwen threw open the door
of her room, despondently as she had approached it. It was one of the
smallest rooms in the large house, but it was quite big enough for one
small girl, and it was so pretty! The furniture was bird’s-eye maple;
the paper, carpet, hangings, all a harmony of soft old-rose color; and
the few pictures both good and cheerful.

“Is this really my room?” cried Jan, who had loved the big, bare, sunny
room at home, which she had shared with her two sisters next in order
to her, but who had always longed secretly for a lovely room, such
as she read of in her favorite stories, and which should be all her
own. And now, behold, here was her wish gratified beyond her wildest
imaginings--at least, while she was an inmate of her uncle’s household.

“Yes. Do you really like it? It isn’t very large, but maybe you won’t
mind,” said Gwen, looking around her critically. “The next room is the
nursery. Hummie sleeps there, and Jerry’s crib is there; Viva does
her lessons there in the morning--she has a governess; she hasn’t
begun school. If you want anything, you must go in to Hummie--that’s
headquarters for any Graham in distress. Gladys has the middle room on
this floor, and mine is the back one; Viva has the one beside mine at
the end of the hall. We won’t hear one another much, because the house
is so dreadfully deep, and the dressing-rooms are between the chambers;
that’s one good thing. Syd calls this floor ‘the hennery,’ because all
the girls’ rooms are here. I told him that I didn’t mind; if he and
Jack were roosters, it was proper they should roost above us--they are
on the next floor, you know. And he didn’t like it, though I think my
joke is quite as good as his--it’s the same joke, in fact.” And Gwen
laughed in malicious enjoyment of these exquisite sallies of wit.

Janet had been looking out of the window, and discovered that the
identity of the architecture of the houses in the street was less than
she had taken it to be; there were many points of difference between
her uncle’s house and his neighbors’, though the uniform brownstone
made them drearily similar to eyes used to long stretches and plenty
of space. But she had also caught a glimpse of trees and grass as she
leaned out, and she drew her head in to inquire of Gwen what they
meant, forgetting the pretty room, and not hearing what her cousin had
been saying.

“That is Central Park; the entrance is just above us, at Fifty-ninth
Street,” said Gwen, wondering at Jan’s brightening eyes. “It is nice to
have it so near; I often go there to think out my plans--stories and
poems and such things--and Glad and I are learning to ride.”

“I know you are awfully clever. Uncle sent mamma some of your poetry,
cut out of a magazine,” said Janet, removing her hat and shaking out
her masses of warm-tinted, curling hair.

“Oh, my, what bea-u-tiful hair!” cried Gwen involuntarily. “And what
lots of it! If that doesn’t make that conceited old Daisy Hammond turn
green when she sees it! She’s so vain of her hair, it fairly disgusts
one! Oh, those verses were only in the back part of St. Nicholas, where
the children’s things are. It was ever so long ago--certainly two
years. I hope I can do better than that now.”

“Do you expect to write when you are grown up?” asked Jan, with the awe
for a person who could look forward to such a career natural to a girl
who dearly loved books, and who felt that they who made them belonged
to an order of beings apart from common mortals.

“I can’t tell,” said Gwen, seating herself on the bed beside her cousin
and taking her knee into the clasp of both her hands--it was not often
that she found any one willing to listen to her hopes, much less treat
them with positive veneration. “You see,” she continued, “I can paint
just as well as I can write, and my teacher says I have a very good
voice. I might become an artist instead of an author, or I might go
on the stage and become a great opera singer, like Melba. I shouldn’t
like you to mention it, Jan, because they all--except mamma--make fun
of me, but I mean to make a big name for myself somehow, and as long
as I do that I don’t care which way I do it. Gladys likes society,
and dress, and such stuff,” continued the ambitious young person,
with withering scorn, “but I want to be something that is something.
It’s pretty hard, though, when you’re one of such a dreadfully big
family. I would like to get off by myself on a desert island, like
Robinson Crusoe, and only see them on birthdays, and Christmas, and
Thanksgiving, and such times.”

“Mercy!” exclaimed Jan, rather shocked, though she realized that genius
was not to be measured by ordinary standards. “That would never suit
me.”

“What do you want to do? What’s your special talent?” asked Gwen.

“I haven’t any,” replied Jan. “Unless,” she added, with a twinkle, “it
is a talent to wash and dress children, and dust, and wash dishes, and
make cake, and those things--I can do all that.”

“How perfectly awful!” cried Gwen with conviction. “You poor little
soul, have you been leading such a poky, drudge’s life as that? I am
glad, then, that papa got you here, after all.”

Janet was too quick-witted to miss the implication that Gwen had not
always been glad of her coming, but she said with spirit: “You needn’t
pity me, Gwen, for no girl ever had more fun than I have. I like to do
those things--at least, usually I do.” Jan was too honest not to leave
a margin for those occasions when household tasks had been irksome. “I
have the very nicest home in all the world, and it would be bad enough
if I weren’t willing to do something in it! And we children have the
loveliest times--you ought to see what a splendid little crowd they
are! I don’t know, but I shouldn’t wonder if--” Jan stopped short, not
wishing to impart to her cousin her first impression that the Grahams
were less happy than the Howes.

Gwen was too preoccupied to notice the halt. “And what do you mean to
do, then, when you are grown up?” she insisted.

Jan hesitated. “I believe,” she said slowly, “I don’t want to be very
much of anything--not anything famous or showy, I mean. Papa says it
is hardest, and greatest of all, to be a true-hearted, noble woman who
makes home happy and helps everybody to be good. I believe I would
rather do that--be the sort of woman mamma is--than anything.”

“What sort of woman is she?” asked Gwen respectfully; the glow in Jan’s
eyes and the loving tremor in her voice impressed the girl, who had
never had this side of life presented to her aspirations before.

“She is so cheery and kind, she makes you feel better, no matter how
miserable you are, if she just walks through the room,” said Jan. “She
never thinks of herself at all--it keeps us busy to stop her going
without things for us all the time. She never is too tired to listen to
our fusses, nor too busy to unsnarl us. She never says a word if she is
sick or troubled, but puts it all out of sight so no one else will be
unhappy, too. And she makes time, somehow, for her neighbors’ troubles.
And she not only cooks, and sews, and nurses us children, but she reads
to us, and talks to us, and we each feel as though we were all alone
in the world with her. And she never breaks a promise to us, whether
it is to do something pleasant for us or to punish us, and she is
never the least wee bit partial or unjust. And when we’re bad, or have
crooked days, she is so patient! And she just loves us straight and
good. And there isn’t one of us that wouldn’t just die if we thought we
had deceived or disappointed her, because she trusts us. And everybody
wonders why the Howe children are so square, and honorable, and good,
on the whole. As if they could help being--with such a mother!
Oh, I love her, I do love her!” And Jan’s tears rolled over as she
remembered how many miles now separated her from this dear woman, and
how long it must be before she held her tight in her arms again.

Gwen sat motionless, looking down on the long fingers clasping her
knee, as Jan stopped speaking. Her face was sweet and serious, although
a trifle puzzled. Jan had given her an entirely new point of view, had
filled her mind with new thoughts; and it was a fine mind, guiding a
noble nature, both quite capable of appreciating the picture her cousin
had painted.

“Thank you, Jan,” she said at last, to Jan’s surprise, as she rose to
leave her. “I think I see what you mean. I shouldn’t wonder if your
ambition was better than mine; I mean to think that over. By and by
you’ll tell me more about Crescendo and Aunt Jennie; I wish I knew her;
I wish--” Here Gwen stopped in her turn. “Don’t be homesick, and don’t
mind Gladys. She is so silly that it doesn’t mean one thing. Come down,
when you get ready, to the library--where we were when you came. Papa
will want to speak to you before he goes out. And don’t miss those nice
people too much; we’ll try to be decent, and I guess you’ll like New
York. I’ll tell Norah to have your trunk sent up when it comes.”

Gwen left the room with a smile intended to be reassuring, but which
was rather wistful, and Jan proceeded to wash away the tears, which she
immediately checked, and with them the cinders from her long journey.

The little trunk was long coming, and while Janet was wondering whether
she should go down without waiting for it Viva knocked softly at her
door.

“O Viva, darling, I’m so glad it’s you! Come in and talk to me,” cried
Jan.

[Illustration: “My dear little niece, you don’t know how glad I am to
see you.”]

“I can’t, Janet, because papa sent me up to say, won’t you please come
down and talk to him for half an hour before he gets dressed to go
out?” said Viva gravely.

“If you’ll just wait till I braid my hair,” said Jan, kissing the pale
little face, from which dark eyes looked out seriously upon her. “Has
auntie come home, too?”

“Yes; mamma’s in,” said Viva. “If I were you, I’d let my hair hang all
around like that. It’s so very, very pretty. You are pretty, too; much
prettier than Gwen and Gladys--Gwen said so, too.”

“‘Pretty is that pretty does,’ you know, little cousin,” laughed Janet.
“Gladys is graceful and stylish, and Gwen looks clever; besides she has
perfectly glorious eyes. Come, then, if you think I’m nicer with my
hair crazy.” And Jan took the hand extended to her with a sinking of
the heart of which she was ashamed.

“My dear little niece, you don’t know how glad I am to see you,” said
a voice heartily as she entered the library, and then she felt a
warm kiss on each cheek, mingled with the odor of a very good cigar.
After this Janet ventured to lift her eyes. She saw a handsome man,
keen-eyed, yet smiling, looking at her closely, while from across
the room a pretty woman in a beautiful _negligée_ came languidly
toward her. “How do you do, child? I hope you are not too tired,” she
said, in a manner recalling Gladys as much as the words did. Janet
kissed this new aunt, but her eyes wandered back to her uncle, seeking
a resemblance in him to her mother. He smiled upon her, and said: “You
are like Jennie in expression more than in features. By Jove, I wish
she were here, too! Dear little woman!” Janet’s lip quivered, and her
uncle quickly drew her beside him upon the couch.

“Now tell me everything you can think of about that blessed mother of
yours,” he said. “She’s the dearest woman in the world--I hope you know
that?”

“Indeed I do!” cried Jan fervently, and in a few moments was rattling
off to her uncle, in response to judicious questions, the simple story
of her life.

The half-hour passed too quickly; in it Jan was completely happy, and
it was long enough to win her heart to her uncle with an affection that
subsequent days could not annul. After he and her aunt, of whom she
had a resplendent glimpse in her dinner gown, had driven away there
was a dull half-hour of waiting, at the end of which Gwen and Gladys
appeared, and they were called to dinner in the big dining-room, which
struck a chill as well as awe to Jan’s soul. Here she saw Sydney for
the first time, but beyond a nod to her when Gwen introduced her he
did not notice Janet throughout the meal, nor speak except once to
contradict Gladys flatly, and once to ridicule Jack for a slip of the
tongue. Janet’s heart sank lower and lower; it seemed to her that she
was stifling, and her loving heart exaggerated the really unfortunate
state of affairs in her new surroundings.

After dinner Gladys disappeared, as did Sydney, and Gwen, having been
polite to the guest for a while, picked up a book and was soon lost in
it. Viva had gone to bed, and Jack was up-stairs struggling with his
lessons. Wondering if she was doing an unpardonably rude thing, Janet
slipped out of the room and sought the nursery. Here she found Jerry
sleeping in her crib; her flushed, baby face brought comfort and the
sense of home to the lonely “Miss Lochinvar.” Here, too, was Hummie,
darning stockings and humming the Lorelei, a most inappropriate theme
to her bulk. And here was Jack, his hair tousled, his cheeks hot over
refractory examples that would not come right.

“I won’t wake the baby; may I help him?” whispered Janet, and Hummie
nodded hard.

“Let me help you; I love arithmetic, and I always help Bob,” Janet
whispered, going over to the afflicted boy. If the sky had fallen, Jack
would not have been more amazed. Not only was it inconceivable that any
one should like arithmetic, but to offer to help him! He yielded at
once, from sheer inability to grasp the situation.

But here was a girl that was a girl--if she wasn’t a good angel.

Jack’s admiration grew as his troubles diminished. With a word here
and an illustration there, Jan threw light upon his darkened path, and
she actually whispered funny things as she did so. Jack found himself
positively giggling under his breath as he worked over the hated sums.

“Gee! You’re a dandy!” he remarked audibly, forgetful of Jerry,
as he saw the task completed. “And you can explain as old Ramrod
can’t--that’s my name for our teacher, he’s so stiff; ain’t it great?
I understand just how you did that, and I don’t believe I ever saw
through the stuff before. Thanks, lots, Jan.”

“Not a bit; I have had a nice time with you, Jack. I’ll come every
night, if you’ll let me, and I don’t have lessons of my own to do at
night,” said Jan heartily. “Even if I do, we can make time. You know I
like this sort of thing, because at home we children help each other,
and it makes me less lonesome.”

“Gee!” said Jack again. “What a queer house yours must be! Nice,
though.” And Jan had gained one more devoted admirer among her new
cousins.

This little adventure sent her to bed in a much happier mood than
she had expected to go in, and Gwen, moved with compunction when she
aroused from her pages to find her cousin gone, came up to make her a
little visit. The trunk had come, and Gwen eyed with pitying glance
its slender and shabby contents, inwardly resolving to set the matter
of dress right before Jan made her appearance in the Misses Larned’s
formidable halls of learning.

Jan had intended crying herself to sleep--had laid the plan during
the dreary dinner--but helping Jack and talking to Gwen so cheered
her--besides she was so tired--that she quite forgot it, and fell
asleep almost at once after she had laid herself down for the first
time in her pretty bed, for her first night in vast New York.




CHAPTER IV

“AMONG BRIDESMEN AND KINSMEN AND BROTHERS AND ALL”


For three days Janet’s life in her new surroundings was neither dull
nor lonely. She saw but little of her aunt, and practically nothing
of Gladys, who showed unmistakably that she did not consider “Miss
Lochinvar” worth bothering about; nor was Sydney’s manner to her
different from his taciturnity toward his own family. But Jack, Viva,
and Jerry lost no time in learning to admire her--they all three
worshiped Jan by the end of her second day among them.

With Mr. Graham Janet passed two happy evenings talking of her mother,
surprising him with her knowledge of the most minor details of his own
boyhood and early home, and rousing him into telling funny stories of
happenings of which she did not know, to the boundless surprise of his
own children. At the end of that time her uncle had grown accustomed to
her presence, and, though his affection for his sister was one of the
strongest ties of his life, they had been separated so long that other
interests made more pressing claim upon him. Added to this was the
fact that matters on Exchange were threatening; there was danger of “a
bear market.” Janet heard him say this, and construed it by her Kansas
experience of crop failures to mean “a bare market,” and she pictured
to herself empty stalls and New York threatened with shortage in food.
Mr. Graham was vitally interested in keeping prices up, and became so
preoccupied that Janet received from him only the pleasant word night
and morning accorded his own children. Gwen, heroically, and with more
pleasure to herself than she expected, entertained her cousin for three
days. Then her absorbing interest in her own pursuits asserted itself;
she began her sixth novel--none of them had ever passed the fourth
chapter, and but one reached it--and forgot Jan completely in the
solitude of her own room when she got home from school.

It had been decided that Janet should have at least a week in which to
accustom herself to exile before facing the girl world in the Misses
Larned’s school. Gwen had suggested to her father that Janet be clad
suitably before this ordeal, and he had promptly written a generous
check for that purpose to supplement at shops where the Grahams had no
account any deficiencies in what they wished to purchase where bills
were charged. Nurse Hummel and Gwen had gone down once with Janet
to begin this shopping, but to “Miss Lochinvar’s” bewilderment, she
learned that many trips were required to fit her out as a New York
schoolgirl, and after this first one she and Hummie had to go alone.
Gladys flatly refused to go abroad with her cousin until these changes
in her costume had been made, and was most anxious that she should not
be seen by any of her schoolmates, but Gwen did not conceal the fact
that they had a Western cousin consigned to them for the winter, and
the three girls whom Gwen most disliked, and Gladys stood most in awe
of, set out at once to call upon her, moved by curiosity rather than
friendliness.

“Miss Hammond, Miss Gwen, and Miss Ida Hammond and Miss Flossie Gilsey
is down-stairs to see you; they sint their cards. They do be asking for
Miss Janet, though not be name,” said Norah, presenting six bits of
pasteboard through the crack of Gwen’s door.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake! Has anything come home for that prairie-chicken
to put on?” exclaimed Gladys, flushing with annoyance; she chanced to
be at that moment in her sister’s room.

“I don’t believe so,” said Gwen composedly. “They had to alter the
house dress we got ready-made. Still, it doesn’t matter for those
girls.”

“Gwendoline Graham, you are enough to provoke a saint! Of all the girls
in school, they are the ones who would notice most, and they have the
most money,” cried Gladys.

“And are the most vulgar and the stupidest about their lessons,”
finished Gwen. “I don’t see why you mind what such people think.
However, I’ll go up and see what I can do for Jan.” And she arose,
putting aside her lap tablet with the air of a martyr.

“She can’t wear anything of yours; she isn’t tall enough, and they
would know our things, anyway,” said Gladys. “I suppose we’ve just got
to let her come in that shabby best dress of hers. But do tell her not
to say or do anything queer, or tell any of those stories she tells the
children about riding broncos and playing Indian in the fields--no,
prairies! Make her understand she has to be like other people, and
these are swell girls.”

“If she’s used to wearing feathers and war-paint we can’t make her take
to civilization right off--no Indian does that,” said Gwen wickedly,
for Gladys never could grasp satire. “But, you know, I think she has
nice manners, simple and not as if she thought of herself. And the
Hammonds and Floss Gilsey are more swollen than swell.” And with this
parting witticism, Gwen ran up the hall.

“Jan, Jan, here are three girls come to call on you,” she said, putting
her lips to her cousin’s door. “Hurry up, and come down to see them.”

Jan opened her door at once. She was writing a long letter home, and
her cheeks were too red to indicate perfect peace of mind.

“I’ll just pumice-stone this ink stain off my finger,” she said, “and
then I’m ready. If ever I sympathized with any one, it was with Mr.
Boffin when he told John Rokesmith he didn’t see what he did with the
ink to keep so neat when he wrote. I’m ashamed of myself, and mamma
says I ought to be, but I can not keep my fingers--this middle one,
anyway--free from ink when I write. I guess I get so interested I
dive down to the bottom of the ink-well without knowing it. Who are
these girls?” As she had talked, Janet had scrubbed energetically,
and now turned to go down with Gwendoline, without any additional
prinking beyond a hasty smooth of her rebellious hair. Her dress was a
blue-serge skirt and a cotton shirt-waist, although it was October; it
never occurred to her, used as she was to seeing her girl friends in a
girlish manner, that anything more was required of her in the matter of
toilet.

Gwen eyed her quizzically, thinking with amusement and annoyance
of what these would-be fine ladies down-stairs, who could not have
understood Jan’s reference to Dickens, would say if she let her go
down thus. It was dawning upon Gwen’s inquiring mind that many things
in the world were not quite as they should be, and that the scales
in which lots of people weighed other people and things were badly
weighted on one side.

“I am afraid you will have to put on your bestest gown, Jan,” she said.
“They would probably drop dead if they saw you no more fixed up than
that, and it would be a nuisance to have to prove they weren’t murdered
here. Get out your finest things, and I’ll help you.”

“My finest things aren’t fine enough to make much difference,” said
Jan, who had not had her own eyes shut to facts since she came.
“However, I’ll do my best not to disgrace you, Gwen.”

Together they fastened Jan into the light-blue cashmere which her
mother had made for her to wear to possible children’s parties with her
cousins. Jan could not help smiling at herself in the glass, while Gwen
was buttoning up the waist in the back, remembering this, and what was
Gladys’s idea of a party, and how little she considered herself a child
at thirteen.

“You really look like peaches and cream with that light blue against
your skin,” said Gwen admiringly when the task was completed. “They
can’t say you’re not awfully pretty.”

“Don’t flatter, Gwen. And imagine a brown maid peaches and cream! Come
on, then. Have you any instructions to give as to manners?” asked Jan.

“No,” said Gwen wisely. “Yours are always nice, because you’re so real
and unaffected--not that there’s the least hope of their knowing that
simplicity is nice, though.”

“My cousin, Miss Howe; Miss Hammond, Miss Ida Hammond, Miss Gilsey,”
said Gladys, doing the honors with unusual dignity because she felt
sure it would be needed to cover Jan’s deficiencies in worldly
knowledge.

Janet murmured her salutations confusedly, badly handicapped at the
start by the formality of so many “misses” when she expected to be
introduced all round by first names.

“How do you like New York, Miss Howe?” asked Daisy Hammond, estimating
Jan’s gown rapidly but accurately. “It must be very different from the
West?”

“Yes, but I like it,” said Jan warily.

“New York is so much bigger,” added Ida Hammond, with a trying air of
superiority.

“Than the West? Oh, no; the West is very large,” said Jan demurely, to
Gwen’s delight.

“Are you fond of the theater, Miss Howe?” asked Flossie Gilsey,
throwing herself in the breach.

“I never have been; we are going, Gwen says, sometime this winter.
But I love to act; we do plays in the barn chamber, my brothers and
sisters and I. It’s loads of fun. I’d love to see a real play, but it
costs too much to go to the city, and then buy tickets to the theatre,”
said honest Jan, quite unconscious of disgrace in the fact of poverty.
Gladys turned crimson as her ill-bred guests cleared their throats
emphatically and giggled a little. Gwen flushed wrathfully, but not at
Jan.

“That is like Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy; do you remember what fun they had
acting in Little Women?” she asked tactfully.

“It is so long since we read Little Women--not since we were children;
I don’t remember it very well,” said Daisy. “What do you like best,
Miss Howe? Dancing? Sport? What is your special line?”

“The clothes-line, I guess,” said Jan, laughing outright, for it struck
her as ridiculous to be asked what was her specialty, “as if it was a
menagerie, and she wanted to know whether I was a long-necked giraffe
or a short-horned gnu,” she said afterward. “I help take in clothes
quite often. But I like all kinds of fun--dancing in the house in
winter; and games, and racing, and riding out of doors. I guess any
sort of fun--just having fun--is my special line.”

Gladys only barely succeeded in checking the groan this horrible speech
called forth, but Gwen laughed openly. She did not think it quite
wise in Jan to have said that about taking in clothes, but she was so
indignant at the thinly veiled rudeness of the girls to her cousin and
the guest in her house that she did not care, as long as Jan had the
best of it.

The callers rose to go, not being in the least certain whether they
were being made game of or not, but thoroughly satisfied that they
detested as much as they despised this Western girl, who looked at
them with smiling candor in her undeniably pretty eyes, and seemed
unconscious of offense.

“You poor dear thing!” said Daisy Hammond in the hall to Gladys, having
bade Gwen and “Miss Howe” good-by in the parlor. “It is really awful
for you to have to civilize her! She is a perfect savage. Whatever will
you do with her when she comes to school? Do you suppose she has any
education at all? She certainly has no manners.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t it awful?” said Gladys, tears of wrath and
self-pity in her eyes. “She hasn’t had any chance; that’s the only
excuse. For goodness’ sake, don’t tell the other girls!”

“Tell them! My dear, not for worlds!” said Flossie, as they started
down the steps on their way to find the others of their set and impart
to them how “perfectly awful the Grahams’ cousin was.”

Jan had wandered into the rear parlor when her first visitors had
left her, and so had not heard the remarks to Gladys, which had been
perfectly audible to Gwen.

When she got her sister up-stairs that young lady freed her mind.

“Gladys Graham,” she said, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself not to
stand up for your own cousin, and not to have any more self-respect
than to let those geese be impertinent to her and to us in our own
house! Jan didn’t do anything dreadful. She needn’t have said that
about the clothes, I’ll admit, but I suppose she was disgusted, and
well she might be. Besides, she’s the kind of girl that can’t help
seeing the funny side, but she isn’t one bit mean. Those girls acted
as if she were as far below them--as far as the sea-level from Mont
Blanc. And I only wish I could have boxed their ears. If you don’t stop
letting those Hammonds and Floss and that crowd impose on you, you’ll
be a goose all your days. Just you wait and see if you don’t find
out I’m right. I am just ashamed of you--helping them sit on papa’s
sister’s daughter!”

Gladys flared up. “She’s perfectly disgraceful, that’s what Janet Howe
is! Saying she was too poor to go to the theater, and took in clothes!
I wonder she didn’t say she took in washing! Maybe they do, and the
ladies give her their old clothes,” she cried.

“Gladys, stop this instant! I won’t let you talk that way. Jan’s a
trump, and I can see it if I do neglect her. I only wish we were as
nice as they all must be,” cried Gwen.

“Well, if you like that sort of girl, you may have her. I won’t
take her out, and I won’t go anywhere with her, and I think papa is
downright mean to impair her on us,” Gladys sobbed.

“If you mean _impose_, why don’t you say so? I honestly think we
are the ones whom Jan impairs,” said Gwen, restored to good-nature by
the chance to correct one of Gladys’s many slips of tongue. And thus
ended Jan’s introduction to New York society.




CHAPTER V

“AND, SAVE HIS GOOD BROADSWORD, HE WEAPONS HAD NONE”


“Fine feathers” may not make “fine birds”; it is generally conceded
that true fineness lies somewhat deeper than the plumage, but fine
feathers have a marked effect on the minds of ordinary little birds
regarding the wearer of them; they have to be birds of considerable
experience or native refinement not to judge their fellow bipeds by
their plumage.

When the results of Nurse Hummel’s many shopping expeditions with Janet
came home, and “Miss Lochinvar” appeared in the tasteful and well-made
apparel they had chosen, Gladys treated her cousin with new, if not
lasting, respect, and even Sydney showed by several surreptitious
glances at her, which keen-eyed Gwen intercepted, that he was realizing
for the first time that his quiet Western cousin was worth looking at.

Gwen felt something of the pride of an architect in the building he has
created as she wheeled Jan around to view her from every point, and as
she saw that the others were newly inclined to admire the girl of whom
she was beginning to grow fond, and whom she would have loved dearly if
she had not been too self-centered just then to give any one very much
affection.

Janet was ashamed to discover that she shrank with no little terror
from the ordeal of her first day at school. She felt quite sure
that the accomplished young ladies, of whom she had seen examples
and who were to be substituted for the girlish girls who had been
her classmates in Crescendo, would know so much more than she that
they would shame her in learning, as they outstripped her in worldly
knowledge. She saw from the first instant that she entered the door
that this school was to differ from her previous experiences in more
than its pupils.

The Misses Larned, who were its principals--Gwen said that this did
not necessarily make them the girls’ _princibles_--did not teach;
they were at the head of the school by virtue of proprietorship,
and they were the final, awful tribunal before which transgressors
were haled, though, it must be confessed, without any more awful
consequences, usually, than a severe lecture. But the girls said “they
would rather die” than go up before the dignified sisters, “who were
so solemn they took the starch out of a body before they opened their
lips.” The same irreverent pupils called the school “the Hydra,”
because it had two of that monster’s many heads. No one would ever
know--none but the boldest dared speculate--what was the extent of
the Misses Larned’s own learning. They walked into the class-rooms at
intervals, and inquired of the presiding teachers as to the progress
of the day’s work with such Minerva-like air that one felt convinced
that the wisdom of the ancients and moderns sat enthroned behind their
sapient eyeglasses.

They were wise in the selection of their teachers. “The Hydra” was
really a very good school in that respect, and the girl who desired
knowledge could obtain it there, and an excellent preparation for
college beyond. But she who had not this desire could slip through
with marvelously little instruction sticking to her brain, for it was
a school frequented chiefly by the children of wealthy and fashionable
people, and vigorous discipline would have been resented by the
majority of the parents.

The school occupied an entire house on a cross-street, near the Park,
and Janet passed under its portals with trepidation on her first
morning. Gwen sustained her; Gladys had preceded them, and bore herself
with a little air of aloofness, in spite of Jan’s better appearance,
as if to provide herself against deeper disgrace than was absolutely
necessary, in case “Miss Lochinvar” fulfilled her apprehensions.

It was not an easy matter to grade the new pupil. In arithmetic,
history, geography, spelling, and in general information her teachers
soon discovered that she far surpassed their old pupils, but she
was guiltless of French, though, on the other hand, she could speak
German--a point no girl in school ever aspired to reach. The extent of
the universal ambition in regard to that tongue was to avoid so many
mistakes in the gender and cases of nouns as should lead to a serious
lowering of averages in marking percentage at the end of the year. On
the whole, Janet passed her entrance examination with honor, and was
placed in the class with Gwen for everything but French, which she “had
to begin with the babies,” as Gladys disdainfully remarked. She was
uncertain whether to be relieved or annoyed that “Miss Lochinvar” had
been ranked with the best scholars, though Gladys’s ambition did not
lead studyward.

A sudden rain prevented the customary brief walk in the Park at recess,
and the girls gathered in the large room on the upper floor, formed
by joining two rooms together, which was their refuge under such
circumstances.

Gwen honestly meant to do her duty by Jan during this first recess,
when she was to meet her future mates, but she began to talk to Azucena
North, and quite forgot her cousin. Cena North was the daughter of a
lady who had been steeped in admiration for Verdi and Trovatore when
Cena was born; consequently she had named her baby after the gipsy
in that opera, and Cena pathetically said that “if she _must_
be named out of Trovatore she didn’t see why she couldn’t have been
called Leonora.” Gwen didn’t see either; she privately pitied her
friend deeply for being burdened with such a name as Azucena. But there
were compensations, as there are in most misfortunes. Cena was one of
the best scholars at the Misses Larned’s, and her father was Mr. North,
the head of the great publishing house of North & Co., which Gwen felt
accounted for Cena’s thoroughness, as well as partly made up for her
name. Cena and Gwen were deep in a plan to lay before Mr. North Gwen’s
novel--when it should be finished, of course--without telling him that
it was the work of Cena’s classmate, a girl of fifteen. After he had
accepted it, and he and his house had exhausted themselves in praise of
its many brilliant qualities, Cena was to say demurely that she knew
the author, and would bring her to her father’s office. And Gwen was
to go with her--wearing her most simple and girlish gown, to increase
the dramatic effect--down to the great establishment of North & Co.,
and Cena was to say, “Behold the new Charlotte Brontë!” or something
to that effect. It is no wonder with such a project in hand that Jan
slipped from Gwen’s mind when she and Cena collided in the “campus,”
as they classically called the playroom. They straightway became
oblivious to all but the discussion of ways and means for fulfilling
the great plan, which really lacked but the novel to be successful.

Janet wandered on alone, feeling very shy and strange, among the
chattering crowd eating cake and candy instead of better luncheons, and
all eying her curiously as she passed.

She was bearing down toward the younger children--her refuge here, as
at her uncle’s--when the Hammonds and Flossie Gilsey stopped her.

“Have you forgotten us already, Miss Howe?” called Daisy Hammond.

“No, indeed,” responded Janet, trying to speak easily and cordially.
“But please don’t say Miss Howe. It seems so funny among girls like us;
my name is Janet.”

“Thanks; it is awfully good of you to let us be intimate right away,
and waive all ceremony. Generally we have to wait to use first names,”
said Daisy, with an inflection that told Jan, unused as she was to
polite disagreeables, that the speech was not meant at its face value.
“I heard that your cousin Syd--isn’t he too handsome?--had given you
such a nice, funny nickname.”

“Yes; Miss Lochinvar. That’s because I ‘came out of the West,’ you
see,” said Janet, instinctively seizing her foe by the horns, so to
speak. “It was bright of him, but only too flattering. I don’t expect
to make a clean sweep of everything, like Young Lochinvar.” But as she
laughed Jan’s heart sank. She was not used to this sort of bad temper,
and she hated herself for meeting it while she felt forced to do so;
she understood “getting mad,” but not petty spite. And all the while
she was saying to herself, “Gladys told them; Gladys has been making
game of me.”

But she had crippled her adversary; Daisy did not know how to meet this
view of the case, and she glanced slyly at Gladys, who shrugged her
shoulders.

“How well you speak German, Miss--Janet!” said Flossie Gilsey. “Isn’t
it queer you know it so well, and don’t know French?”

“Not at all queer,” said Janet simply. “I hadn’t much chance to learn
French, but there are lots of Germans in Crescendo. Besides, I like it
better than French, I’m certain. But the real reason why I know it is
because I worked hard to learn it. I meant to be able to speak it; I
wanted to be fit to help papa in his office.”

A short silence fell on the little group at this shocking remark,
during which Gladys turned a succession of alarming colors, and longed
to go into hysterics or choke her cousin--probably both in rapid
sequence. Janet Howe, her father’s sister’s child, staying at her house
that winter, and brought by her and Gwen to this exclusive school, to
announce--shamelessly, brazenly, to announce--that her ambition was to
be a clerk in her father’s office, and that for this purpose she had
learned German!

Poor Gladys really was to be pitied at that moment, for though she was
a little goose to feel so, she really did feel that a disgrace had
fallen upon her which death could hardly wipe out. And then the silence
was broken by a little titter from the three girls, and Ida Hammond
said sarcastically, “How nice!”

Janet looked from Gladys’s party-colored countenance to the amusement
gleaming in the eyes of her friends, and saw that something was wrong,
but what it could be she had not the faintest idea. And before anything
worse could happen a voice behind her said: “Yes, isn’t that nice?
Isn’t it lovely? Please introduce me to your cousin, Gladys.”

Janet turned and saw a girl who was in the class with her and Gwen. She
was tall, not pretty, but distinguished looking, with that air of good
breeding which is so definite, yet so indefinable--the look of one who
for many generations had inherited good principles and right standards
of living and taste.

“My cousin, Janet Howe, Miss Dorothy Schuyler,” murmured Gladys.

Dorothy put out her hand. “I am so glad to have you here, Janet,” she
said. “I was so much interested in what you were saying. There aren’t
many girls with enough affection for their fathers to study that they
may help them, and few clever enough to do it, even if they do want to.
Won’t you tell me about it?”

There was a determined look in the brown eyes that smiled kindly, in
spite of it, on Jan, and she knew, though she did not know why, that
she was being championed.

“There isn’t very much to tell,” she said slowly, responding in a
puzzled way to the other’s cordiality. “My father is in the real-estate
business out in the little place I came from--Crescendo. He has to deal
a good deal with Germans, and he hasn’t as big a business as he would
have in such a growing town if he weren’t working on a patent he wants
to bring out. So he needs me--or I liked to think he did--to help him,
and he needs some one to speak German, so I tried to combine the two.
Like the man in Pickwick who wrote about Chinese metaphysics,” added
Jan, with a sudden laugh, and the dimples that made her so irresistibly
pretty coming in her cheeks.

Dorothy had a sense of humor, too, and she liked Dickens. She laughed,
and put an arm affectionately over the stranger’s shoulder. “I think it
is beautiful to find a girl of our age trying to do something loving
and sensible like that,” she said heartily. “I hope you can teach me
to be brave and unselfish. Wouldn’t you like to come over to that deep
window-seat and see the view--it is fine from there--and tell me more
about Crescendo? If Gladys can lend you to me a while?” she added
interrogatively.

Gladys seemed to think that she could, and the two walked away,
followed by glances by no means pleasant from the group they had left.
In that first encounter were sown the seeds of future enmity, for the
Hammonds and Flossie disliked Janet as much as they would naturally
dislike one to whom they had been unkind, and who had thus been the
means of making them appear badly in the eyes of Dorothy Schuyler.

When Gwen awakened from her day-dream to a consciousness of her neglect
of Janet, she stared in amazement at the sight of her cousin chattering
volubly to Dorothy, whose cheeks were red from laughing. Gwen drew a
sigh of relief; she saw that Jan was happy, and she knew Dorothy was so
innately well-bred that she would never misunderstand any confidences
Jan chose to make, as would the other sort of girls.

Walking home at two o’clock, Janet told Gwen the story of her
adventures at recess--“recreation hour,” she found that she must learn
to call it.

Gwen listened with frowns and smiles. “You will have to learn not to
tell that gang”--it is a melancholy fact that the budding author did
say “gang”--“anything about home, and being poor. They only draw you
out for pure meanness, and they don’t know anything but just money.
But wasn’t it fine of Dorothy Schuyler to squelch them like that?
Dolly Schuyler is the most a real lady of any girl in that school. She
doesn’t put on airs--of course not, if she is a lady--but she makes all
the girls feel that what she says and does is the very last, best thing
to be said or done. And she leads us all; not because she wants to, but
because she is what she is--all the girls look up to her. She wouldn’t
stoop to do an underhanded, sneaky, nor a mean thing--not if she got a
crown by doing it. She never says nasty things, but when she looks at
you--if you’ve been contemptible in any way--you can’t help curling up.
I’ve always been very proud that Dorothy seems to like me; she doesn’t
like every one. The Hammonds, and that crowd, pretend not to care for
what she thinks, because they’re richer than she is, but she is the
very concentrated extract of blue blood, and they do care a lot. If
there is any aristocracy in America, it’s people like Dorothy’s family.”

“But there isn’t; papa says it is sheer nonsense to talk about
aristocracy in a republic,” said Jan, her independence touched.

“All right; I don’t say it isn’t, so don’t wave the Stars and
Stripes at me,” said Gwen. “But if there is aristocracy, it must be
those people descended from the signers of the Declaration, and the
Revolutionary fighters, and the colonists, and all those. Why, you’re
descended from them yourself, so you needn’t fire up, Janet Howe.”

“I don’t care; in the West we don’t fuss about trifles. Tell me about
Dorothy,” said Janet.

“There isn’t much more to tell, and what there is you’ll find out for
yourself. But it was a big thing for Dorothy to champion you. You’ll
see that it will make a difference. Both ways,” added Gwen honestly,
“for it will make the Hammonds and Floss Gilsey hate you. I wish we
could put our heads together to get Gladys away from those girls. I
should think she’d know better than to like them, and they’re certain
sure to spoil her, if it keeps up.”

“I’m afraid if I put my head into it she would go with them all the
more,” said Jan, with a hurt little laugh. “Gladys can’t bear me, Gwen.”

“Gladys is a perfect goose; if she likes such girls as the Hammonds she
couldn’t be expected to like you. But just you wait. She’ll come round.
Those girls are sure to do something mean to her some day--they’re
so jealous of everybody, and I’m proud to say they just hate me. And
as to you, nobody could help liking you sooner or later, Jan. You’re
a regular dear!” and Gwen kissed her cousin on the front steps,
moved with compunction for the neglect which had exposed her to her
unpleasant experience at noon, admiration of the generosity which did
not resent it, and pride in the little Lochinvar out of the West whom
Dorothy Schuyler had sealed with her approval.




CHAPTER VI

“HE RODE ALL UNARM’D, AND HE RODE ALL ALONE”


One day was very like another in the first two weeks of Janet’s new
school life. The teachers soon liked the sunny girl with the ready
dimples and readier wit, joined with honest industry and determination
to learn. The girls--the best girls--liked Jan at once, but the little
knot of companions whom Gwen had disrespectfully called “that gang”
disliked her every day a little more than the previous one, and chiefly
because of the liking of the better faction. Gladys--and this was
what made the attitude of these girls hard to bear--Gladys arrayed
herself with them, and showed positive dislike to “Miss Lochinvar,” who
certainly did not deserve it at her hands.

At home, after school, during the five hours between its dismissal
and dinner time, life was a trifle dreary, or would have been but
for Jack, Viva, and Jerry. Gwen thoughtlessly, in spite of her liking
for Jan, betook herself to her own pursuits. Sydney did not seem like
part of the family at all, but rather like some one who was fortunate
enough to have secured an unusually well-appointed lodging-house and
restaurant. He came and went unnoted, to Jan’s amazed distress. She had
heard so much said by her father and mother of the necessity of keeping
close to their boys and making home pleasant to them that motherly
little Jan quite yearned over the handsome lad who had no one to see
that he kept straight. She longed to make friends with him; a longing
intensified by her intimacy with her own elder brother, Fred, whom she
missed more than any of the children she had left behind her, unless it
was the baby, Poppet. But though Sydney was perfectly polite to Jan,
he made no recognition of her overtures of friendship, and, it seemed
to his cousin, grew more indifferent to his surroundings, and more
heavy-browed at each succeeding dinner.

Mrs. Graham soon got over her annoyance at Janet’s coming, and was
always pleasant, pretty, and kindly, but not less busy than at first.
As the autumn advanced into winter she was more deeply engulfed in
engagements than ever, and Jan shared her children’s lack of their
mother’s society. Unfortunately, with her aunt’s displeasure at her
coming had disappeared her uncle’s pleasure in receiving his favorite
sister’s child, and Jan quite longed for another of the evenings with
him, such as she had tasted on her arrival a month ago.

Every afternoon when she came home from school--except on the
afternoon of the dancing-class--Jan went into the nursery and sat
down with Hummie, Jack, Viva, and the baby--who would have resented
the title. Jack found the steep hill of learning which--to speak
metaphorically--had so winded him turned into “the primrose path of
dalliance” by this pretty cousin, who was so honest that she would not
do his tasks for him, yet so clear-headed that she turned them into
positive joys. Then she told the jolliest stories of the doings of
her brothers and sisters, whom Jack burned to know, considering them
more attractive than any youngsters he had had the luck to meet with,
either in or out of a book, and whose feats filled him with envious
admiration. Peals of laughter floated down the hall frequently during
these hours--laughter which reached Gwen in her shrine of genius, and
sometimes brought her out to share the fun. Gwen was surprised to find
herself half jealous of the children’s love which Jan had won in a
short month, and which she had missed because she had never thought
about them at all. She sometimes felt quite shut out and hurt when she
saw how the faces of the three youngest brightened at the sight of Jan
and heard the whoop of delight with which they welcomed her.

Quiet little Viva found that Jan knew ways of playing housekeeping
which her own naturally domestic little brain could not have devised,
and that she could dress dolls, and play with them, too, as no one--not
only her own sisters, but her friends--could begin to hope to do. And
she could tell stories, not only the funny stories of life in Crescendo
and the Howes’ frolics, but the fairy-tales which Viva preferred, in a
way that would make the lady who told stories in the Arabian Nights’
green with envy. Viva loved Jan with a sort of dumb adoration. She
was a sensitive little creature, and Jan had come into her solitude
like sunshine. As to Jerry, she adopted Jan--whom she called “Yan”
with a pure Norwegian pronunciation--as her own property, and loved
her with tumultuous affection. Jerry had grown so well-behaved in the
dining-room--never tipping over her oatmeal spoon, still less kicking
“Tsusan”--that her father and mother wondered at the reform. They did
not know that if “Yan” lifted her eyebrows in shocked surprise at the
dawn of naughtiness in the wilful tot, Miss Geraldine immediately
resumed the behavior which should make “Yan” show her dimples in
smiling at her, for “Yan’s” dimples had become Jerry’s barometer, and
she could not exist if their absence indicated disapproval.

It was fortunate for Janet that she was so sincerely fond of younger
children and that her little cousins did cling to her with such
devotion, for without their love she would have had many lonely hours
and would have found the atmosphere of the splendid home she had come
to too frigid for happiness.

Helen Watterson was to give a party, and the school was stirred by
the announcement. Not only did Helen live in a house so large that
her party was sure to be an event, but she had announced it as a
“fagot party,” and all the girls invited protested that they could
never, never fulfil its requirements. These requirements were for each
guest to bring a fagot of wood--and “fagot” could be interpreted very
liberally to mean anything from a few toothpicks bound together to a
large bundle of real sticks. These fagots were to be laid in turn on
the open fire, and while his fagot was burning each guest must tell a
story.

The Grahams, Gwen, Gladys, and Janet Howe, were invited, as well as
most of the girls of their age at “the Hydra.” Gwen felt no uneasiness
as to her powers in the story-telling line, nor did Jan, though she
was rather frightened at the thought of lifting up her voice in such
an august assembly, but Gladys was dismayed, and declared, without
meaning it, that she would not go if she had to tell a story, but would
plead some excuse at the last moment. As it happened, it was Gwen, who
longed to go, that pleaded the excuse at the last moment, a painfully
real excuse, for she had a bad sore throat, and could not leave her
room. Jan begged to be allowed to stay at home with her, partly through
kindness to the cousin whom she really loved, and partly from a strong
preference for doing so, for the prospect of going to a party without
Gwen and with Gladys was worse than going alone. But Gwen would not
hear of Jan’s staying behind.

“It will be the nicest party, I’m sure, Jan,” she said, “and I wouldn’t
have you miss it. Besides, it is really the first affair we’ve been
asked to since you came, so it will be your introduction to New York
society. And another ‘besides’ is that I shall want to hear all about
it, every story repeated, and everything, and Gladys never would tell
me one thing.”

“I don’t feel as though I could go with Gladys, Gwen,” Jan said
involuntarily. “She does dislike me so, and it makes me more awkward
and scared than ever.”

“Don’t pay the slightest attention to her,” said Gwen, looking
wrathfully at Jan over the red-flannel swathings of her throat--Hummie
always insisted on the efficacy of that color for such purposes. “After
you leave the dressing-room you keep with Dorothy Schuyler and Cena
North. They’ve got sense enough to appreciate you! And they’re my
friends. You’ll have a good time, because there’ll be plenty of good
times there to have, and when there are, you don’t miss them.”

Gwen, with mistaken zeal, made a few vigorous remarks to Gladys before
they set forth, telling her what she thought of her slighting Jan, and
bidding her be nice to her at the party, under threat of wrath to come.
The result of this well-meant interference was that Gladys sulked,
settling herself in her corner of the carriage without speaking to Jan
during the drive. After they arrived she compelled Susan to arrange
her hair and dress first, and she then left the dressing-room without
waiting for Jan, who had to find her way, frightened and hurt, to the
parlors alone.

“Isn’t Gwen coming?” asked Dorothy Schuyler, standing near their
hostess, when Gladys entered.

“Gwen has a sore throat. She’s dreadfully disappointed. She cared more
about coming than I did,” said Gladys.

“And Jan wouldn’t leave her, I suppose?” suggested Dorothy.

“Oh, Jan is here. She is coming right down,” said Gladys, trying to
speak easily.

Dorothy gave her one of the glances which Gwen had said “made you
curl up,” and went swiftly into the hall. Here she found Jan coming
hesitatingly down-stairs through the group of boys lounging part way
up, waiting for “the party to begin.” They all stared at Jan, glad
of something prettier to look at than one another, for, though some
of them were already young dandies, most of them despised the stiff
costume to which even the younger lord of creation is condemned at
festivities, and were wondering, each individually, if he “looked as
big a fool in his stiff collar as the other fellows did.”

Jan gave a sigh of relief as she caught sight of Dorothy. It seemed to
her that she could not enter that crowded room alone. Dorothy noticed
with pleasure that Jan looked very charming in soft, delicate green,
which gave her, with her brown eyes and hair, the effect of some
sylvan creature.

It was not so very bad after all to get to her hostess and make her
salutations now that kind Dorothy was at her elbow, and when the ordeal
was over Jan turned to enjoying herself with her tendency to make the
best of things.

There was to be dancing after supper, but first the young guests
grouped themselves around the open fire for the fagot burning and
story-telling. Dorothy began, and told a pretty legend of Brittany,
not long, but much longer than Daisy Hammond’s, who had brought a
tiny bundle of three lightest twigs, and related a tragic tale in two
stanzas of “nonsense rhymes.”

When it came Jan’s turn she found to her horror that the story which
she had so carefully learned and rehearsed with Gwen had slipped from
her as completely as if she had never heard it. “What shall I do?” she
whispered to Dorothy. “I have forgotten my story!”

[Illustration: The story-telling party.]

“Make up another. Tell us something you have seen or done in the West,”
said Dorothy. “It will probably be much more interesting, so don’t
worry.”

“I have forgotten the story I meant to tell,” Jan began in a faint
voice as she laid her fagot on the fire. “I think maybe I could
remember it if only I could get hold of the beginning. But Dorothy
Schuyler says I had better tell you something true that happened at
home, so I am going to tell you about a cyclone we had once, and I’ve
got to hurry, or my wood will be gone. There was a family living
outside of Crescendo, about a couple of miles out, and they had come
there from the frontier, and twenty-five years before the day of the
cyclone they had lost one of their children--the oldest boy--out in
the territory; he was stolen by Indians. They hunted everywhere and as
hard as they could for him, but they never found him, so they thought
he must be dead, and they moved into Kansas, and settled in Crescendo,
and had ever so many other children, and were quite happy, though they
never forgot that lost boy. They didn’t get on so very well--didn’t
make much money, I mean, so mamma and papa tried to help them. They
couldn’t very much, because we have such lots of children and not much
money. But one day there came up a storm, and papa ran around making
everything tight and getting all our children in, for he said it was
going to be a windstorm, and that scares us out there--we’ve seen them!”

Jan had forgotten her shyness, and was becoming dramatic as the
recollection of the fatal day came over her. She leaned forward, her
elbows on her knees, her eyes fastened on her burning fagot, with the
light playing over her earnest face.

“Well, it came. The sky got all over a dreadful yellow, and it was so
dark we lighted up like night. Mamma was baking and I was sweeping and
dusting--I know I thought it was lucky my head was tied up, for it
seemed as though it might blow off. The wind roared and rushed past us,
and branches of fruit-trees and heavy things came banging up against
the house--oh, it was awful! But we didn’t get the worst of it inside
the town. Outside, where this family lived, it was the very middle of
the cloud, and it took the roof off, and it blew down the barn, and
the neighbor’s house blew over and part of it struck theirs--and--oh,
dear, oh, dear! I can’t bear to think of it!” Jan hid her face in her
hands a moment, shuddering, and her audience sat silently waiting for
her to go on.

“The wall fell in and it buried all that family under it, for they
were all huddled together--they hadn’t any cyclone cellar. It was the
first time a cyclone had ever struck Crescendo. And when the storm
had passed--it was all over in fifteen minutes--they went out to that
house and they found them dead, all dead, except the baby, and he was
crying and pulling at his mother’s dress.” Jan’s voice quivered so that
she had to wait another moment, and no one noticed that her fagot was
burned out.

“And when they got there,” Jan went on, “there was a young man standing
among the ruins whom the people who came to help had never seen before.
Would you believe it? It was that oldest son whom they had lost! He
had found out who he was and had traced his parents, and had come to
Kansas after them, and had reached Crescendo just in time to find them
dead in the ruins of their home. And there was not one left but the
little crying baby and the oldest son--they were all gone! I took off
my sweeping dress, and mamma left her baking, and we went out there. We
brought the baby home with us--he was just Poppet’s age--until after
the funeral. Then the young man took him, and they went away together,
the oldest and the youngest, and we have never seen either of them in
Crescendo again.”

After a complete silence of a few minutes, more flattering than
applause, the applause for Jan’s tragic story burst forth from every
pair of hands. It was the success of the evening, but to Gladys it was
a success worse than failure. The confession that Jan and her mother
had been busied with housework at the time of the tragedy added the
story to the long list of disgraceful disclosures Jan was forever
making.

But the other guests at the party did not seem to consider Jan’s little
tale a blot upon her credit--_they_ could afford to admire it,
Gladys thought bitterly; she was not _their_ cousin! Girls and
boys crowded around Jan to congratulate her, till poor Jan hardly knew
where to look. She was already the heroine of the evening, but one
thing more raised her into a heroine indeed, though it ended the party
for her and Gladys.

The last fagot was on the fire, and Helen Watterson leaned forward with
the tongs to adjust it as it burned. She wore floating tarlatan over
her pink-silk skirt, and as she reached for the falling fagot the draft
from the chimney sucked her dress into the fireplace, and instantly the
gauzy stuff blazed up.

Her guests fell back screaming, but Jan sprang forward, gathered up
the overdress in her hands, crumpling it together, and extinguishing
the flames before there was the slightest danger of injury to Helen.
Probably there had not been very great danger, for the flimsy stuff
would very likely have been consumed before it could ignite the rest of
her garments, but none the less, Jan had done a brave deed, and at the
cost of painful burns on her own hands.

Mrs. Watterson took her away to be coddled and bandaged, amid a murmur
of admiration from the guests she left behind her. When the poor little
brown hands were thoroughly wrapped in oil and cotton a carriage was
called, and Susan put Jan into it, while Gladys followed, angry at
being obliged to miss the dancing, angry with herself for her bad
temper, angriest of all with Jan for proving her so wrong, yet swelling
with pride that her cousin had saved Helen’s life--for Gladys would not
regard the event as less than life-saving. The drive back was as silent
as had been the drive to the party. Jan was in too much pain, Gladys in
too perturbed a state of mind for speech.

As Susan helped Jan from the carriage, a forlorn, hungry, sick-looking
little tiger cat ran mewing toward her, and then scuttled away, as one
who had no reason to count on the human kindness it implored.

“Oh, that poor, poor, dear little cat!” cried Jan, who loved dumb
beasts tenderly. “Can’t I take it in, Gladys?”

“Oh, Miss Janet, it’s that forlorn and miserable, you don’t want it!”
protested Susan.

“Yes, I do; that’s why I want it!” cried Jan. “Do you think your mother
would care? I’ve missed my animals so dreadfully, Gladys!” she pleaded.

“You know mamma never cares what we do as long as we are satisfied,”
said Gladys ungraciously.

Jan waited for no further permission. With her bandaged hands, and with
the blandishments of a voice used to conversing with our little kindred
who can not reply--not in the same tongue at least--Jan contrived
to catch the frightened little waif who stood in such sore need of
kindness.

Clasping him to her breast, in spite of bandages, and disregarding
possible mud on the white paws, Jan returned, damaged, excited, but, on
the whole, happy, from her first party.




CHAPTER VII

“OH, COME YE IN PEACE HERE, OR COME YE IN WAR?”


After the party and Jan’s accident there were seven days of uneventful,
shut-in life, which were both pleasant and unpleasant. Jan could not go
to school, for her hands were very painful, and holding a book would be
quite out of the question.

Gwen was well and out again in a day, but she devoted her afternoons to
Jan, going over their lessons with her, that she might keep up with the
class, and entertaining her the rest of the time. The girls in school
showed a tendency to make a heroine of Jan, who refused to be lionized;
Dorothy, Cena, and Helen Watterson came, separately or together, nearly
every afternoon to see her, and the teachers sent messages of sympathy
and pride in her courage to her, whom they called “their brave little
Janet.”

Sydney hailed her on the day after her adventure with a cordial smile
and a tone which she had never heard him use to any one. He liked
pluck, and it struck him suddenly that the girl whom he had dubbed
“Miss Lochinvar” had been showing it, in one form or another, ever
since her arrival.

“I hear you have been making a burnt offering of yourself, Miss Jan,”
he said. “Don’t do too much of that sort of thing, because it would be
a pity to have you burned up altogether.”

Jan was so pleased at this advance from Sydney that she built upon
it great hopes of real friendship between them, but though Sydney
never relapsed into his perfect indifference of manner toward her,
they did not get beyond this slight break in the ice. Gladys alone
stood completely aloof. She was a very unhappy Gladys in these days,
and heartily wished that she had not taken the attitude toward her
cousin which she now felt called upon to maintain. Pride kept her from
admitting that she was in the wrong, and stubbornness toward Gwen, and
a deep-seated objection to seeming to admit her authority, made her
ten times worse than she might have been without these inducements to
bad behavior. Gwen found out from Jan how Gladys had treated her at
the party. Jan did not mean to tell, but in saying how good Dorothy
Schuyler had been to her, she found that she had blundered into
betrayal of Gladys’s neglect.

Gwen was very angry. Not only was her sense of justice and liking for
Jan in arms, but had not she, Gwendoline, Gladys’s elder and talented
sister, warned Gladys that night before setting forth that she must not
treat their cousin badly?

“I don’t want to be a tell-tale, Gladys, and I’m not the sort to run
to papa with things, any more than he is one to bother with them, but
you know what he said about sending you to boarding-school if you
dared be rude to Janet when he had invited her here! Now, you just
keep it up as you’ve been doing, and I’ll have to go to him, and tell
him how perfectly horrid you are to her--and she so sweet and dear,
and everybody that is anybody admiring her like everything!” said Gwen
sternly.

“You can tell him anything you please,” said Gladys furiously, “but I
won’t have anything to do with Janet, and nobody can make me! You can’t
say I treat her badly if I let her entirely alone!”

So Gladys withdrew herself from her sister’s society, since it involved
Jan’s, and was more than ever with her objectionable friends, by way of
defying Gwen and proving her independence; though the only thing she
succeeded in proving thoroughly was proved to herself, and that was
that she was very miserable and ashamed of herself.

“I am driving Gladys away,” said Jan forlornly to Gwen one day. “You
are never together, and it’s all my fault. I sometimes wish I had never
come to New York.”

“Don’t worry, Jan. Gladys and I were never friends,” said Gwen lightly.
Then seeing Jan’s shocked expression, she added: “Not that we were
enemies, you know. What I mean is we never were chums. We always liked
different things and people. It might as well be you we differ about as
anything else. It isn’t you who have done it.”

“But she is with the Hammonds all the time--more than when I first
came, and you never liked that,” objected Jan.

“Probably it is all for the best. I should think that would be the best
way to cure her of liking them,” laughed Gwen. “Don’t worry, Jan. You
can’t make everybody alike.”

With which bit of philosophy Jan had to try to satisfy herself.

The kitten she had rescued on her return from the party was showing
gratifying results of her care. After he had had the mud sponged from
his fur--a task performed by Gwen, since Jan was unable to do it--he
had displayed a pretty coat of black stripes on a brownish ground, with
snowy breast and paws, and a nice face, which Jan convulsed Gwen and
Jack by pronouncing “grave and sweet in expression,” though there was
no denying that this was true when she had pointed out the fact.

He had been some one’s pet, for his manners were quite elegant, and he
had been taught to jump through hands, and to eat like a Turveydrop of
deportment. But Jan did not call him Turveydrop, as Gwen wanted her
to. She named him Tommy Traddles, after the cheerful youth of whom
she was very fond, and he became the greatest addition to the little
exile’s comfort. Tommy Traddles required convincing that each other
member of the family individually meant well by him, for he had been so
frightened during his days of wandering and hardship that he distrusted
every one, but Jan he loved from the first. He had a shocking cough and
bad indigestion from exposure and lack of food, but Jan cured the one
with cod-liver oil and the other by careful feeding, and Tommy Traddles
came out as good as new. It seemed to Jan, when he sat purring in her
sunny chamber window, with the broad middle stripe of his back getting
more glossy before her eyes, that she had not had a moment of home
feeling until her dear cat came.

One day when it had been raining heavily, and a cold had kept Jack
at home from school, Jan sat in Gwen’s room listening to the first
chapters--three were now written--of the novel which she, quite as
implicitly as Gwen, believed that North & Co would jump at the chance
to publish as soon as Cena North laid it before her father.

Jack was restless. His cold was just bad enough not to risk going out
with it, but not bad enough to subdue his spirits. Gwen lost patience
at last with his constant popping in and out of her room and snapped
him up.

“Ivan Graham,” she cried, “if you don’t keep out of here, I’ll make
you! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of me, like
a sneak, just because my lock is broken! Aren’t boys a nuisance, Jan?”

“No, but their noise is sometimes,” smiled Jan, with a warning shake of
the head at Jack.

The warning came too late. Jan had never seen an exhibition of her
little cousin’s temper, though she had been informed more than once
that “Jack was a terror when he broke loose.” He “broke loose” now,
and Jan saw the suitability of the expression, for he was like a young
wildcat.

“I’m not a sneak! I’ll teach you to call me a sneak!” he shrieked,
throwing himself on Gwen with such violence that she staggered halfway
across the room. “I’ll show you! I’ll show you!” Apparently Jack meant
that he would show his sister how he could use his fists, for he was
pummeling her black and blue, and Jan’s bandaged hands prevented her
going to Gwen’s rescue.

But Gwen had had sorry experience with ungoverned temper from her
earliest days. She caught Jack deftly at last, pinioned his arms, and
bore him--for she was a tall, strong girl--half dragging him, half
carrying him, to Hummie for punishment, though he kicked and fought all
the way.

“Isn’t he a cherub?” asked Gwen, returning triumphant, but short of
breath.

“It’s awful!” cried Jan, who had been quite frightened during the
tussle. “If some one doesn’t teach him to control that temper he may
do something he’ll be sorry for all his life. And he really is a dear
little fellow--so warm-hearted and generous!”

“Oh, those tornadoes are always warm-hearted and generous, if they
feel pleasant,” said Gwen. “I think I like less generosity and fewer
kicks. I shall be black and blue for a week. Don’t your brothers have
tantrums?”

“Yes, but we always try not to stir up the quick ones, and when they
get into a fit of temper we try to cool them down--we have what we call
the Rescue League, you know--mamma founded it--and we pledge ourselves
to rescue one another from our foes--inside ourselves, of course. It
really is fun, and more like a play than anything goody-goody. Then if
mamma is around when one of us gets mad, she takes that one by the hand
and leads him off--sometimes it’s a her, you know--it has been me--been
I--and soothes him all down and talks quietly, and we come back feeling
as if we had had a bath--a bath for our minds.” Janet’s eyes had grown
dim as she talked. The little plain home looked so lovely and peaceful
as she recalled it!

Gwen was silent, and at this moment Susan offered Jan a letter.

“Oh, it’s from mamma!” she cried. “Please open it for me, Gwen. And lay
it on my lap where I can read it.”

Gwen obeyed, but the attempt at reading was not successful. The pages
slipped and Jan’s fingers were not free to hold them.

“You would rather not have me read it to you?” asked Gwen. “Do you
think it’s secrets?”

“No, but I do love to read mamma’s letters myself,” sighed Jan. “Thank
you, Gwen. Please take it.”

Gwen did as she was bidden, and read:

  “MY DEAREST LITTLE JANET-GIRL: It is really several days
  since I wrote you, but papa and Fred have written, and there wasn’t
  any news. Only that there are five more citizens of Crescendo
  than there were last week--four are kittens--nice little Maltese
  and white things, belonging to Madam Puff--and one a calf, the
  long-legged daughter of Mrs. Cusha. I am so glad that my little
  girl is not getting too fond of luxury to want to see her plain
  home again! They are very good to you at Uncle Howard’s, and it was
  beautiful in him to fit you out as prettily as his own daughters,
  so that you should not be mortified nor mortify them when you
  appear together. By and by you will see more of Aunt Tina, I am
  sure. She must be fond of all those dear children, of course. [Here
  Jan began to blush furiously, but Gwen only elevated her eyebrows
  and went on reading with increasing interest as she caught sight of
  her own name farther down the page.] And though it is delightful
  for you to see so much of the tiny ones, and have them love you
  so dearly, I am especially glad that you like Gwen, and that she
  seems to like you, for I feel sure she is a noble girl, as well
  as a clever one, and I always wanted Howard’s oldest daughter and
  my oldest girl to be friends, as we were, he and I, years ago.
  And no, dear, you certainly must not mind Gladys’s dislike too
  much, nor even feel sure it is dislike, because one is likely to
  get the kind of treatment one expects. I am as sorry as I can be
  that she apparently despises poverty. Of course that is nonsense.
  Rich people are not better than poor ones, nor are poor people
  better than rich ones. It all depends how one meets and uses his
  opportunities, and money or its lack is an accident. Rich people
  are tempted to be hard and selfish, but, on the other hand, poor
  people are tempted to be envious and jealous. ‘The betwixt and
  between’ folk have the best of it, for they are not so strongly
  tempted either way. Still, they often get dissatisfied with
  enough. Agur was very wise when he prayed to be given ‘neither
  poverty nor riches.’ I am sorry as I can be that my poor little
  niece is so worldly, but I hope she will learn better when she is a
  little older. If she doesn’t she will have some hard lessons, for
  worldly people are taught very sharply how vain are the things upon
  which they have set their hearts, and no one with false ambitions
  is ever happy. But if little Jan doesn’t get worldly, I can not
  care as much as I should about any one else. I was so afraid, so
  dreadfully afraid, to put my single-hearted girl among things which
  could never be hers--afraid I should spoil her content and her
  unconsciousness of differences, which really are imaginary and do
  not matter at all. Go your ways, my Jan, like an honest, simple
  little girl, and do not be other than your true, good little self.
  It grieves me to think that any one in my brother’s house--much
  more one of his children--should not be quite kind to Jan, but I
  feel sure you will win Gladys by and by, if you are patient. The
  greatest English writer after Shakespeare--to my thinking, at
  least--said that the world was a looking-glass, reflecting our own
  expression toward it. And he was perfectly right. So smile away,
  Janet, and by and by all your little world will smile at you. All
  the children and your father send kisses enough to take your breath
  away. And so does she who loves you a little more than any one else
  can love you, and who prays ‘that God will keep you so pure, and
  true, and fair.’ You remember our favorite song?

    “Your loving and only mother,
      “JENNIE GRAHAM HOWE.”

To Jan’s surprise and dismay, Gwen sprang up after reading this
letter, which Jan would not have allowed her to see for the world if
she had known that it was going to reflect her own comments on her
surroundings, and threw herself on the bed, sobbing as though her heart
would break. “Why, Gwen, why, dear Gwen, don’t!” cried Jan, clasping
her cousin in her wounded arms. “I didn’t mean anything about Gladys!
I’m so sorry you read it! But it really wasn’t anything bad I said!”

“Oh, it’s not that. I don’t care what you said--Gladys is a pig!”
sobbed Gwen. “It’s because Aunt Jennie is so awfully, beautifully
dear! And because--because--O Janet Howe, you don’t deserve credit.
You ought to be a nice girl!” And puzzled Jan agreed with her, as she
stroked her hair in wondering silence.




CHAPTER VIII

“HE STAYED NOT FOR BRAKE AND HE STOPPED NOT FOR STONE”


Gwen and Jan, with Gladys accompanying them protestingly, and with an
air suggestive of being about to walk on the other side of the street,
were on their way home from school. Except for a slight tenderness
lingering about her reddened palms, Jan’s hands were healed, and she
had resumed her former life, very glad to get back to the world of
fresh air and sunshine. It was late November, and the air around the
park was full of suggestions of country odors--the sunshine soft and
warm through the haze overlapping from Indian summer.

There were rumors afloat of great events to come, events of absorbing
interest to all the young people. First of all, Sydney’s school was to
have a tournament at Thanksgiving, in which not only were there to be
races--foot and bicycle races--and wrestling matches, and jumping, as
in most schoolboy tournaments, but there were to be tennis-matches,
singles and doubles, and in the latter girls were to compete, the lads
being allowed to ask sisters or friends to play with them. Sydney had
very little to do with the girls of his household, but when the hour
came that he was to strive with his mates for honor and prizes family
pride stirred, and Gwen and Gladys were profoundly interested. They
were to go to see the games, and Gwen, at least, who was fonder of
sports than Gladys, wished with all her heart that Sydney would ask her
to play the tennis-match with him. She felt quite certain that with a
little practise she could hold her own against her adversaries. Jan
kept discreetly the secret that she had been champion of the girls’
singles at home, but though it never occurred to her to wish for the
impossible--that Sydney might ask her to play with him--she was very
much excited at the prospect of the games, and nervously reiterated
that “she was sure Sydney would win.” And more thrilling, though less
definite, was the rumor, gaining force every day, that something
splendid and unusual was to take place at “the Hydra” in celebration
of the Christmas holidays, and though there was no possibility of an
answer, each girl asked every other girl daily what she _did_
suppose it would be, and if they thought everybody would take part.

It was this indefinitely glorious prospect which Gwen and Jan were
discussing volubly as they walked home in the soft November sunshine,
Gladys occasionally adding a word from inability to maintain perfect
silence.

There was a knot of men and boys gathered ahead of them, and Jan
quickened her pace. She was so constituted that she could not see such
a gathering without her first thought being that perhaps some one was
maltreating a helpless animal, and her quick impulse was to fly to the
rescue. As the three girls came nearer they saw that this time what
Jan feared was really happening. A poor little dog, hair matted and
body thin, was in a convulsion on the sidewalk, and the crowd, with the
usual stupid terror in such a gathering of an animal showing symptoms
of sickness, was kicking the poor little creature from side to side, as
he staggered about blindly, instinctively trying to get somewhere, but
with no power in his tortured brain to select that somewhere.

“Put him in the gutter!” cried a voice, its owner evidently having a
vague recollection that water was the proper treatment for spasms. A
rough hand caught the dog by the tail and threw him into the gutter,
still wet from flushing the street from the hydrant. The bewildered
creature staggered to his feet and essayed to escape from the puddle
into which he had fallen, but the heavy boot of a laborer kicked him
back.

Jan saw no more--indeed she had not stood seeing all this, but had
witnessed the torture in agony as she and Gwen approached.

Dropping her books without looking to see where they fell, she started
on a dead run for the group ahead of her. Her hat flew off, her hair
began to break its bounds, but Jan did not think of appearances just
then. Like a young Valkyrie she swept down on the amazed men and boys,
who fell back before the vigor and suddenness of her onslaught, as
human beings generally give away to some one wholly in earnest.

“You brutes! You cruel, cruel, stupid men!” cried the clear young
voice, shaking with rage and tears. “To treat a little, tiny dog like
that! Don’t you see he’s sick? I only hope giants will come and torture
you the next time you’re sick! Give me that dog.”

“He’s mad, miss,” said the big workman who had given the last blow.

“He’s nothing of the sort. He’s in a fit, and he ought to be perfectly
quiet! I tell you, let me get him!” cried Jan.

The unfortunate little victim of this stupidity and brutality had
lain motionless for the last moment, and Jan bent over him tenderly.
“Dear little dog,” she said, “let me take you.” The brown eyes, full
of misery and pain--for he had recovered consciousness and was coming
out of the spasm--were raised to the pitiful face above him, and,
recognizing that at last here was one human being who had mercy, the
poor dry little tongue came out in an effort to lap the quivering chin,
just out of reach.

Taking care to keep her hands away from the dog’s teeth, which might
close on them in pain and with no intent to bite, Jan raised the
helpless creature in her arms. One leg hung limp, and the dog moaned.

“You have broken his leg!” cried Jan, turning indignantly on the crowd.
“Oh, how can you call yourselves human beings and treat a little, dumb,
helpless thing like that? They haven’t any one but us to help them! The
next time you see a dog sick that way lay him where he’s quiet and wet
his head, and don’t, don’t ever hurt him! He’s just had a spasm, and
now you’ve broken his leg!”

[Illustration: “You brutes! To treat a little dog like that!”]

The men began to mutter, but several looked heartily ashamed of
themselves. Some boys jeered at Jan, but she paid no attention. Turning
to Gwen, who had come up, she looked at her and down at the dog in her
arms, totally unable to speak.

Gwen was not less distressed than Jan. She did not even see that the
little yellow body was dripping mud on the front of Jan’s dress. “We
must take him to a doctor, Jan,” she said. “You are an old trump to
drive down on the crowd like that! I always want to do something, but I
don’t quite dare.”

“It isn’t daring. I don’t stop to dare--I rush,” said Jan. “Where is a
dog-doctor, and how shall we go?”

Gladys stood afar, witnessing this incident with unspeakable horror.
A girl to rush madly down on a crowd like that, harangue them, and
take up a muddy, mongrel cur in broad daylight, and on Fifth Avenue!
And Gwen, not much better, to follow her! She picked up Jan’s books as
if they had been dynamite, and walked away with her head in the air,
too disgusted for adequate expression. Jan was a gipsy. She certainly
looked like one, with her hat off and her hair frowzy--reddish hair,
too! Gladys had not noticed before how red the brown was in the
sunshine.

But if Gladys was repelled and offended anew by Jan’s quixotic
behavior, there was another member of the house of Graham who, unseen,
viewed the incident with different eyes and feelings. Sydney, also just
returning from school, had seen Jan sweep down on the men and boys,
scattering them before her, and rescue the dog by sheer force of will
and justice, and, seeing, he had been warmed into generous enthusiasm
and admiration, for Sydney was a manly boy, and he loved animals.

Now he hastened to his cousin’s and his sister’s support. “Good for
you, Jan!” he cried. “You’re a regular knight without fear and without
reproach.”

Gwen and Jan looked up in amazement. Could this be Sydney? The color
had mounted high in his cheeks, his eyes were flashing, his lips
smiling. There was not a trace of the sullenness and reserve Jan had
thought the only manner she should ever see in her oldest cousin, as he
took off his cap in exaggerated, yet sincere deference, and held out a
congratulatory hand.

“How is the poor little beggar? What an outrage! They’ve broken his
leg! Bad enough to have a fit without being kicked and punched! A crowd
makes me so mad I could knock all the heads together! It always thinks
every half-starved beast has hydrophobia, and then to make sure there
is something wrong, proceeds to stick and stone it. I’m proud of you,
Jan! It’s great to see a girl who doesn’t stop to curl her hair when
there’s something to be done! Gracious! You came down like a wolf on
the fold--the Assyrian isn’t in it with you! What are we going to do
with your find? I hate to chloroform him.”

“Oh, can’t we cure him?” asked Jan pathetically.

“I can’t set legs, but I shouldn’t wonder if we could pull him through.
What about lunch?” asked Sydney.

“Oh, I don’t care about any lunch!” cried Jan eagerly. “It would be
cruel to make him wait with his leg broken. Tell me how to get to the
doctor, and I’ll take him there.”

“Have you the price of a hansom, Gwen? I’m broke--as usual,” said
Sydney, his face clouding. “If you’ve any change I’ll go with Jan and
the dog down to the doctor.”

“Here’s my purse,” said Gwen. “There are two dollars in it and some
small change. I’d just as lief go, if you’re hungry, Syd.”

“Hungry! Of course, but it’s my business to protect Janet. Hi, there,
cabby!” And Sydney hailed a cab a little farther up the avenue, which
rattled down on them at once.

“Pile in, Lochinvar. You deserve your name,” cried Sydney. And Jan
obeyed, wondering if she were dreaming, and if this offhand, genial boy
could be morose Sydney.

“Poor little doglums!” Sydney went on. “You hold him well, Jan. Say,
why aren’t more girls like you? You’re straight girl, ready to cry
over that dog this minute--I’m no end sorry for him, but I don’t feel
teary. And you hold him as if he were your youngest child, and you had
taken care of six of his brothers before him. Now that’s girl for you!
Yet you don’t care a bent copper for what any one thinks, and you make
yourself look like a tramp--hair flying, hat off, books any old place,
and you get mud on your dress from the poor beggar, and you drive
down Fifth Avenue, and it never crosses your mind to consider whether
you look respectable or not. You burst through a tough crowd without
fear of it, or of comment. And all that’s not only straight boy, but
it’s a mighty decent sort of fellow at that. I never saw a girl like
you--you’re the right stuff, Miss Lochinvar, and I didn’t know how
appropriate the name was when I christened you.”

“I’ve been brought up with boys--Fred’s your age, and we’re chums--and
then there are all the others,” stammered Jan, hardly knowing how to
receive this outburst of most acceptable compliments. “I guess there
are lots of girls like me, if you know them. Gwen’s the right sort,
too, and Dorothy Schuyler, and I know ever so many at home.”

“Gwen’s well enough,” said Sydney, with brotherly indifference. “I
don’t know Dorothy Schuyler. Gladys makes me very weary. I wonder if
she’s going to come this airy-fairy business all her days? Here’s the
doctor’s. Give me the patient while you get out.”

“I’m afraid to move him for fear it will hurt him. I’ll get out without
taking hold--I don’t need my hands,” said Jan. But Sydney steadied her
elbow, and she thanked him with a bright smile.

The doctor was at home, fortunately. He was one who loved his
profession and loved his patients. He handled the little waif the
children had brought to him as tenderly as he would have touched
the best-blooded dog, strapping him down carefully, and setting the
broken leg expeditiously and successfully. As he worked he heard the
story of the dog’s rescue through Jan’s wild onslaught, and he smiled
approvingly at the girl who loved those whom the gentle saint of Assisi
called “our little brothers,” and who dared for their sake. When the
work was done he refused his fee, saying that he was glad to contribute
his skill to the little dog who had fared ill at the hands of men.

“Are you going to keep him?” asked the doctor.

Jan referred the question to Sydney with a glance that betrayed her
longing to do so.

“Oh, yes. We’re going to keep him, and put flesh on these poor ribs of
his. And we ought to call him Andromeda, because Janet here rescued him
from the dragon,” said Sydney.

“But Andromeda was a beautiful girl,” objected Jan.

“Well, Andromedus, then--Drom for short. I’m sure his state was rocky
enough to make it appropriate on that count,” laughed Sydney. “Good-by,
doctor. We’re no end obliged. You think the poor fellow will pull
through?”

“I’m sure of it, with your care,” said the doctor, holding the door
for his visitors to depart, and watching them down the stairs. He liked
the frank, warm-hearted pair immensely.

“Goodness, Sydney, it’s three--ten minutes past!” exclaimed Jan,
glancing at the clock on the Grand Central Station.

“I don’t mind. Gwen will have luncheon saved for us--she’s a good
fellow when there’s question of helping beasties,” said Sydney. “And
I’m rather pleased to have made your acquaintance, Miss Lochinvar--the
real Miss Lochinvar.”

“I’ve been just dying to know you, Syd. I miss Fred so dreadfully,”
said Jan, smiling with irrepressible joy. “I think we might have real
good times--” She stopped abruptly.

“Say, Jan,” said Sydney, not noticing her embarrassment. “You can run
like a spider and you have courage and quick wit. Can you play tennis?”

“Why, I was girl champion at home!” cried Jan, blushing.

And Sydney slapped his leg, whistling with surprised pleasure. “The
very thing!” he cried.




CHAPTER IX

“‘THEY’LL HAVE FLEET STEEDS THAT FOLLOW,’ QUOTH YOUNG LOCHINVAR”


The third floor suddenly became to Jan quite as familiar as the second,
which Gwen had informed her on her arrival was disrespectfully dubbed
by Sydney “the hennery.” Her first visit daily on her return from
school and numerous ones from that time until she went to bed were
made to poor little yellow Drom, her and Sydney’s interesting patient.
“Patient” the little dog certainly was in both senses. It is doubtful
if either of the other denizens of that floor of the house would have
borne affliction so sweetly, and as a reward for the meekness which
submitted to bandages and splints with only grateful kisses for the
hands which reluctantly hurt, and for lying motionless through the long
hours, the broken leg set fast and the obtruding ribs disappeared under
flesh.

More than Drom’s broken bones were knitted during those days. Sydney
never fell back into his disregard of “Miss Lochinvar,” and, united in
their nursing and pride in their patient’s progress, the cousins became
real friends.

At times there were glimpses of something in Sydney which Jan did not
understand, but which vaguely troubled her, but it was never coolness
toward her. On the contrary, she could not help fancying that the
taciturn boy was glad of the affection she gave him, and found girlish
sympathy very acceptable. In her loyal little heart Jan resolved never
to rest until she had brought Gwen into this pleasant comradeship,
feeling quite sure that Sydney would enjoy his clever, big-hearted
sister as much as she would enjoy him, if only they might make each
other’s acquaintance.

In the meantime a wonderful thing happened. Sydney asked Jan to play
with him in the tennis tournament, and “Miss Lochinvar” was not less
frightened than elated over the honor.

Syd had taken her out to the courts to practise, and was delighted with
her swift underhand serve as much as with her sure returns and expert
volleying, in which she seemed to be all over the court at the same
time. It proved to be a “court” in another sense to the pretty girl,
for she instantly became a prime favorite with the players, not only
with the boys, who pronounced her “great,” but with the girls. These
were not pupils of “the Hydra,” but another set and kind. Jan found
them pleasanter, as a whole. They were frank, jolly, natural young
creatures, such as the boys would be likely to choose to play with them
when the choice was left them. They all declared that they had not a
ghost of a chance playing against Jan, and the boys announced that
“Graham had a cinch, with that cousin of his to back him.” But though
the boyish slang made her feel more at home than she had since leaving
her brothers, it could not set Jan’s mind at rest. She found herself
starting up out of her sleep at imaginary calls of “Play!” and once
served a dream ball with such a thump of her hand against the nursery
wall that Jerry awoke screaming, and Hummie hastened in, feeling sure
nothing less than fire was the matter.

There was not much time for practise. Sydney laughed at Jan for wishing
they had longer to get used to each other’s methods, but could not help
realizing that victory would have been more assured if they had played
together more. It would never do, however, to let Jan lose confidence.
At the best, Sydney had little faith in “girls’ nerve.”

On the day before the games, which were to be held on the first Tuesday
after Thanksgiving, Jan played so badly that Sydney was seriously
alarmed. She seemed nothing but a bundle of nervousness, serving weakly
or else beyond the bounds, receiving uncertainly, and acquitting
herself generally as badly as possible. Jan came home profoundly cast
down.

“Don’t be discouraged, Syd,” she said, though she needed cheering more
than her partner. “You know I can play a decent game, and I often go to
pieces beforehand, but pull together again when the time comes. Maybe
I’ll be all right to-morrow.”

“Of course. I know how that is,” said Sydney lightly. “You’re all
right, and I wish I was as sure of everything I wanted as I am of
winning to-morrow. You had your funk out to-day. To-morrow you’ll be
right on deck when the umpire calls time.”

Jan went slowly up-stairs, hoping this was to prove true. Her spirits
rose considerably at the sight that met her eyes when she opened her
chamber door. There on the bed lay a tennis dress of which any one
might be proud. It was beautiful broadcloth, rich, warm red in color,
with tiny bands of black fur around the short skirt and perfectly
defining the fine lines of the short jacket which surmounted the
delicate tucked white-silk shirt-waist. But most bewitching of all was
the cap of the crimson cloth, with its outlining of black fur and its
single black quill bidding defiance to the world in its saucy setting
on the left side. Jan promptly donned the cap, admiring the effect in
her glass, which told her that she had never worn anything so becoming,
and resolving to do or die, to live up to her costume. She would not
be one of those girls whom the Crescendo boys despised, whose skill in
tennis consisted solely in selecting a gorgeous sash and knotting it
gracefully. They had had an axiom at home that the better the sash the
worse the playing.

Jan, concluding that Gwen had been at the bottom of her welcome gift,
went to find and thank her. She learned to her surprise that her aunt
had designed and ordered the costume, wishing that her boy should have
not only the most skilful partner, but the prettiest one, and with
this discovery Jan made another, which was that her busy aunt had
unsuspected pride and affection for her eldest born.

The entire family, with the exception of Mr. Graham and Jerry, went out
to the games on the following day. The sun was warm, but the air cool;
there was not much wind. Altogether it was a day which justified the
wisdom of holding games so late in the season.

Most of the big girls from the Misses Larned’s were in the grand stand,
interested from more or less personal connection with the contestants,
and filling the place with gay colors, lively chatter, and candy odors.

The races preceded the tennis, as did the wrestling. Sydney was not
among the wrestlers, but he ran and jumped, and the Graham party
nearly fell over the rail in its enthusiasm as he came in first in the
foot-races and when he marched up to the judges’ stand later to have
the first medal for the race and the second medal for the standing jump
fastened on the breast of his white sweater.

“Isn’t he gloriously handsome?” whispered Mrs. Graham in Jan’s ready
ear. “There isn’t a boy here to compare with him! I am proud of my
beautiful boy and my clever Gwen, Janet, and I sometimes think I love
them more than all the others put together.”

Jan felt the injustice of these words, although she realized that the
pride of the hour might have made her aunt exaggerate her partiality.
But as she looked at Sydney she felt that they were almost to be
excused. With his face flushed, his head thrown back, his lips proudly
smiling, and his straight young form drawn up to its fullest height,
showing his fine muscles at their best, Sydney Graham was a son to
glory in, and Jan clapped her loudest, feeling that her big cousin was
very dear to her, too, and that she was grateful to Drom for being the
link that had drawn them together.

The time for the tennis had come, and Jan rose in her seat to make
her way through the crowd down to the courts. She heard but faintly
the clapping of hands with which her school friends sped her, but she
heard as distinctly as if a megaphone had shouted the hateful words,
Daisy Hammond’s whisper to Flossie Gilsey: “Look at the Wild West
Show! I suppose she thinks she’ll paint this town red to match her own
war-paint.”

A little righteous indignation often does wonders. Jan had risen with
her heart in her rubber-soled shoes. As she heard Daisy’s ugly, vulgar
speech her nerves suddenly steadied, and with a profound contempt
for the speaker came a resolution to show these girls that she could
excel them in sport as easily as she could not help knowing that she
surpassed them in class.

Sydney met her at the foot of the stairs, and he read the steady light
in her eyes and the firm curl of her lips aright, and with unspeakable
relief saw that Janet could be relied on.

“O Sydney, we are all so proud of you!” cried Jan, saluting her cousin
with a wave of her racket in her left hand and a tight clasp of his
hand with the right one. “No, you mustn’t take my racket. It is part
of my costume! Don’t you see that Aunt Tina had a cover for it made to
match my dress?”

“You certainly are a picture,” said Sydney, “and I’m proud of you!
Shall we let them score a few points?”

“Just a few, to add to the interest,” laughed Jan. “But ‘“they’ll have
fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.’”

Sydney echoed her laugh with a mind at rest, and the cousins stepped
out on the hard clay court.

They found that their opponents were in fine form. Jan and Sydney
fought hard, but do what they would they could not keep them from
getting the winning ten after they had held them tied at “forty all”
some exciting minutes.

But the second game Sydney and Janet won, and took their places ready
to make the third theirs by any heroic effort. Unfortunately the
boy and girl opposing them were of the stuff that soldiers are made
from--or rather fortunately, for Syd and Jan wanted to win gloriously.
But they had hard work to win at all. Once more the game halted at
“forty all,” and the ball was volleyed back and forth without pausing,
each side and both partners of each side playing nobly. Once Sydney
played a back stroke that nearly settled it, but the girl across the
net saved the day, and immediately on the ball’s return her partner
gave a swift cut that made it skim the net and fly out to the right
corner of the service-line. With a bound Jan pursued it. It had been
a clever stroke, for neither she nor Syd was near that spot at the
moment. How she got there Jan did not know, but get there she did, and,
swinging her racket without more than time for instinctive planning,
she smashed the ball, and it crossed the net, barely clearing it, sped
close to the ground out to the outer court of their opponents, and
stopped before either raised racket could get down to its level or
either player on the opposite side could pursue the ball. A ringing
cheer announced the game won and Jan the victor. Sydney shook her
violently by both hands, while cries of: “Well played!” “Splendid!”
“What a stroke!” fell on the ears of happy “Miss Lochinvar.”

[Illustration: A ringing cheer announced Jan the victor.]

“It was the prettiest sight I ever saw,” said Mrs. Graham, kissing
Jan on her return, and more inclined to regard the affair as a
spectacle than a sport. “You are sweet in that crimson, Janet, and
Sydney is delicious! I am so proud of you both!”

Gwen hugged her cousin breathless, Jack and Viva trying vainly to
get at her the while. Even Gladys was swept away by the glory to her
family, to which for the first time Jan had contributed, into something
like cordiality toward “Miss Lochinvar.” All the girls Jan liked at the
Misses Larned’s congratulated her jubilantly, and the other faction was
forced into silence. Altogether Jan enjoyed a little triumph, and came
home blissful, to dream of the theater-party to which Mrs. Graham was
to take her, Gwen, Gladys, Sydney, his most intimate chum, and Dorothy
Schuyler, in celebration of the victory, on the following day.

It was the more shocking that she ran up the stairs later to visit
Drom, full of these anticipations for Jan to find Sydney with his head
bowed on his arms across his table and to meet the tragic face which he
raised as he tried to smile at her.

“Why, Sydney, what has happened?” she cried, standing still on the
threshold and paying no attention to Drom’s cordial greeting.

“Nothing,” said Sydney. “I--perhaps I ran too hard. I don’t feel quite
well. How are you after our victory?” He tried to speak easily, but Jan
was too well versed in boys’ ways to be deceived.

“You’re in a scrape, Syd,” she said decidedly, entering and shutting
the door behind her with a discretion Sydney admired even then. “Won’t
you tell me what it is? Or have you told your mother?”

“My mother! No, I guess not,” said Sydney. “I’d be sorry to tell
her--if I were in a scrape,” he added, realizing his indirect admission.

“Then tell me,” said Jan, sitting down at the other side of the table
with an air that suggested not rising again until she had been told.
“Two heads are better than one, and you can trust me.”

“Well, I’m in debt,” said Sydney, yielding at once, glad, perhaps, to
share a burden that had been oppressive for some time. “And the fellow
writes to say he won’t wait any longer. If I don’t pay up he’ll go to
my father. I can’t pay up, so I suppose there’s no help for it, and
he’ll have to go.”

“In debt!” Jan exclaimed, her voice low and horror-stricken. “O Syd,
that’s awful! What will uncle do if that man goes to him? Who is the
man, anyway? Tell me more.”

“He’ll raise the roof, as to father’s part of it, and very likely send
me off to boarding-school,” said Sydney, flushing. “The man, as you
call him, is a shopkeeper who likes to get the fellows at our school
to buy things on tick from him, if he knows there is some one at home
who will pay in case they don’t. He even offers to lend us money and
put it on the books and not charge any interest. He’s a scamp to do it,
and I know it, but I’ve been fool enough--and scamp enough, too--to get
things charged and to borrow a little now and then, thinking I could
pay up myself. Well, I can’t, and now I’ve got to face the music. It
serves me right, but that doesn’t make me enjoy myself any better.”

“O Syd, how could you?” said Jan, who had been brought up to regard
debt with horror, and whose father might have to deny his children
luxury, but by practise and precept he taught them to live within their
means.

“Now, you needn’t lecture,” said Sydney, who found the pained and
disappointed look in the brown eyes opposite to him hard to meet. “I
know all you can say about its being wrong, but I did it, and there you
are! Five dollars a month isn’t much allowance, and that’s all I get.”

“Five dollars! Every month, and to spend on yourself?” cried Jan, to
whom this seemed a fortune.

“Oh, you little goose!” said Sydney, almost ready to laugh at her
simplicity. “What do you suppose that is among the boys I go with? But
don’t you worry. I’m sorry I told.”

“Do you think it would be right to pay this man and not let Uncle
Howard know?” said conscientious Jan. “You see, Sydney, I think fathers
and mothers ought to be told things.”

“Don’t you think it makes a difference whether it would do harm
or good?” asked Sydney. “Father would be angry and send me off,
and I can’t see what good that would do. He is too busy to try to
understand. And I’ve had enough of it. If I could pay up now I would
keep clear of this sort of thing forever. It has worried me ever since
September.”

Jan was thinking rapidly as Sydney spoke, and it seemed to her loving
heart like sealing the boy’s fate to send him away from home, where it
was her favorite dream to root him more closely. So she said: “I will
lend you money, Syd. I have some that papa gave me to buy Christmas
gifts for the children, but you can pay it back, perhaps, before then.
It’s five dollars. Do you need so much?”

Sydney laughed outright, though it was a melancholy and kindly laugh.
“Five dollars, you blessed innocent!” he said. “It is about a tenth of
what I owe.”

Jan gasped. “Gwen has money saved,” she said with a sudden inspiration.
“Tell her. She’ll be glad to help you out. And it will make you better
friends,” she added in her thoughts.

“Indeed I won’t tell Gwen,” cried Sydney. “I’ll tell you what I will
do. I’ll borrow your five and try to get him to take it on account, and
wait before he tells father.”

“And then, if I were you, I’d try to earn the money to pay up,” cried
Jan, with another inspiration.

“How could I?” asked Sydney.

“Errands after school, work in some store--lots of ways, if you mean
it,” said Jan, springing to her feet in her earnestness.

“Gentlemen don’t do those things, Jan,” said Sydney. “Would you like to
see me an errand-boy?”

“I’d rather see you anything than dishonorable,” said Jan hotly.
“_Gentlemen_ don’t borrow and spend money they can’t pay back.”

“That’s it! Go ahead! Hit a man when he’s down!” said Sydney bitterly.
“That’s the girl of it! I thought you were a square fellow, Janet.”

“Oh, please forgive me, Syd,” cried Jan, repentant. “I didn’t mean to
say anything like that! I know you are honorable and are sorry for
doing wrong, and I’ll do anything in the world to help you. But I hate
to hear you talking like a fop and not seeing where the real disgrace
would be. I’d be prouder of you if you joined the street-cleaning
department than I would to see you getting mixed up in your ideas of
honesty.”

Sydney laughed again. “All right, Miss Lochinvar,” he said
good-naturedly. “You are somewhat mixed up in your speech, it strikes
me. I accept your apology, and I’ll admit you are right in your ideas,
if you want me to. And I’ll accept your five dollars, too, if you’ll
lend it to me. And I won’t forget that you stood by me as well as you
could. Perhaps I’ll pull through with this help.”

Janet could not help seeing that Sydney was too ready to throw off his
burden in the relief of temporary relaxing of the pressure. She wished
with all her heart that she was old enough and wise enough to help her
cousin in the ways in which he needed help most. But it was something
that he trusted her with his secret and accepted aid from her.

“I’ll run and get the money now, Syd,” she said. “I wish I wasn’t poor,
for your sake. But think it over and see if you can’t earn some money.
It would be so much more manly and fine than getting it from Uncle
Howard or counting on presents. And fair, too, because you would be
setting your own wrong-doing right.”

“All right, Miss Lochinvar, I’ll think,” said Sydney. “You’re a pretty
good sort of fellow not to scold me harder and to be ready to hold out
your hand to a sinner. I won’t forget it of you, Jan.”




CHAPTER X

“FOR A LAGGARD IN LOVE AND A DASTARD IN WAR”


It seemed to Jan that each day was full of happenings of late. She was
so much interested and had become so much a part of the life around her
that she had not time to be homesick any more. First of all, there was
Sydney and his affairs, which troubled her, though he had told her that
her five dollars had purchased him temporary relief, and that he was
considering ways of taking her advice and of earning money after school
hours with which to pay his indebtedness.

And, strangely enough, there was Gladys, though nothing had seemed
less likely than that this particular cousin should ever engross Jan’s
thoughts.

The vague rumors floating about the Misses Larned’s school of great
things to be done at Christmas had crystallized into the delightfully
definite announcement that the girls were to give a play. And these
thrilling tidings were followed by the still more exciting news that
Gladys had been chosen for the principal part--that of an unfortunate
princess, who, at the end of the play, came into her own again--from
which Gwen, whose talent exceeded her sister’s, was excluded because of
her height. The secret leaked out that the only competitor with Gladys
in the minds of the teachers who made the cast was Daisy Hammond, and
it did not tend to soothe the feelings of that young lady, already
deeply chagrined that Gladys had been preferred to her. But she did
not allow her wounded vanity to make any difference in her friendship
for Gladys, treating her with more rather than less affection during
these trying days, a fact to which Gladys triumphantly called Gwen’s
attention as “perfectly sweet and dear of Daisy.”

There came a day--a dreadful day--however, less than a week after the
matter of the distribution of the parts had been settled when the elder
Miss Larned--and the more awful Miss Larned, if there were degrees in
the awe-inspiring qualities of the sisters--came into the class-room
and announced that for reasons into which it was not necessary to
enter, but which were deemed quite sufficient by the faculty, the
principal part in the Christmas play had been transferred from Miss
Gladys Graham to Miss Daisy Hammond. Miss Gladys, she added, had been
assigned the rôle of second court lady.

There was a silence more profound than mere absence of speech as this
announcement fell on the ears of the first class, and it realized what
it meant. “Second court lady!” Why, it was only a “thinking part,” a
mere figure which trailed in and out, swelling the number of attendants
on the principals in the play! What could have happened? For evidently
this was a punishment inflicted upon Gladys, but for what? All eyes
turned upon the deposed princess, who sat staring at the desk whence
her sentence had proceeded, turning rapidly every shade and color of
which the human countenance is capable, tears starting to her eyes,
her lips quivering, but with such a look of blank amazement visible
through her grief that most of her mates decided on the spot that
whatever might be wrong Gladys was as ignorant of it as they were.
Daisy Hammond’s face wore a look of gentle commiseration and regret,
combined with wonder. She kept looking toward Gladys and raising her
eyebrows inquiringly, while she shook her head in a vaguely expressive
manner. As soon as recess came a buzz of voices rose on every side, and
all the girls rushed to Gladys to ask what she had done to offend Miss
Larned and receive such a crushing blow. They found Daisy Hammond with
her arms around her friend, begging her to tell her what had happened
to make Miss Larned do “such a horrid, horrid thing,” and assuring her
that she would not “think of playing a part which had been taken from
darling Gladys.”

“There hasn’t the least bit of a thing happened,” Gladys said in reply
to the chorus of inquiries. “I don’t know anything more about it than
you do. But I don’t care. If they want Daisy to play the princess, let
her play it. The only thing I hate is being disgraced like this before
the whole school, all for nothing.”

“Go to Miss Larned and ask her why she has changed her mind,” advised
Dorothy Schuyler. “Tell her we all think she is offended with you, and
you think so, too, and tell her you aren’t asking to be given the part,
but you do ask for a chance to defend yourself if she thinks you have
done wrong.”

“That’s the thing to do, Glad,” said Gwen decidedly. “Come on. I’ll go
with you, and if she isn’t fair to you I’ll throw up my part, and so
will Jan.”

An irrepressible gleam of triumph which shot across Daisy Hammond’s
face before she could repress it, and a quick glance between her and
Ida Hammond and Flossie Gilsey, did not escape the keen eyes of “Miss
Lochinvar,” whose suspicions were alert. Nor was she less sure that she
had seen the glance when Flossie Gilsey said sweetly: “You won’t spoil
the play, Gwen! You know no one could take your place.”

This was strictly true, for Gwen had real dramatic talent and had been
given a rôle requiring more acting than that of the heroine, for she
was the leader of the princess’s enemies and had some telling lines and
situations.

“I certainly shall not care about spoiling the play, even if my getting
out of it did spoil it, if my sister is unjustly treated,” said Gwen.
“Come on, Gladys. We’ll let you know, girls, what Miss Larned says.”

The Grahams came back before many minutes, Gladys in tears, Gwen with
a flushed and angry face. “She won’t explain one bit,” said Gwen. “She
says it is a matter of which the least said the sooner it’s mended.
She insists that Gladys understands, and she says that is all that is
necessary.”

“But you don’t understand, Gladys?” asked Cena North.

Gladys gave her head a despairing shake. “Not any more than you do--not
any more than if I had just landed from China and couldn’t speak a word
of English,” she said. “I do think it is the meanest thing!”

The summons to return to the class-room came at that moment, as a
corroborative murmur arose on all sides.

“Did you tell her you wouldn’t act?” whispered Daisy Hammond to
Gwen. But Gwen shook her head. “I said nothing about any one but
Gladys--_yet_,” she replied. Gwen, like Jan, was suspicious of
treachery.

Gladys was escorted home by the sympathizing trio with whom she
most consorted, but Gwen and Jan walked home together, holding an
indignation meeting as they walked.

“Those Hammonds are as sweet as pie to Glad, but I wouldn’t trust
them,” Gwen said. “Daisy Hammond was wild to be the princess, and she
knew if Gladys could be got out of it she would be put in, for she was
second choice for the part in the first place. I’m just certain that
crowd is at the bottom of it!”

“So am I,” Jan agreed. “Let’s try to find out what they’ve done and
straighten it out! It’s a perfect shame not to give a girl a chance to
explain. I’m so sorry for Gladys! I’ll never rest till it’s made right.”

“What a trump you are, Jan,” said Gwen, stopping short to gaze
admiringly at her cousin. “You never bear the least grudge. Glad has
been perfectly nasty to you often, and now she’s in trouble you’d do
anything to pull her through!”

Jan colored. “I’m not a saint, Gwen,” she said. “I don’t enjoy being
snubbed, but I think it’s mean and low to try to get square with
people. If you can’t fight a thing out at the time, drop it, I say. I
just despise people who keep up and keep up and dwell on fusses--even
if they were in the right in the first place that puts them in the
wrong, to my way of thinking. I don’t believe that’s goodness in me.
I do so hate such petty ways of quarreling. I’d feel low and ill-bred
if I remembered rows and waited a chance to get square. However, as
to Gladys, I don’t want to get square with her. I’ve been sorry she
didn’t like me, but I don’t feel any spite toward her. Besides, she’s
my cousin, my blessed mother’s own niece, and your sister, and Syd’s
sister, and the sister of all of you, and it would be a queer thing if
I wouldn’t stand by my own cousin.”

Gwen, remembering how she had scolded Gladys for not standing by this
very “own cousin” of hers, still thought it fine in Jan to be so
generous, but she continued her way without further expression of that
opinion, resuming her animated discussion of Gladys’s wrongs.

That afternoon Gwen and Jan went to see the Misses Larned in the
freedom of hours out of school. They intended firmly, though
respectfully to decline to appear in the play if their teachers
persisted in refusing to allow Gladys opportunity of clearing herself
of whatever she might be accused.

Jan’s part was insignificant, for she was not suspected of histrionic
ability, nor was her experience in acting in the barn in distant
Crescendo known to “the Hydra’s” heads, but Gwen was a loss which
threatened the play with disaster, and Miss Larned--the elder and the
only one whom the girls found at home--stooped from her dignified
height to expostulate with her.

“It is quite natural and in one sense laudable that you should espouse
Gladys’s cause, Gwendoline,” she said. “But I assure you, you are
mistaken in so doing. We are justified in making the change that has
been made, and we are acting kindly in making it with no complaint of
Gladys--merely making it. Gladys understands perfectly why it is done,
and you should trust us--trust me, in fact--sufficiently to assume that
I am acting wisely.”

“Miss Larned,” said Gwen, trying to control the wrath this stately
speech aroused, but betraying it in her heightened color, “you think
you are acting wisely, but I think--we all think--you are dreadfully
mistaken. As to Gladys’s knowing what all this is about, I was with her
when she solemnly told you that she did not know. Gladys has plenty of
faults, but in all the fourteen years of her life I never knew her to
tell an untruth if you asked her anything straight out, as you did this
morning. When Gladys says she doesn’t know, _she doesn’t know_.
And if it comes to trusting any one, I must trust my own sister’s word
when I know I can. If Gladys was untruthful I would be fair enough to
own it--to myself, anyway--and keep still. But lying is not a Graham
fault, and I know Gladys is in the dark about what makes you take her
part from her. And I want to ask you if you think it is fair to condemn
any one without a hearing?”

“I can not allow you to question my judgment, Gwendoline,” said Miss
Larned. “The matter is closed.”

“Very well. Then I must ask to be excused from taking any part in the
play, Miss Larned,” said Gwen rising, with hardly less dignity than
Miss Larned herself.

“Gwendoline, you will put us to serious inconvenience. There is no one
in the school competent to act the part assigned you save yourself,”
said Miss Larned. “You should have the success of the play, the honor
of your school, when strangers will come to witness your efforts,
sufficiently at heart to sacrifice something for it.”

“I have the honor of my sister a little nearer my heart than the honor
of the school, Miss Larned,” said Gwen. “I care more what people think
of Gladys than what they think of the acting, though I would have
worked hard to make that play go. But as to any one taking my place,
my Cousin Janet here has been trying my part at home and she acts it
better than I do. She has acted a great deal before she came to New
York. She could do it, if she would. I certainly must resign it under
the circumstances.”

Jan looked at Gwen in surprise at this suggestion, not guessing that it
was a bit of pure malice, intended to heighten Miss Larned’s regret.

That lady turned to Jan graciously. “Janet an actress!” she exclaimed.
“I am surprised. Though Janet has shown such admirable scholarship
since we had the pleasure of receiving her into our care, I do not know
why I should wonder at discovering this accomplishment to be hers.
Then, my child, if your cousin persists in her refusal to listen to
reason, and to injure herself and us for her sister’s sake, I will give
her part to you, if you are as capable of performing it as she thinks
you.”

“Thank you, Miss Larned,” said Jan hastily, “but I wouldn’t take it for
the world. I feel just as Gwen does about Gladys--of course, because
an own cousin is the very next thing to your sister--and I must give
up even the little part in the play which I have already learned. I
wouldn’t take part in it for anything unless Gladys has a chance to
clear herself of whatever you think she has done and is proved guilty.
Neither Gwen nor I would take her part if she deserved punishment. We
only want you, please, to let her know what she is accused of.”

“I have told you that she already knows. If she does not choose to tell
you, that is her own affair. I must wish you good-day, young ladies.
I really have no time to waste on arguments with my pupils.” And Miss
Larned made them a curt bow of dismissal and sailed from the room,
leaving them to find their way out as they could. She was not dull
enough to fail to perceive that Gwen had suggested Jan’s acting merely
for the pleasure of hearing the girl refuse to accept the part.

With this small satisfaction to comfort her, Gwen returned slowly
with Jan to her home. It was maddening to feel that the Christmas
festivities were to end in disgrace to Gladys, loss of her own part in
the play, which Gwen could not help knowing she could act well, and
universal discomfort. And still less endurable was the situation to
both Gwen and Jan that they felt convinced that Gladys’s friends had
acted treacherously toward her and that they were powerless to prove
their theory or bring about justice.




CHAPTER XI

“THERE NEVER WAS KNIGHT LIKE THE YOUNG LOCHINVAR”


The days that followed Gladys’s downfall were far from pleasant at
school. Gladys was miserable, Gwen and Jan indignant, and their
classmates divided into two camps, of which the larger was strongly
partisan of the Grahams, but the second sided against them or “didn’t
know.” The play, recast and with an incompetent girl in Gwen’s
place, went badly at its rehearsals, and the Misses Larned were as
cool to Gwen, who was responsible--or whom they chose to consider
responsible--for its disaster as they dared be to one of two valuable
pupils who had two more sisters at home growing up to scholar’s estate.
Gladys had been with difficulty persuaded by Gwen and Jan to keep
the story of her wrongs a secret at home until later. These would-be
detectives hoped to discover the cause of Miss Larned’s injustice,
and they knew that if Mrs. Graham learned of her daughter’s treatment
she would demand instant reparation or take her from school, and the
mystery would remain a mystery to the end. But at the close of the
third day Gwen and Jan were no nearer its solution, and Gladys was
passionately declaring that she couldn’t and wouldn’t keep the secret
any longer. She knew, she said, that her mother “would take her away
from the horrid old Hydra if she heard how she had been treated, and
for her part she did not think any one with any self-respect ought to
be willing to have her stay--much less try to keep her there.”

Just as Gladys was on the eve of becoming utterly unmanageable, chance
put the clue to the affair into Jan’s hands, or perhaps it was good
fairies, approving her unselfish desire to help her cousin, forgetful
of Gladys’s many unkindnesses to her.

Three of the teachers were standing in the hall at noon as Jan came
down it. She had no thought of approaching unseen or unheard, but it
happened that the day was dark and the hall badly lighted at that
point, and Jan had on her rubbers, deadening her footfall.

She heard the name “Gladys Graham,” and stopped short. There was no
time in which to debate her action. She despised listening, but she
wanted--no, that did not express it--she felt that she _must_ hear
what was being said. Before she had more than grasped the temptation
before her, and had not had time to yield to it or resist it, she heard
in the brief pause she made at the turn of the hall words which gave
her quick wits the clue for which she longed. The English teacher’s
voice, clear and resonant, reached her. She was saying: “There can not
be the least possible doubt of the child’s guilt. It was an abominable
letter, begging Daisy to join her in a plot to bring discredit on
the entire class and school, written in Gladys’s hand, on that very
peculiar foreign paper she has, and which there is none like in the
school, if there is in the city. And Daisy, whom you never liked, Miss
Esterbrook, had written across the bottom of the page: ‘I would not do
such a thing for the world.’ The paper fell into Miss Larned’s hands
accidentally--it had got in with some composition papers I had to
correct. Gladys deserves much more severe treatment than being deprived
of her part in the play, but policy, as well as kindness, makes Miss
Larned hush the matter up. It is very fine of Daisy Hammond, and shows
that she really loves Gladys, that she does not tell the other girls,
for of course she must guess what is wrong.”

“I could not have believed such a thing like that of Gladys,” said the
German teacher. “She is wain and not so much a student as her sister,
but I have never a bad child found her.”

Jan turned back and went quietly up the hall in the direction whence
she had come. No one had seen or heard her, and she wanted to make
certain that she was able to speak naturally before she encountered the
group of teachers.

So this was the trouble! Daisy Hammond had evidently written a letter,
purporting to come from Gladys, containing a proposal to do something
wrong, a proposal which she--writing then in her own person--had
indignantly refused. Daisy then had contrived that the letter should
fall into the teachers’ hands, knowing or hoping that the result of
her plot would be to give her Gladys’s coveted part in the play. Jan’s
hands clinched as she realized what a contemptible trick had been
played, and she resolved to expose it if it took the rest of her life
to do so--Jan was inclined to be dramatic under strong excitement.

And the idea, she thought contemptuously, of Miss Arnold saying that
the paper was written in Gladys’s hand, when all the first class and
second class wrote so nearly alike, that, with the exception of Gwen,
to whom much writing had given an individual hand, one could never be
certain whose writing one was reading. But the peculiar paper? This was
a difficulty, and Jan longed to get Gwen to herself safe at home and
begin investigations with her help. But Gwen was out when Jan reached
the house, and on second thought it struck “Miss Lochinvar” that it
would be delightful if she could ferret out Gladys’s wrongs alone. What
happiness it would be to know that she--the unwelcome cousin, of whom
Gladys had always been ashamed--should be able to set her right in the
eyes of the school where her present disgrace far exceeded that of
having a cousin who did not mind confessing to poverty!

As a preliminary step, this dawning Sherlock Holmes went to work on
paper dolls’ dresses for Viva, little as they seemed to bear on the
case. She was anxious not to arouse Gladys’s suspicion, and she wanted
an excuse for obtaining some of “that very peculiar foreign paper” of
which Miss Arnold had spoken as belonging to Gladys.

“Have you any sort of odd letter-paper, Gladys, that you would let
me have to make a doll’s dress?” asked artful Jan. “I want something
stiffer than the paper we have, and something out of the common.”

Gladys received the request graciously. She had been pleasanter to Jan
since she had stood by her in the matter of the play and had refused to
take Gwen’s part when it was offered her--a fact that Gwen was careful
that her sister should know, not failing to point out the contrast of
this loyalty to her own treatment of Jan.

“I had the very thing,” said Gladys, “but there isn’t a scrap left.
Wait--I’ll look--maybe there is just a scrap.” She tossed over
the papers in her desk and produced a half sheet of a peculiar
greenish-gray paper with a tulip design in one corner. “Would this be
any good?” she asked. “I had lots of it, but I gave half to Daisy, and
mine is all used up. It came from Holland, and now I’m sorry I didn’t
keep all of it, for nobody has any like it.”

“I can’t tell whether it will be useful or not,” said Jan truthfully,
for she had not seen the paper on which the incriminating letter of
which the teachers had been talking was written. Her heart gave a leap
as she heard Gladys say so unconsciously that she had divided her paper
with Daisy. “I’ll take it, if you don’t want it, and see if I can use
it.”

“All right. I don’t want it. Half a sheet is no good, but isn’t it
nice, with those tulips in memory of Holland in the corner?” said
Gladys, looking regretfully at the solitary remainder of her too great
generosity.

“It’s just as pretty as it can be, and it’s nice for a New York girl to
have, because the Dutch brought their tulip bulbs over here. Thanks,
Gladys. I’ll do as much for you, if I can.” And Jan laughed nervously.

“You needn’t mind about doing anything, if you can’t do more than
give me half a sheet of letter-paper,” said Gladys. And Jan ran away
thinking how much nicer Gladys was now that misfortune had made her
less airy.

Viva did not get her doll’s dress made from Gladys’s contribution. Jan
cut out a dress from half of the half-sheet, but carefully preserved
the upper part with the tulips in the corner. The next day at school
she carried her deep-laid plan further. Daisy Hammond, as well as
Gladys, had been more civil to her since the trouble, though from some
other cause. Jan could not quite see what this cause could be, but she
decided that, in spite of her efforts to control her voice and eyes,
something of the suspicion she felt toward Daisy had been betrayed,
and that Gladys’s false friend feared “Miss Lochinvar’s” possible
discoveries.

Counting on Daisy’s evident desire to propitiate her, Jan went to her
at recess. “Daisy,” she said, “Gladys gave me a stray half-sheet of
paper to make a doll’s dress for Viva. She said she hadn’t any more to
give me, and I want some badly. Gladys didn’t say I might ask you, but
she did say she had given some of her paper to you. Have you the least
little sheet, or even half a sheet, that I might have to finish with?”
And Jan held up the quarter-sheet of paper which she had kept.

Daisy could not repress a start as she saw it, and she glanced sharply
at Jan’s rosy face. But “Miss Lochinvar” had her wits about her, and,
though she noted the look of fear that passed swiftly across Daisy’s
face, she met that young lady’s eyes with her own brown ones smiling
steadily, and Daisy saw no sign of a latent motive behind the innocent
request.

“Oh, I don’t believe I have a bit like that,” she said. “Gladys only
gave me two or three sheets, ever so long ago. I’ll give you any other
I have.”

“Gladys said she had given her half,” thought Jan, keenly alive to
Daisy’s words and actions. But she said aloud: “Let me go with you
while you look. I wouldn’t mind for myself. I could get on without
the paper, but I’d like to finish what I have begun for my cousin.”
It really was good sport to say this, knowing what a different
significance from her own Daisy would attach to her words.

Daisy dared not refuse Jan for fear of arousing her suspicions, so she
went down-stairs with very bad grace, Jan following close at her heels.

At Daisy’s desk Jan kept right at her back so that she could see its
contents plainly. Daisy could hardly restrain her annoyance as she
tossed her paper about with movements that were so unnatural that Jan
knew she was on the track of what she sought.

“There isn’t a bit here,” said Daisy, hastily throwing a copy-book to
one side. “Take this pinkish shade. It’s nicer for dolls, anyway.”

But Jan was too quick for her. “Pink wouldn’t go with the dress I
began,” she said, reaching over quickly and raising the copy-book.
“Why, there are several sheets of this Dutch paper! You covered it up
and didn’t see it, Daisy.”

Daisy flushed crimson, even up into the roots of her hair. “What right
have you to touch my desk, Janet Howe?” she cried angrily. “I never
allow any one to do that.”

“Oh, very well. You needn’t get so mad. I didn’t know you objected,”
said Jan quietly. “And if you didn’t want to give me the paper you
weren’t obliged to. Why didn’t you say so when I asked you?”

Daisy saw that she had made a mistake. Perhaps it was only her guilty
conscience that made her fear Jan. Surely that troublesome young person
looked as calm and innocent as the new moon, not at all eager for the
paper. Perhaps she really did want it for the doll’s dress and nothing
else. In any case, it would not do for her to act guilty.

She laughed affectedly, and said: “How absurd you are, Jan. Of course
I’m willing you should have the paper. You startled me, that’s all, and
it does make me furious to have any one touch my things. Take all the
paper, if you want it--I am sure I’m willing.”

“No, indeed; but if you can spare one sheet I’d be glad,” said Gwen.
Then with a sudden realization of the value of witnesses, she turned to
Dorothy Schuyler, who had just entered the schoolroom. “See this paper
Daisy has given me. Gladys gave it to her. It came from Holland. Did
you ever see any like it?” she said.

“Never. Isn’t it pretty?” said Dorothy, feeling the texture as she
paused on her way to her own desk. And Jan knew that, if she needed it,
there was some one who could prove that she had received the paper from
Daisy and not from Gladys.

At this point in her plotting Jan stopped for two days, keeping Gladys
quiet in the meantime by a hint of hope which set her agog with eager
impatience.

Then, without giving any reason for her request, she asked Cena North
to borrow Daisy’s blotter and forget to return it; instead, to give it
to her--Jan--after school.

Cena was ready to do anything that Jan asked of her. She admired
fearless “Miss Lochinvar” with all the might of her own quiet nature.

Not for nothing had Jan read stories in which looking-glasses had
disclosed the secrets of blotters. Locking her door on her arrival in
her own room, putting a chair before it in case the impossible should
happen and some one should open it, pulling down the shade to the
extreme annoyance of Tommy Traddles, sitting on the window-sill, and
lighting the gas, this solitary conspirator held the blotter before her
mirror.

She nearly fell over in the joyful shock of the revelations thus
obtained. Only a word here and there, but they were enough. Though
Jan knew nothing of the contents of the letter which had fallen by
deliberate apparent chance into Miss Larned’s hands, she saw that
these words must be part of it, preserved by the faithful blotter to
incriminate the girl who had betrayed her friend, and fought her, not
fairly, but treacherously, for precedence.

With the blotter and the sheet of paper she held in her hands the
proofs which should reinstate Gladys on the morrow. Now it was time to
take Gwen into her confidence, and she turned down the gas, drew up the
shade, removed her superfluous barrier, and thrust an excited, flushed
face out of the door.

“Gwen, Gwen, come here!” she called, and Gwen flew out of her room,
knowing from the tremulous voice, strained and unnatural in tone, that
something had happened.




CHAPTER XII

“’TWERE BETTER BY FAR TO HAVE MATCHED OUR FAIR COUSIN WITH YOUNG
LOCHINVAR”


Gwen and Jan held a council of war. But it was a long time before
they reached the council. It took so long to tell the history of the
campaign which “Miss Lochinvar”--worthy of her name--had been waging,
single-handed and alone, in her cousin’s behalf. It was a story full
of “I thoughts,” and “I saids,” and “she saids”; of “I founds,” and “I
heards,” and “she dids.” Gwen could not sit still to listen, but walked
up and down the room, eyes flashing and cheeks burning, till Tommy
Traddles--sensitive, like all cats, to perturbation in the air about
him--jumped up on the top of the bookcase, and watched her with large,
disapproving eyes, doubtless thinking that people who did not belong to
the feline family were most foolishly excitable over trifles.

The result of the girls’ consultation--when they reached that
point--was that Gwen and Jan left home early on the following morning
together, and when Gladys followed later she was met at the door
by Miss Larned’s maid, requesting her immediate attendance in that
personage’s private room.

“Probably they’re going to expel me this time,” thought the victim of
previous injustice. “I don’t care. It’s the meanest school in New York,
anyway!”

She ascended the stairs slowly, “standing with reluctant feet” at the
threshold of the Misses Larneds’ sanctum a moment before she knocked.

Opening the door at the permission to do so, she saw an amazing sight.
There were both the august sisters sitting as if in judgment, flanked
by Miss Arnold, the English teacher. There were Gwen and Jan flushed,
trembling, plainly quivering with excitement. And--most wonderful of
all--there was Daisy Hammond dissolved in tears, looking “as though she
could not look anywhere,” as Gladys said afterward.

“Ahem! Miss Gladys Graham, we have sent for you,” began the elder
Miss Larned, portentously. “We have learned that we were mistaken in
thinking you guilty of a shocking action, in punishment of which you
were deprived--as we supposed justly and with full cognizance on your
part of the cause of our decision--of your part in the Christmas play.
We have but just learned that you were absolutely guiltless of the
offense.”

“I told you I hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t know what made you
pounce on me,” said Gladys, so embarrassed by this flood of Johnsonian
English, of which she did not understand half the words, as well as
perturbed by the fact dawning on her that instead of being expelled she
was being reinstated, that she expressed herself with inelegant brevity.

At another time Gladys’s “pounce” would not have passed unreproved. As
it was, Miss Larned resumed what her pupils disrespectfully called “her
language.”

“A letter fell into our hands, purporting to be written by you,
on a certain imported paper which you alone possessed,” Miss
Larned continued. Gladys started, and looked at Jan, who nodded
significantly. “The letter proposed a course disgraceful in itself and
injurious to the school. Miss Hammond was supposed to have been the
recipient, and she had indignantly repudiated what was apparently your
base proposition. We have discovered that Miss Hammond was the sole
author of the letter; that by apparent accident she contrived it should
fall into our hands. Her motive was envy of your superior part in the
coming play and the desire to have you deprived of it, knowing that,
if this were to happen, she would be assigned the part in your stead.
Her plot has been so far successful. But for your cousin, Miss Howe,
the true culprit would not have been discovered. Actuated by firm faith
in your innocence, as well as affection, she has devoted herself to
discovering the truth. Chance put into her hands the clue of what we
intended--charitably to you--to retain a secret. She has worked upon
that clue very cleverly, and, armed with her proofs, laid the case
before us this morning. Miss Hammond, seeing the futility of doing so,
has attempted no extenuation of her wrong, but confesses it fully. We
therefore restore to you our confidence and regard, expressing also
our regret that you have undergone this trial, which will doubtless
be beneficial to you, nevertheless. And we also request that you once
more assume the rôle of the princess in the play. Your sister and your
cousin will resume their parts if this arrangement pleases you.”

Gladys was sustained from actual collapse by the formality of this
lengthy address, but she was dreadfully upset, and had great difficulty
in murmuring her agreement to this arrangement. Miss Larned, seeing
that she was overwhelmed by the revelations so suddenly poured forth
upon her, graciously arose and held out her hand in amicable dismissal.

“We will excuse you, Miss Gwendoline and Miss Gladys Graham, from
attendance on your classes to-day. You, too, Miss Howe, may be excused.
And you, Miss Hammond, will hardly be in a fit condition mentally to
apply yourself. You will, therefore, keep holiday to-day, reporting at
the usual hour to-morrow. And I need not say, I trust, that as this
melancholy affair was preserved a secret when Miss Graham was supposed
to be the guilty one, so it will be close guarded now that we have
learned who is really culpable, much more culpable, I regret to say,
than we had thought Miss Graham in the first instance. You will not
mention to any of your mates, young ladies, the matters which have been
discussed, the facts which have transpired in this room this morning.”
Miss Larned, Miss Agatha Larned, and Miss Arnold bowed to the four
girls, who found themselves in the hall they hardly knew how.

Daisy Hammond, sobbing bitterly, held out her hand to Gladys, but she
put both her hands behind her back with a movement of aversion. “No,
Daisy Hammond,” she said decidedly. “I don’t say I won’t forgive you
sometime, but I won’t do it now. Gwen was right about you, and I never,
never will go with you again. I wouldn’t have minded anything else,
because we were chums, and I never was better than you were. But I
couldn’t do anything like what you did. To write a letter and pretend
it was mine, and use the paper I gave you for it, and then write an
answer to it yourself, and let me be put out of the play and disgraced,
and never say one word! And pretend every minute you were my friend,
and so sorry for me that they could hardly tease you into playing the
princess--oh, my! I never heard of such a humbug! No, sir, Daisy, we’re
never friends again as long as I live. And I’m dreadfully sorry--it’s
the worst thing I ever heard of--you’re a regular Benedict Arnold!” And
with which parting shot, drawn from her slender armory of historical
lore, Gladys turned away forever from her treacherous friend, her head
held high, but with tears running down her cheeks.

Gwen, Jan, and she made their way homeward with difficulty, for Gladys
had to be told the whole story, and it was impossible to get her to
grasp it when Gwen and Jan were talking together, and all three were
dodging the carriages spinning down Fifth Avenue.

The entire day was spent in ceaseless talking over the affair. Mrs.
Graham was captured, and the history of her daughter’s wrongs was
poured into her indignant ears. Sydney had to learn the story on his
return in the afternoon, and Jack grew so angry, and quiet Viva so
excited hearing it discussed that only Jerry preserved anything like
her ordinary state of mind. Jan was a heroine. Mrs. Graham could
hardly express her admiration for the silent determination with which
she had set to work to clear Gladys. Mr. Graham was told at night what
had been going on at school, and after first declaring wrathfully that
he would take Gladys away from the Misses Larneds’, he ended in hearty
laughter over what he termed Jan’s pluck, and compromised on a luncheon
and a theater-party to be given in her honor. This was the way in which
Mr. Graham’s interference in family matters often ended.

“May I come in, Jan?” called Gladys’s voice at Jan’s door at bedtime.

“Of course,” said Jan, hastily opening to the slender figure in the
blue eider-down robe which solemnly entered, and would have seated
itself on Tommy Traddles in the rocking-chair but that Jan rescued him.

“I can’t say what I want to,” Gladys began, almost timidly. “But I
came to thank you for what you’ve done for me. It isn’t clearing up
the row--though that’s a good deal,” Gladys continued quickly as
Jan started to speak. “Of course it is simply fine to get back my
part, and have every one understand that the Superior Ladies [this
was Gwen’s name for the Misses Larned, by a transposition of “lady
superior”] were wrong about me. But it’s the way you stood by me. And I
know I’ve been mean to you, Janet. I hated to have you come here, and I
snubbed you, and I made fun of you, and I neglected you----”

“Oh, stop, for goodness’ sake, Gladys! That’s all right!” cried Jan,
not relishing this outburst of self-abasement.

“And I called you Miss Lochinvar,” continued Gladys without heeding.

“No, it was Syd dubbed me that, and I’m proud of the name. I like it
better than my own--now,” said Jan.

“Yes, it suits you,” said Gladys in the same monotonously melancholy
tone. “I read over the poem to-day, and you’re very much like him.
Brave and straight, and everything you try goes through. But I didn’t
mean it like that. I meant it nastily. But I have learned a great deal,
Janet. I shall never be such a foolish girl again. It is an awful thing
to find out your friends are perfectly horrid.”

Jan tried not to laugh, but did not succeed very well. Gladys could not
be quite simple even under sincere feeling, such as Jan felt sure was
moving her now.

“You haven’t found that out about everybody, Gladys. And, honestly, I
think the Hammond-Gilsey crowd isn’t much of a loss,” she said.

“No,” said Gladys sadly. “Gwen was right. They’re vulgar, ill-bred
girls. But I don’t see why I couldn’t know that as well as Gwen did.
And, besides, I’m kind of sorry I know it now. But I haven’t found out
you’re mean. I have found out you’re the very nicest girl I ever saw.
And what I wanted to ask you was if you thought, after a while--a long,
long while--you could forgive me, and like me a little bit?”

“Why, Glad, I don’t even remember I have anything to forgive!” cried
Jan, throwing her arms impulsively around the neck of the small figure
of humble contrition. “And I do like you now--no, I don’t! I love
you--aren’t you my own cousin, and aren’t we going to be friends?”

“I am going to be _your_ friend, and I’m going to try to be the
kind of girl you are,” said Gladys, returning Jan’s warm kisses
heartily, but in a chastened manner. “I would rather you wouldn’t say
you love me yet, because if you do it must be just for Gwen’s sake, or
because I’m your cousin, and I want you to love me anyway--because I’m
worth loving.”

“Of course you’re worth loving, Gladys. And I think this trouble at
school is a perfect blessing!” cried Jan. “You were all mixed up with
that worldly, silly lot of girls, and it was just as bad for you!
You’ll be ever so much more sensible and nicer when you are done with
them.”

“I hope so,” returned Gladys, evidently not in a mood to take a
hopeful view of herself. “If I had been sensible I wouldn’t have liked
them--Gwen didn’t. You never can like me as well as Gwen, because she
really is sensible, and she’s dreadfully clever, and then she’s been
pretty nice to you all along. Just think of my caring because those
girls knew you hadn’t any money! Shouldn’t you have supposed I’d have
known they weren’t ladies, and that you were, and not have cared--just
despised them?”

“Yes,” said Jan, stifling a yawn, for an exciting day had left her
too sleepy to enter into discussions, moral or social. “I guess people
are like things to eat--you like some from the start, and others you
have to learn to like. The Hammonds were a sort of puff paste, and too
much of them gives you indigestion. Don’t you bother any more about me,
Gladys. We’ll have such good times together that you’ll forget you ever
were mortified by your Western cousin.”

“Don’t, Jan,” said Gladys gravely. “I’m so ashamed.”

“Now that’s a healthy feeling. I’m always an angel for several days
after I’ve been ashamed of myself,” laughed Jan, kissing her crushed
visitor good night.

Jan fell asleep with Tommy Traddles purring at her feet and something
very like a purr in her own heart, so full of content it was. For the
first time she felt that her peaceful conquest of the Graham family was
accomplished, that there was not one under that roof that night that
did not love her, and to whom her coming was not a matter for which to
be glad. Sydney had been indifferent, but now they were the best of
friends. Gladys had disliked her, but she bade fair to love her more
than Gwen did. And her Aunt Tina had bade her good night with positive
affection in her kiss, a kiss that was not usually given when she left
her to sleep. Jan felt very happy, very grateful for the love that was
springing up around her, not realizing that it was a case of the mirror
of which her mother had written her, which Thackeray had said gave back
one’s own expression.

Jan was so full of unselfish love that she diffused warmth, and the
chill of the big brownstone house was fast disappearing in the glow of
her unconscious girlish sweetness.

But it was part of her charm that she should never think such thoughts
as these. Instead, she wondered happily and sleepily how it was that
everybody was proving so nice, and resolved to do all she could to make
the Christmas play a complete success.




CHAPTER XIII

“‘NOW TREAD WE A MEASURE,’ SAID YOUNG LOCHINVAR”


As Christmas day drew near Jan found that down in the bottom of her
heart lurked a dread of the beautiful festival which would crop out at
odd moments when the preparations for the play allowed it opportunity.
It was not that she was homesick now, nor that every one in her uncle’s
house was not affectionate toward her, but Christmas was Christmas and
home was home, and she had never before welcomed one beyond the charmed
circle of the other. When she thought of her little Poppet, Jerry could
not fill her place, and she hardly saw how Christmas could be truly
“merry” without the dear home voices to wish it so. But Jan remembered
her mother’s rule for being happy, which was to forget oneself and make
others as happy as lay in one’s power, and, following this rule, Jan
found it working better than she had believed possible.

Sydney had not been able to return her five dollars yet, and Jan had
written her mother about its loan, explaining to her that lacking it
she could not buy the home presents she had planned to send. The result
of this letter had been one from Mrs. Howe, warning Jan against helping
Sydney in concealing his troubles and mistakes from his father, but
admitting that she was not able to judge the wisdom of Jan’s course
in a household to which she was a stranger, and enclosing another
five-dollar bill to take the place of the one gone to help poor Sydney.

Knowing how scarce dollars were in the little house in Crescendo, Jan
shed a few tears over this letter, but cheered up as she put on her hat
and jacket to go out to do her shopping, hoping that the first five
dollars were to prove a good investment, and feeling sure that she
could never have won Sydney to confession to his father unless she had
first found a way to help him to have less to confess.

There was no time to be homesick and dread Christmas, because every
moment was so full getting ready for its coming. The play required
hard work, for the double change in the cast had thrown it back. Then
every other minute which she could snatch Jan worked fast on gifts for
the Crescendo dear folk and for those around her. It had been hard work
to coax the five dollars into getting her materials for a trifling
remembrance for each one on this long list, even though the nimble
fingers and quick wits were active in fashioning slight foundations
into desirable forms.

Hummie had taught the little girl knitting in the funny German
left-handed fashion, and white Shetland wool was so cheap that fifty
cents gave her enough for a little hood for Poppet, a scarf for her
mother to throw over her head on summer evenings, and another for her
aunt, which Jan knit with misgivings of its acceptability.

Little Dresden flowered linen glove and handkerchief cases, daintily
embroidered, were the best that Jan could do for Gwen and Gladys, and
she made similar cases to hold scarfs for Sydney and her brother Fred.
A scrap-book for Jerry and doll’s clothes for Viva took so much time
that a less cheery and industrious person than Jan might have lost
heart, but she stitched away blithely, and actually accomplished what
she had set out to do.

Gwen found out how slender was her cousin’s store for Christmas gifts,
and was more moved by the thought of trying to make so many purchases
with a sum which she would have spent on one gift than she would have
been by more biting forms of poverty, probably because this touched her
personal experience. The result was that she and Gladys went off on
private shopping tours of their own, and when the day came for packing
the box which Jan was to express to Crescendo beautiful presents came
forth from secret nooks in the girls’ rooms, and Jan was overwhelmed
with the vision of the delight with which the beaming faces so far away
would gleam as the undreamed-of riches were unpacked.

Even Jerry was inspired by the universal outpouring for the Crescendo
children, and nobly tucked, unseen by any eye, into a corner of the box
the rubber top of her discarded bottle, to which she still had recourse
in moments of anguish or when she lay down to sleep, in spite of the
dignity of three years.

How could Christmas be anything but merry, after all, when it brought
such treasures as met Jan’s opening eyes on that morning? A watch from
her uncle, as tiny as it could be and keep time; its beautiful long
chain and chatelaine pin, from her aunt; the set of Dickens, which she
coveted, from Gwen; a charming little brooch of enameled green leaves
and mistletoe berries, from Gladys; a muff given in Viva’s and Jerry’s
name; a fan from Jack; and, best of all, a book from Sydney, who, as he
handed it to her, said with an honest blush: “I earned the money for
this, Miss Lochinvar, trying to be a man, as you suggested, so I have
a right to give it to you. I can’t give you your five dollars yet, but
I’ll do that, too, later.”

Three days after Christmas came the play. Jan never knew precisely how
that evening passed. It was a whirl of light and color and excitement
to her, but delightful beyond all telling. It seemed to her that there
never could be again such talented creatures brought together as the
girls proved. She could not criticize--all were wonderful to her, and
she saw no faults in any one’s acting. But if there were degrees in
the marvelous geniuses before her she felt proudly that the highest
were her own family, for Gwen’s haughty, yet animated, rendering of
the duchess seemed to unsophisticated Miss Lochinvar to prove that she
should give up her dreams of authorship and painting, and tread the
boards without delay, the glorious equal of Bernhardt and Duse.

Nor, in another way, was Gladys inferior--so graceful, dainty and
charming was her rendering of the princess. Jan was so proud of her
cousins that at one point she stood still, quite unconscious that a
burst of applause from the audience was intended for her and not for
Gwen, who had to pinch her and whisper to her to bow, or humble Jan
would not have acknowledged her favors.

It was fairyland to roll homeward in one’s own carriage after the
play with one’s fellow-actresses, rumpling one’s high-piled, powdered
hair recklessly against the carriage cushions, and burying one’s nose
luxuriously in the flowers which the usher had handed up to each young
artist, and which filled the carriage with their fragrance.

“It would never do for me to take to playacting and dressing up too
often,” said Jan with a sigh of delight and regret as the carriage
pulled up at the door, and Susan began to gather up the trophies. “If I
had much of this sort of thing I wouldn’t be any good for real things.”

“You would soon get used to them and not care so much,” said Gladys
with a touch of her old-time superiority and the air of an experienced
woman of the world.

“I think New Year’s is a queer, no-kind-of-a-sort of a day,” said
Gladys disconsolately on that morning. It was raining, and there was an
air of melancholy abroad which justified a dismal view of the holiday.

“I know it!” exclaimed Gwen. “Christmas is over, and school and lessons
are just ahead, and yet it is a holiday and you feel as though you
ought to be having a good time, but you’re not. I never did like New
Year’s day.”

“Besides, it’s so sad to get old and know you’ve got to be grown-ups in
just a few New Years more,” sighed Viva, so mournfully that the others
shouted, for at seven there hardly seems to be immediate necessity for
grieving over the approach of age.

“I wonder if there isn’t anything interesting we could do, something we
never do, to begin the year with a rush, and cheer us up,” said Jan,
characteristically, casting about for something to cheer her, even
while inadvertently admitting that she needed cheering.

Jerry uttered a wail, and Gwen swooped down on Jack, who was tormenting
her. “Let Jerry alone, you trying boy!” she cried. “What is the matter
with you this morning?”

“He got out of bed the wrong way,” said Sydney, who was lolling in the
window. “I had to trounce him for bothering Drom while I was getting
dressed.” Drom, who was quite recovered, save for a slight stiffness in
the leg which had been broken, wagged his tail at the mention of his
name, as if corroborating Sydney.

“There isn’t anything to do, Jan,” said Gwen, replying at last to
Jan’s suggestion. “We might get up something with the girls this
afternoon--if they’re not all off somewhere.”

“I think we are enough to have fun among ourselves,” said Jan, with an
eye on Sydney, who looked so glum that she longed to shake him out of
his thoughts and not let him go off to find amusement outside.

“Let’s play house!” exclaimed Jerry hopefully, a suggestion hailed with
a laugh from her sisters and a hug from Jan.

“See that little Italian boy with the violin,” cried Gladys. “Let’s get
him in to play for us to dance.”

“Oh, dancing in the morning!” said Sydney scornfully, but Gwen and Jan
fairly tore to the door without waiting to discuss the question--they
both would dance at any time of the day or night, and all day and
night, apparently.

The Italian came wonderingly, but smilingly, at their summons. He could
not speak English, and at first he thought that they wanted to order
him on, and eagerly protested with eloquently outspread palms that he
would not play within their hearing; that he was but beginning his
day’s work having been to the cathedral for mass.

All of this was lost on the girls, but they saw that he had
misunderstood them, and, falling back on pantomime, they signified
that he was to follow them up-stairs and play for them to dance.

“Ah, si, si, si,” he cried, smiling at his own misapprehension, at
them, and at the world at large, and obeyed them gladly.

In the nursery the impromptu ball began without loss of a moment.
The wandering minstrel played well. Even Sydney’s indifference
thawed beneath the strains of an inspiring waltz, and he swung the
girls around with considerable enjoyment, while the others danced
together, Jack also condescending, though he was at that mid-stage of
boyhood when he regarded all social customs as not only a bore, but a
conspiracy against true freedom.

[Illustration: The impromptu ball began without the loss of a moment.]

But Jack was certainly in a trying mood that morning. He contrived to
be exasperating in a dozen ways, suited to each person’s weaknesses,
and Gwen threatened to banish him if he did not reform at once, while
Jan--usually so patient with mischief--informed him that he was a
nuisance, and had begun the year about as badly as he could.

This stern remark made Jack both angry and ashamed, angry enough,
unfortunately, not to allow the shame to bring forth fruit. As the
smiling musician struck up a polka that must have made it hard for the
chairs to keep their legs still, and did make Jerry pick up her skirts
in an improvised dance all her own, Jack grew more obstreperous.

Gwen and Jan were dancing together, Sydney was trying the heel-and-toe
with Gladys, and Viva was polkaing with her largest doll, her face as
sweetly grave as usual, and her little form swaying most gracefully,
for serious Viva was a born dancer.

Suddenly the music became irregular in time, and Gwen called over Jan’s
shoulder as they whirled: “What are you doing, boy? You would have to
have crutches to dance that time, it is so hitchy!”

The Italian only smiled. To all blame as well as to praise he presented
the same unvarying smile, as a safe way to meet the uncertainties of an
unknown race and clime.

“’Tisn’t the boy, Gwen, it’s Jack!” cried Viva, who had stopped, after
vain pursuit of the time.

“Jack, what are you doing?” cried Gwen, and Jack grinned at her from
behind the ragged arm holding the bow which he had been joggling.

“Now I am going to have you put out!” cried Gwen, stopping short. “It’s
too bad for you to spoil our sport! I should think you’d be ashamed,
a great boy like you, to make yourself a nuisance and a baby! Hummie,
Hummie! come get Ivan, please; he’s bad.”

It was the second time that Jack had been called a nuisance in less
than half an hour, and the first time it had been Jan who had said it.
He was in an exasperating and exasperated frame of mind at best, and
Gwen’s words infuriated him. Besides, she had called him a baby, and
summoned the nurse! His hot temper, always in danger of flaring up,
flamed now. With a cry of rage he darted out from behind the musician,
snatched up a triangular block, one of Jerry’s architectural building
blocks lying by the table, and threw it with all his might at Gwen.

Sydney sprang to catch the uplifted hand, but too late. The block had
flown, with the undeviating course of a violent throw, straight at
Gwen’s face, and with a moan of pain the poor child threw her arms
above her head, covering her eyes, and sank to the floor on her knees.

For an instant no one moved, then Jan and Gladys, white with terror,
went to her and tried to raise her, but she drew away from their touch,
and groaning, “My eye--my eye is gone!” pitched forward fainting.

“Hummie, Hummie!” shrieked Viva, while Sydney lifted Gwen’s head to his
shoulder, and Jack, his wrath spent in the outburst which had done the
unknown harm, stood shaking in every limb, a pathetic image of horror,
and Jerry ran away screaming “Hummie!” at the top of her voice. Nurse
Hummel heard and ran, brushing past Jerry in the hall, and lifted Gwen.

“Was is happened?” she demanded, looking suspiciously toward the
Italian standing with his bow raised and his violin at his feet, his
face white under the brown tint.

“Jack threw a block--he was mad,” said Gladys hoarsely. “O Hummie, is
Gwen blind?”

“Blind! Mein Gott im Himmel!” murmured Hummie, and turned the
unconscious girl’s face toward her. Then she hastily let it fall
back on her shoulder and gathered her up as though she had been a
baby. “Ach, mein liebchen, my smart Gwen, mit die beautiful eyes!” she
moaned, and bore her away without answering Gladys’s awful question.

Mr. Graham was out, but Mrs. Graham was in her room in the extension,
away from the sounds of the household. Nurse Hummel called her as she
carried Gwen to her room, and the horror in the old nurse’s voice
penetrated Mrs. Graham’s ears through the closed doors.

She rushed out, and in an instant the children heard her low cry,
and then her voice raised to a shriek. “Sydney, Sydney!” she cried,
“ride on your wheel for a doctor as fast as you can! Get the first one
who will come! Then ride for Dr. Amberton, the oculist. Look in the
directory for his address. Hurry, oh, for Heaven’s sake, hurry, Syd!”

Sydney rushed from the room, and with one impulse Gladys and Jan turned
to each other, and held each other close, too frightened for tears.
Viva was comforting Jerry on the stairs. No one remembered Jack, who
most of all in the stricken household was to be pitied then. The boy
slunk away, withdrawing his hand from Drom’s compassionate tongue, and
crawling up the stairs, never stopped till he had reached the top of
the house, and crept shivering into the cupola, where he lay down, a
little heap of misery, to wait till Gwen had died, and they came to
seize him.

For hours it seemed to him he waited, yet no one came. He was cold,
but he did not mind that. In those awful moments he lived and thought
such agony that it seemed to him if they did not imprison him it would
do no harm to let him go free, for never again, never, could he be
insane with a fit of passion such as had made him begin the New Year by
killing his sister--or blinding her, was it? It did not matter. Jack
was wise enough to know that Gwen blind would not care for life.

At last a step came slowly, lightly, up the stairs, and Jack cowered
breathless. It was but one person, and not a policeman, not his father,
than whom Jack would rather face an army. It was a girlish step--Jan?
For the first time a ray of hope penetrated the gloom of poor Jack’s
mind. Jan always came to help. The door opened. It was Jan.

“O Jack, poor, poor little Jack,” she sobbed, and, kneeling, put her
arms around him with a tenderness he was too broken to resent. “I’m so
sorry for you! I know how dreadfully you feel now.”

“Is Gwen dead?” whispered Jack.

“No, oh, no, dear,” said Jan.

“Blind?” whispered Jack again.

“They don’t know. They can’t tell yet,” groaned Jan. “O poor, poor,
clever, dear Gwen, with all her plans, and her beautiful eyes!”

Jack shivered, and Jan remembered that she had come to comfort the
warm little heart, which was full of noble impulses, though black rage
sometimes held it in control.

She laid her cheek softly against Jack’s without speaking, and the boy
nestled close to her, feeling there might be pardon for him somewhere
since Jan did not cast him off.




CHAPTER XIV

“SO FAITHFUL IN LOVE, AND SO DAUNTLESS IN WAR”


It seemed to Jan and Gladys as if the entire world had sunk into
silence, waiting to hear whether or not Gwen must be blind. There was a
hush over the house. Every one spoke and moved softly, not only because
the poor little patient was suffering severe pain, but as if they were
all unconsciously listening for the verdict which they dreaded from
the doctors. And even in the streets they bore with them the muffled
atmosphere of their home. The outside world no longer seemed gay,
noisy, cheerful. Sorrow and anxiety deadened the sights and sounds of
others’ pleasure to them.

The best physicians of the city were working hard to save Gwen’s
sight--regular physicians to care for the nervous system, which had
sustained a serious shock, and the famous Dr. Amberton, the oculist,
to treat the eye itself, which the sharp corner of the block had struck
with such force that it was impossible to say for some days whether the
sight could be preserved.

Jan found herself in a different household from the one which had
received her three months earlier. In the face of this misfortune
threatening poor Gwen--one peculiarly dreadful to a girl of her tastes
and ambitions--the indifference to one another which had so shocked Jan
on her coming from her own closely united home disappeared, and the
atmosphere she breathed was full of love, though heavy with grief.

Mrs. Graham’s interest in her social pleasures, her clubs, and all the
outside issues which Jan had loyally struggled against believing that
she cared more for than for her family, were thrust into the background
and forgotten in the midst of the one absorbing thought. And Jan saw
that her uncle was at last her mother’s own brother; that Wall Street
and money-making no longer seemed important to him. Mr. and Mrs. Graham
went back to the days when they were first married, and Sydney and Gwen
were babies together, when, though they had a pretty home, it was
farther west and farther down in town, and, though Nurse Hummel was
with them, Mrs. Graham had more time and there was more necessity for
her taking care of the little ones. Gwen became once more to them that
baby girl whom they had then watched so proudly, and her mother hung
over her in her darkened room with a loving devotion which suggested
Jan’s own mother to the little exile.

Gwen turned to this new mother-love with childlike clinging. She
loved to lie with her bandaged eyes resting on her mother’s shoulder,
peaceful, and satisfied in something for which she had unconsciously
longed, though she could not help knowing that her mother’s tears,
which she felt when her groping hand touched her cheek, boded ill to
her.

Gladys was gentle, unselfish, absorbed in the thought of her sister,
which rendered her a far sweeter, lovelier Gladys than Jan would have
believed she could be when she was occupied only with poor, silly
little Gladys Graham.

Sydney hovered about Gwen’s door, racking his brains for something to
do for her, all his taciturn indifference lost in his pity and regret
for Gwen. Altogether, Jan could not help half wondering if the worst
were to come, and Gwen lost her sight, if the good accomplished would
not be worth the terrible purchase price.

Only Jack was outside the pale of the family love during these waiting
days. Jan’s heart ached for the poor little fellow, whose temper had
brought him anguish harder to bear than Gwen’s, but whose father could
not forgive him. Jack’s meals were served up-stairs, and his father
debated sending him away to a military school, where stern discipline
might check the temper which Mr. Graham characterized as “murderous.”
But Jan knew that the shock of seeing Gwen sink beneath the pain of
the missive he had thrown, and the torture of these past days when
every one avoided him, and he waited, like the rest, but not with the
rest, to learn Gwen’s fate, had burned into warm-hearted Jack’s brain
such horror of bursts of passion that the military discipline would
not be necessary, that he was completely cured of even a temptation to
violence.

“You are our little comfort, Janet,” said her uncle to her one night,
when in the dusk she sat by him chatting of her mother in the hope of
cheering him. “You won’t admit that our poor girl can lose the light
out of her young life, and though you aren’t an old, wise woman, I
can’t help feeling better for your faith.”

“Isn’t that just dear!” cried Jan. “You don’t know how I wish I could
help, but I honestly feel certain that God won’t let splendid, clever
Gwen be blind.”

“Splendid, clever people are the very ones who have to be perfected
by suffering, dear little Miss Lochinvar--queer how I’ve come to like
that name for you! But you do help. You have no notion how your gentle,
affectionate, sunny little presence cheers your aunt and me, and I
think Gladys is a much better girl for being with you. Jenny has lent
me a simple, genuine little girl who never thinks of herself, and so,
without trying, sweetens all her surroundings. I don’t see how I can
repay either Jennie or her loan,” said Jan’s uncle, drawing her up
close to his side with a warm caress.

Tears of happiness sprang into Jan’s eyes. “If you really want to do
something for me, Uncle Howard,” she whispered, “forgive poor little
Jack.”

Her uncle’s face hardened. “Your ‘poor little Jack’ is a thoroughly bad
boy,” he said. “I can’t forgive him till I know how Gwen comes out.”

“He has done just the same thing, however she comes out, uncle,” said
Jan cautiously. “He did not mean to harm Gwen--he never meant anything
at all, but flew into a rage, and threw the first thing that came
handy. He has done things like that always, and no one thought much
about it, only this time the block struck badly. He will never again
be the same--he is ever so much more to be pitied than Gwen! He isn’t
bad, Uncle Howard. He is a dear boy, generous, truthful, brave, but he
has got a terrific temper. One of our boys has such a temper, but mamma
watches and helps him all she can, and he is getting over it without
such a dreadful thing to cure him as poor Jack has had. You know Hummie
is a dear, but she can’t help a boy the way his father and mother can.”

“Why, Jan, are you implying that I am responsible for Jack’s
violence?” demanded her uncle.

Jan turned crimson, but stood to her guns after a fashion. “He needs
help, uncle, or he did need it--he will not forget now, I think,” she
said. “And you know Aunt Tina and you have been so busy! I love Jack,
Uncle Howard, and I pity him more than I do Gwen. How would you have
felt if you had blinded mamma when you were eleven?”

“My dear child, I never had such a fiendish temper as Jack’s,” said Mr.
Graham.

“No, you were more like Gwen, even and pleasant, and you weren’t like
Jack. But Jack is a noble boy. He isn’t mean, and he isn’t unkind,”
said Jan.

To her great relief her uncle gave a faint laugh. “No one remembers our
childhood like these grandmothers of ours!” he said. “You remember my
boyhood better than I do, Jan.”

“Let Jack come down and talk to you, uncle,” pleaded Jan, after she
had punished him for his impertinence by spatting the end of his nose
with a favorite movement of her forefinger. “We are all miserable and
worried to death now, but we have each other. But there is Jack--only
eleven--up-stairs, like a prisoner, worse off than any of us, because
he caused all this sorrow! Only Syd and I go near him--and Drom--and
after a while he will be so unhappy you can’t do anything with
him--he’s having a fearful time--it would kill me!”

“Who is Drom?” asked Mr. Graham.

“The poor little dog Syd and I saved and had his broken leg set. He’s
a darling, so loving and grateful, and he knows more than lots of
people!” said Jan.

“What is that Mrs. Browning wrote about some one whose face looked
brighter for the little brown bee’s humming? I used to have time to
read, but I don’t get a moment now! You are a born lover, Jan. Some
people have a talent for loving, just as others have a talent for
music, and some--a few--for cooking,” said her uncle. “I seem to
remember hearing how you swooped down on the persecutors of that dog.
And so you think I’m a bad father?”

“O Uncle Howard, I never thought anything so horrid or so impertinent!”
cried Jan. “I’m only a little girl, and what do I know about bringing
up children? I never knew any girl outside a story-book who knew how
to bring up a family. But of course I feel as though nothing could be
nice but mamma’s ways, because we are the very happiest children in the
world, and I know she wouldn’t dare leave Jack all alone these dreadful
days.”

There was silence for a few moments, and then to Jan’s infinite relief
and joy her uncle said: “You are right, Janet. It will do the boy
mischief to be left brooding through these dark days of anxiety. And
I suspect you are right and he has needed wise control all along. Go
up and tell Jack to come to me. Tell him not to be afraid--I know he
has had punishment enough--but to come down, and we’ll begin all over
again.”

Jan ran off on her errand with a lighter heart than she had had since
the day of the accident, first giving her uncle a warmly grateful kiss
on the forehead, around which the hair was beginning to grow a little
thin. Jack needed no persuading to follow her down-stairs. Much as he
had always feared his father, he would have faced anything rather than
be left any longer a prisoner with his own thoughts.

Jan left him at Gwen’s door with a kiss the boy did not resent. “Tell
your father all you think and feel, Jack, and don’t be afraid of him.
He understands and wants to help you. We must all hold on to each other
in trouble, you know.” And Jack went slowly on, feeling that they all
must hold on to Jan forever.

The library door closed behind him, and no one ever knew precisely
what happened in the interview between the poor little culprit and his
father. But when, long past his usual bed hour, Nurse Hummel went to
hunt Jack up, she found him curled up asleep in his father’s arms in
the great leather chair, his legs twined over its arm to supplement
his father’s lap, his cheeks flushed and stained with tears, but peace
written on the parted lips, which looked very childish in slumber.

As Jan passed into Gwen’s room she found her alone. Her mother,
thinking her sleeping, had stolen away, and Jan, for the same reason,
seated herself noiselessly in the corner, afraid to open the door again
lest she waken Gwen. But Gwen was not asleep. In a few moments she
spoke. “Jan,” she said, “please come where I can touch you.”

“How did you know who it was?” asked Jan as she obeyed.

“Blind people have keen hearing,” said Gwen bitterly. “My ears are
learning double work.”

“I suppose that’s sensible of them, to improve themselves, but
considering you’re not blind they might save themselves the trouble, if
they were lazy,” said Jan lightly, not betraying the shock Gwen’s words
gave her, for no one had hinted at blindness to Gwen.

“Do you think I don’t know?” asked Gwen, raising herself on one elbow
and speaking with such fierceness that Jan was frightened. “Do you
suppose I don’t know what makes mamma so loving to me, and why she
cries quietly when she thinks I won’t know it? Do you suppose, Janet
Howe, that I don’t know why those horrible doctors are so idiotically
cheerful with me? If that Doctor Amberton tells me any more silly jokes
I won’t answer for what I’ll do or say to him! I am blind--blind--and
I’d far rather be dead! Why didn’t Jack kill me if he wanted to do
anything to me? Do you suppose I can _live_ without my eyes? How
can I write, or paint, or be great--or stand it?”

Jan was dreadfully frightened. “You are not blind, Gwen,” she stammered.

“Now don’t you try to tell me stories, Jan, because I won’t stand it!”
said Gwen. “I got the truth out of Viva the other day when mamma let
the poor youngster try to read to me. I nearly scared her to death,
because she won’t fib, and she didn’t want to tell the truth. Now I’m
talking to you, because I trust you, and I can’t keep it to myself any
longer. Jan, Jan, for mercy’s sake, say it isn’t so!”

“It isn’t so--or it very likely isn’t so,” said trembling Jan. “If you
get all excited and go on like this I don’t know what harm it may do
you--the doctors all say to keep you perfectly still for fear of fever.
You are not blind, and that’s the truth. But they are anxious about
you. Now you see I’m not deceiving you one bit! We didn’t know you
were lying there fretting--why didn’t you speak before? You will get
well--I’m just as sure as I can be you will--but we all love you so
much we feel awfully to have you sick. But if you did have some trouble
with your eyes you could be just as great--greater! Isn’t it lovely
to have your mother all to yourself like this, and your father never
thinking of business, and Gladys and Sydney, and even little Jerry--of
course sweet little Viva--all just devoted to you? Don’t fret, Gwen. If
you are sick ever so long, you will see!”

“Come here, Jan. I want to hold you!” cried Gwen, clutching her cousin
with burning hands, and drawing her downward in a half-delirious grasp.
“I won’t see, and that’s just it! O Jan, don’t you know, don’t you
feel, what that means?”

“It isn’t going to be,” maintained Jan stoutly. “Yes, I know exactly
what it means, but it won’t be so! If it were, you would be just the
very heart of this whole family, and you could write the loveliest
stories and poems, and everything like that! But, what is better, you
could love them and they’d love you, until the whole house would be so
much nicer--like ours, which you always said must be lovely, if it was
poor. For love is best, of anything, isn’t it?”

“No, no,” moaned poor Gwen; “my eyes are.” But in spite of the tragedy
hanging over her, Jan comforted her, and she presently fell asleep, her
burning cheek pressed against Jan’s cool one, Jan’s firm hand stroking
her tumbled hair, Jan’s strong young shoulders supporting her, and
Jan’s warm young heart sustaining her by its courage and love.




CHAPTER XV

“ONE TOUCH TO HER HAND AND ONE WORD IN HER EAR”


“See here, Jan, it’s no good,” said Sydney, speaking so suddenly that
Miss Lochinvar was startled.

“What isn’t any good?” she asked, giving a last twitch to Tommy
Traddles’s red ribbon.

“Trying to earn money and go to school at the same time. I am not
making a success of either, for I have only earned about four dollars
and ninety-nine cents,” replied Sydney gloomily.

“Is the man getting impatient?” inquired Jan.

Sydney nodded with much emphasis. “Won’t wait,” he said laconically.

“Then I’ll tell you what to do, Syd,” said Jan, coming over to where
the boy was sitting, moodily jerking the shade cord at the window. “Ask
Gwen to lend you the money. She has quite a good deal--nearly fifty
dollars--left from Christmas presents, and allowance, and so on, and it
would be better for you to let her help you out, as I can’t.”

“I don’t want a girl’s money, either hers or yours,” said Sydney.

“Well, I suppose you don’t _want_ it, but you _need_ it
dreadfully,” said Jan with some subtleness of distinction. “And I
want to tell you, Syd, that I think it would be real kindness to talk
to Gwen about your troubles, and get her interested in something.
She isn’t better, and I heard the doctor say that if she couldn’t be
aroused she’d have a serious illness. Get her to think of something
besides her poor eyes, and it would be good for her. Gwen would be
glad, too, to think you trusted her.”

“I wonder!” said Sydney doubtfully.

“Well, I know!” said Jan emphatically. “And then, after she’s lent you
the money to square up, tell your father all about it, and get him to
put you in the way of earning something. He ought to know. I don’t feel
right to think I know and he doesn’t. It is wrong to help you have
secrets from him. I wouldn’t have done it if I could have coaxed you
to tell at first.”

“Maybe I will talk to Gwen,” said Sydney slowly. “I don’t see any other
way unless I do talk to father, and he’d make it pleasant for me if I
did that!”

“He might take you away from that school and those extravagant boys,
but you’d find he wouldn’t be hard on you. And I should think you’d
like to get out of that crowd,” said Jan.

Sydney flushed with sudden eagerness. “Say, Jan,” he cried, “I’d give
my head to be let off from college! There’s no college in me--I’m
crazy to live out of doors. I don’t even want to go into business! If
I thought daddy would give me a start civil engineering I’d work hard,
but he won’t. What I’d like is to go out on a ranch. I’d rather study
men and beasts than books. But there’s no use talking--he’s made up his
mind to college for me, and to college I must go.”

“Isn’t that silly! To say there’s no use talking, when you haven’t
tried talking!” exclaimed Jan impatiently. “I never saw a family that
knew one another so little! Why, Uncle Howard isn’t an ogre! How do
you know he wouldn’t let you do what you like best? ’Tisn’t likely he
wants you to be spoiled! Come home with me when I go,” she added with
sudden inspiration. “Fred talks of ranching, and we’d make a man of you
in Kansas.”

Sydney swallowed the implication that he was not wholly manly now with
fairly good grace. “Well,” he said, “it’s pretty hard for a fellow to
be different from all around him. I haven’t had to rough it, and I
suppose I got extravagant without knowing it. I’m disgusted enough with
myself to find myself in debt, goodness knows! I’ll see Gwen to-day,
and if the poor old girl wants to lend me her ducats I’ll brace up
and make a clean breast to father. You deserve to have your advice
followed, for you’ve been a trump to me, and to us all, down to this
fellow.” And Sydney affectionately twitched Drom’s tail.

Jan gave Gwen a hint of her brother’s approaching visit, and Sydney
found her as gentle, loving, and interested as a sister could be.

“Why, of course, I’ll lend you the money, Syd,” she said. “You ought to
have told me before. I’ve been thinking that we all told one another
too little. Since I’ve been lying here I’ve had to see with inside
eyes, you know, and I’ve discovered several things. You’ll have to
find my little bead bag in my upper drawer, Syd. That has my money in
it--not my pocket-book. And you’ll have to help yourself to what you
want--if I have so much--for I----”

Sydney found the abrupt breaking off of Gwen’s sentence very pathetic.
If only Gwen might see again!

Sydney found the bag and counted over the crisp bills it contained.
“You have four dollars more than I need to pay that shopkeeper,” he
said, putting them back. “Jan lent me five some time ago.”

“O Syd! When Jan has so little!” said Gwen with reproach in her voice.
“And you went to your cousin instead of your sister!”

“Well, Gwen, I guess I’ve been a dunce! We have got into the way of
standing off from one another, but you’re a trump, and we’ll stick
together henceforth,” said Sydney.

Joy such as she had not thought that she could feel again surged
through Gwen’s heart at these words. “Syd,” she said, “if ‘Miss
Lochinvar’ had never ‘come out of the West’ we wouldn’t have discovered
how horrid it was to be so selfish and distant--maybe never.”

“That’s shaky English, but solemn truth, Gwendoline, my dear,” said
Sydney. “Jan’s a trump! That’s two trumps now--we’ll have a handful if
we keep on! She’s not one bit goody-goody and she never preaches, but
she seems to clear the air--kind of like a thunder-shower that never
strikes.”

“More like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole,” said Gwen
softly. “I love her so, I could never tell you! And I always think of
that line in the gospel when I think about her. Now finish up getting
acquainted with the Graham family, Syd, and tell papa how things have
been going at school. He has a right to know, and I don’t believe it
is a good place for you where the boys are spending so much money, and
getting into debt, and all! Tell him I’ve lent you the money, so you
don’t want him to help you that way, but you do want him to show you
how to pay me back, and start square. If I’m not mistaken, papa will be
pleased to find you see things straight without needing showing, and
instead of scolding you, you’ll find him kind and ready to lend a hand.”

“I don’t know that I could say honestly that I hadn’t had some showing
as to the most honorable and manly course,” said Syd truthfully. “Jan
gave me the tip, and now you back her up. I didn’t expect to find girls
so on the level, but I’m glad to say I’m able to see that you’re both
right. I’ll talk to dad the first chance he gives me, and I’m much
obliged, Gwen; we’re better friends from this day. I guess you won’t be
blind--we all are seeing a good deal clearer, strikes me.” And Sydney
disappeared with a boy’s awkwardness in expressing the deep gratitude
and the softer emotion which filled him.

“Ask Gwen,” said Jan, the artful, as Viva came begging for a story at
dusk. She was beginning to say “Ask Gwen” as often as possible when
one of the three younger Grahams implored a favor. It was long that
they had waited for Gwen’s sentence, and still the doctors could not
be sure of what it was to be. Gladys and Jan had resumed school, and
the hours dragged while the poor child waited their return and the
coming of her friends who were faithful in spending some time with
her each afternoon. It was to little Jerry and Viva that Gwen found
herself turning for comfort while the others were away; Viva always
gentle, grave, and sweet; Jerry showing herself the dearest mite, with
her headstrong, impulsive baby nature toned down to meet the needs of
her whom she now invariably called her “poor, dear little Gwennie.”
Gwendoline’s talent for story-making was used now chiefly to entertain
Viva, while Jerry spun yarns for “poor, dear little Gwennie,” usually
of thrilling interest, though briefly sustained.

“Once there was a dreat, bid lion, and he roared--like dis!” And Jerry
interrupted her recital to open her mouth to its widest extent and
roar fearfully in a deep alto. “And he was wery hundry, and he came to
N’Yort, and he ated up seven, five, free little dirls on n’avenue, and
Jewwy Draham shood him off wid her stirts in bot’ hands, and she stared
him so he was awful feared, and she said: ‘Poor, poor lion, come in
n’house and see little Gwennie!’ Isn’t dat er fine stowy?”

“Well, he might be an awkward caller,” laughed Gwen. “Perhaps if he’d
eaten up so many little girls he wasn’t hungry, though. Yes, that’s a
fine story, Jerry!” And Gwen groped for the little dimpled hands to
squeeze them, and Jerry snuggled down with rapturous kisses for “poor,
dear Gwennie.”

Jan rejoiced to see how unconsciously but surely the Graham household
was knitting together around Gwen’s bed. At the worst they would be
happier than before the accident, but Jan would not admit, even to
herself, that the worst was possible.

Sydney had discovered his father. In a long, intimate talk the boy
had laid before him the difficulties and temptations of his little
world, and found himself telling the man, who remembered quite well,
after all, how it felt to be a boy, some things that he had not said
to the girls. But they had proved right in their prophecies of how his
father would take Sydney’s disclosures. With unspoken self-reproach for
having left a boy of sixteen unguarded, Mr. Graham set to work to undo
his mistakes. If Sydney did not feel that he would be a success as a
business man or as a professional one, Mr. Graham said, he would not
ask him to go through college. But he did ask him now to work harder
than he had ever done at his books, and prepare himself for whatever he
was to be in the future by doing his duty faithfully in the present.
And he promised him to send him every afternoon to a friend of his, a
professor at Columbia, who had asked for an intelligent boy to copy for
him notes he was making on natural history. He would pay Sydney for
his labor, and thus he could set himself right in his own eyes, and
pay back the money his sister had lent him. In the meantime he would
be having the best possible companionship, and be in the way of making
sure that he was not mistaken in deciding that college life and study
had no charm for him.

Sydney felt as though the gloom in which he had walked for months had
given way to a glare of sunshine, and he blessed Jan in his heart for
showing him the road to the best and most needed friend that a boy of
his age could have--his own kind father.

“Daisy and Ida Hammond have left school,” announced Gladys, bursting
into Gwen’s room one day. “They said their mother considered the
Hydra less exclusive that it had been, and was going to let them go to
boarding-school.”

“I don’t see how they stood it so long after they were found out,”
said Gwen scornfully. “It’s rather nice of them to make the Hydra more
exclusive by removing the only girls in it who had been found out in a
disgraceful act.” Gwen was stronger; she could bear sudden outbursts
from the children, and Jan couldn’t help hoping that the next step
would be the restoration of the wounded eyes to light and health.

“Oh, as to the exclusive, that refers to me, I suspect,” said Jan so
carelessly that it showed how completely she had lost the timidity and
wounded sensibility of her first days in New York. “Tommy Traddles,”
she added to the cat lying at Gwen’s feet, curled over on his back,
with his four feet drawn up on his white breast, and his tongue
sticking out while he looked over the top of his head to see what
effect his blandishments had, “Tommy Traddles, you may consider that
a squirm, but I consider it a device for winning attention.” And she
proceeded to bury her fingers in Tommy’s white shirt-front, while he
shut his eyes in blissful satisfaction with the result of his “device.”

“Well, I am thankful they have gone,” said Gladys, removing her rubbers
with her right hand while her left thoughtfully smoothed her stocking.
“It was very disagreeable to have them around when you didn’t want to
go with them. And your set have not been so very anxious to have me,
Gwen. If it hadn’t been for Jan I’d have been quite out of it since the
fuss.”

“Slang, Gladys?” hinted Gwen, for they had pledged themselves never
to use slang--or, as everybody said in the ancient days of Pinafore:
“Hardly ever!” She had hard work not to rejoice over her sister’s
admission, and found it quite impossible not to smile.

“I know a great deal more than I did,” continued Gladys. “Those
girls are really a dreadful warning to me. I can see plainly now how
different a real lady is from an imitation one. It’s funny how blind I
was.” She stopped short, frightened by having used a word that never
was to be mentioned before Gwen.

But Gwen met the allusion quietly. “You were blind first, Glad, and got
well. Maybe I’ll get well, too. I feel stronger, and sometimes I hope
a little. If I don’t get well, I’m going to try not to be a failure,
and be brave,” she said.

Gladys went over to her and kissed her with a sweet gravity that was
pretty to see in the little girl who had been so shallow and vain. “My
kind of blindness was worse than yours, Gwen,” she said. “You’d be
nicer than I ever could be if you lost all your eyes.”

“Gwen isn’t a spider, and Gwen is going to get well,” cried Jan,
laughing to keep from crying.

Gladys left the room hastily and Jan perched on the bedside, holding
Tommy Traddles’s paw in one hand and Gwen’s fingers in the other.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you something Aunt Tina said yesterday, and
I haven’t had a chance,” she said. “Something just for yourself to
hear--right in your own ear.”

“This is my own ear, Jan; it was given to me fifteen years ago,” said
Gwen, inclining that organ toward her cousin.

Jan leaned forward to whisper into it. “She said that you were making
such a peaceful, happy little spot of your room, and were so brave and
cheerful, and all the children were getting so loving and gentle with
you that she half dreaded to have you get well and break up the little
oasis in the midst of a selfish world. Isn’t that nice for your mother
to have said?” And Gwen could not help feeling that it was.




CHAPTER XVI

“HAVE YE E’ER HEARD OF GALLANT LIKE YOUNG LOCHINVAR?”


The longer days and greater cold had come. But with the cold was
interspersed here and there a day on which there was a vague far-off
hint of spring in the air, and the lover of nature who went up on the
short Northern road or over into New Jersey to get the full flavor of
his Sunday rest came back with reports of swelling twigs and the first
note of the bluebird; for it was late February.

Although the doctors would not give better reasons for hope than
their more cheerful manner, there was a growing feeling in the Graham
household that Gwen was going to escape her hard doom, and it was on
one of those illusive days when the atmosphere seems full of light that
Doctor Amberton definitely authorized rejoicing by telling them, when
he came down from Gwen’s room, that the bandages could be removed from
her eyes in a week, and that they would be restored to enjoy the spring
sunshine.

Mr. Graham shook the doctor’s hand hard, speechless with the joy of
this tidings, while his wife fell sobbing on Jan’s neck, and Viva
tumbled down in a burst of emotion such as silent children sometimes
give way to, and hugged the andirons, kissing their polished tops and
clinging to them hysterically.

Gladys, Sydney, and Jack were not there to hear the good news, but
Viva ran to call them, and they were not less stirred by the blessed
certainty of Gwen’s escape than were the others; indeed Jack turned
so white on being told that his angry hand had not blinded his sister
after all that his mother sprang to put her arm around him, thinking
that he was fainting.

Who was to take the good news to Gwen, and how was she to be told?
Gladys wanted the entire family to go up in a body and rejoice with
her, but Mrs. Graham would not permit this, and Mr. Graham suggested
that he and her mother went up together to bring comfort to the girl in
whom they had always felt so much pride, but who had become very dear
in these hard six weeks of courageously borne suffering.

Jan whispered something in her aunt’s ear, and Mrs. Graham hesitated.
After a moment she said: “I believe it would be the very thing!” and
turning to the others added: “Jan suggests that we let Jack go up,
quite alone, and tell Gwen that he and she have escaped the awful
consequences of his fit of rage. She says he can tell her that he took
her eyes from her, and now he has come to give them back again. It is a
pretty idea. Shall we carry it out?”

“Yes,” said Sydney decidedly, and “Ye--es,” voted Gladys doubtfully.
But Mr. Graham settled the question by saying: “Go up-stairs to your
sister, Ivan, my man, and tell her that you are bringing her back her
sight--that Doctor Amberton has said that she is safe, and we are
coming up in half an hour to try to tell her how thankful we are.”

[Illustration: “You’re not going to be blind, not one bit!” said Jack.]

Jack turned pale, then red; he was not sure whether he liked the errand
or not. He was afraid, and it seemed to him very solemn and difficult
to go to Gwen on such an embassy. He sat down to think it over on the
stairs, and as he thought it rushed over him how Gwen was lying
there, not knowing that she was not to be blind; how all this time she
had patiently awaited this day, knowing it might never come, and worst
of all how his hand had been the one to smite her. A sob rose in his
throat and he scrambled to his feet. Yes, it was good that they had let
him tell her that she was safe, and he must not lose another moment
in doing it. He fell up the stairs, and as he opened Gwen’s door she
sprang up in bed, feeling instantly the excitement with which he was
quivering as his hand touched the knob.

“What is it, Jack!” she said quickly.

“Oh, Gwen, ain’t it just great?” gasped Jack. “The doctor’s gone and
they sent me up to bring you your eyes, they said, because I took them
away. My, but we’re glad!”

Gwen clutched the arm impetuously thrown around her. “Jack, is it
true?” she whispered.

“True! Doctor Amberton said so! You’re to have the bandages off in a
week--you’re not going to be blind, not one bit!” said Jack, choking.

Gwen fell back, burying her face in the pillows. If ever there was a
sincere “Thank God!” it was the one that filled the poor child’s heart,
but could not pass beyond the happy sobs rising in her throat.

Jack was frightened. “Have I killed you this time, Gwen?” he asked
faintly.

Gwen turned back again and caught him in her arms. “Killed me! My
darling old Jack, you have made me feel as though I should never die! I
believe I have been dead all these horrible weeks since New Year’s.”

“They’re all coming up in a little while to tell you how glad they
are--they’re all down in the back parlor nearly out of their minds,
they’re so glad,” said Jack, much relieved to find Gwen unharmed.

“Call Hummie, Jack, and then go tell them to come on--I can’t wait,”
said Gwen.

Before Hummie had recovered from the joy of Gwen’s reprieve
sufficiently to make her fine, as Gwen had intended to be made, the
trooping of the entire family up the stairs fell on her happy ears. She
knelt in the bed in her long crimson wrapper, and held out her arms
speechlessly for a universal embrace.

Sydney, Gladys, and Jan held back, feeling that Gwen’s father and
mother had the first right to her, but Viva and Jerry threw themselves
into the outstretched arms, as Mr. Graham and his wife clasped Gwen at
the same moment. There was a confused scrimmage of hugging and kissing,
and Mr. Graham recognized Gwen’s linen bandage and Jerry’s lace collar,
mixed with Viva’s hair, while Mrs. Graham rained tears and kisses on
her husband’s cuff. But it did not matter. In a moment Gladys and
Jan were added to the joyous confusion, and there was such an utter
abandonment of happiness, and such oblivion to anything but the blessed
fact that Gwen’s precious eyes were safe that Gwen realized for the
first time how dear she was to all these throbbing hearts, and how hard
must have been the past six weeks to them as well as to her, in which
they were bravely trying to keep their own grief out of sight while
they helped her bear her burden.

“When can I really have my eyes?” asked Gwen, when some of the
excitement had spent itself.

“You may take off the bandages in a week, but your eyes must be used
with the greatest care, and very little, all summer. Then by fall
Doctor Amberton thinks they will be perfectly strong,” said Mrs.
Graham. “And now, children, go your ways, for Gwen and I are going to
rest quite by ourselves for a little while.”

Gladys and Jan left the room, arms around each other’s waists, in the
most loving girl fashion, and Mr. Graham followed behind them, smiling,
well pleased at the sight, and remembering how positively Gladys had
declared that she “would not go about with a Wild West Show” when he
had announced Jan’s coming. “Little Miss Lochinvar has won us all,” he
thought, realizing what a happy thing her coming had been for his own
children.

“I wonder, Jan,” Gladys was saying as they went toward Jan’s room,
“I wonder if mamma wouldn’t let us ask some of our friends for a
celebration on the day Gwen tries her eyes for the first time? She
needn’t see them long enough to get tired, but it would be rather nice
to get together everybody she likes to look at when she looks for the
first time for so long.”

“It would be ever so nice,” said Jan heartily. “If Aunt Tina will let
us--if she doesn’t think it would hurt Gwen.”

At the self-same moment Gwen was saying: “Mamma, it is Miss Lochinvar’s
birthday on the 1st of March. Don’t you think I might use my eyes for
the first time on that day, and have a little surprise party for her? I
wouldn’t have to stay in the room longer than was safe, but I’d like to
get the girls together to keep Jan’s birthday properly. She’s done more
for me than you can guess; I couldn’t repay her if I tried forever.
And look at Gladys and Sydney! And how much sweeter Jerry is! And she
hasn’t any more notion of how nice she is than--than----”

“Than a bright little wild rose along the roadside knows how sweet
and cheering it is,” finished her mother for her, as Gwen hesitated
for a simile. “It is only that she is good, really good, unselfish,
unaffected, sincere. She has done a great deal for us all, Gwen. It is
a curious thing to see how one little girl can diffuse happiness, and
make her sweetness contagious only by unconsciously showing how lovely
such a true little woman can be. I mean to write your Aunt Jennie and
beg her to let Jan go with us to the seashore this summer and stay on
for another winter in New York; I have a hope of getting her gradually
to make this her home, and her visits to Crescendo.”

“You won’t succeed, mamma,” said Gwen, shaking her head dolefully.
“I’d give anything in the world to keep Jan every minute of my life,
but she’s too fond of home for that. She truly doesn’t think there’s
anything to do in New York--she said so once, and then was afraid she’d
hurt my feelings. Nothing to do here, but lots that is interesting in
that little Crescendo of hers--only think!” And Gwen laughed.

“Well, at the worst, her father and mother must let her spend part of
each year with us, now that they have taught us to depend upon her,”
said Mrs. Graham. “However, we need not settle that now. About your
party: Yes, I think it can be done, and I should like to honor Jan by
celebrating her birthday. On the first? That is eight days off. Very
well; we’ll have the party. And now rest, my darling Gwen. You can’t
dream how glad your mother is to know you are to look upon her again so
soon!”

“I’m not precisely sorry, mamma,” said Gwen, seizing the hand put
out to her, and returning with interest the kiss given her. What a
beautiful world it was! and how soft and warm was the atmosphere
becoming of the big house which even Gwen had sometimes found chilling!

Mrs. Graham almost betrayed herself by a laugh as Jan and Gladys
unfolded to her their plan for a surprise party so nearly identical
with Gwen’s, except that they had not fixed a definite date, and had a
different end in view in holding it. But she composed her eyes and lips
to the necessary seriousness, approved their plans as she had Gwen’s,
and set about the preparations for both parties. It is not difficult to
prepare for two parties at the same time when both are practically one.
The pair of conspirators kept their secret from the one conspirator,
and Mrs. Graham conspired with both. The same guests were selected by
both camps, except that Sydney was called in to Gwen’s aid, and asked
the boys and girls with whom Jan had played the tennis match, and whom
his sisters did not know.

March 1st fell on Saturday--any one who is interested to know can
easily discover from that fact the year in which the party was
given--and that made it easy to get the guests together early, without
regard to school. It was better, for Gwen’s sake, to make it an
afternoon party, “quite like little children,” as Gladys remarked with
a slight tendency to dissatisfaction.

Viva and Jerry found this a most desirable feature of the celebration;
they were ready in spotless white long before the appointed hour. Too
long before; for Jerry was discovered sitting demurely close to the
butler’s pantry door in the dining-room, very quiet and correct, but
with a long streak of chocolate on each cheek, beyond the reach of
her tongue, which had made the lips stainless, and a great smudge of
chocolate and cream filling on the front of her dainty tucked guimpe,
the cause of which Susan correctly traced to the loss of six little
round chocolate-iced cakes from the pantry.

When the guests began arriving Jan and Gladys were much puzzled by
being called upon to welcome several whom they had not invited, and
whom they had difficulty in receiving as though they had done so.
But Jan was delighted to see again her opponent who had given her
such a hard fight for victory in the tennis contest, and when she had
sufficiently recovered from her surprise at seeing her hailed Molly Van
Buren rapturously.

Gwen sent for Jan to come to her when all the guests had arrived, and
Jan ran across the hall to her cousin’s room. She found Gwen dressed in
silvery-blue, looking paler for her long confinement, and at least a
quarter of a head taller--Gwen was decidedly up to the modern standard
of girls’ height.

“Do you know why mamma asked all these girls and boys here to-day, Miss
Lochinvar?” asked Gwen.

“I should think I did! Gladys and I planned it as a surprise to
you--it’s to celebrate your recovery!” laughed Jan.

“It’s nothing of the sort!” cried Gwen. “It’s mamma’s secret and mine,
and it’s to celebrate your birthday.”

“Were you plotting a party, too? Did you remember it was my birthday?”
cried Jan. “Well, of all things! What a memory you have, Gwen! I
haven’t mentioned my birthday but once, ever so long ago, when you
asked me when it came. And to think that Aunt Tina never said a word!”

“Nor to me either,” Gwen laughingly protested. “Mamma must have been
having rather a pleasant time all by herself, fooling all three of us.
Well, it’s all the nicer. Now, what made me send for you was that I
want to give you your first birthday present, and let you take these
linens off my eyes--I believe you’re such an unselfish old darling that
you’d rather do it than have millions left you.”

Jan’s color went and came; no one had ever known--hardly she
herself--what a grief the prospect of Gwen’s great sorrow had been to
her. And now this little ceremony moved her proportionately. Her hands
trembled as she unfastened the strings holding Gwen’s long eclipse of
her eyes, and the linen bandages slipped down, and were gone--gone,
thank Heaven, forever! “I’m truly glad to see you, blessed Miss
Lochinvar,” said Gwen as she gazed lovingly at the tearful face of her
cousin, the first she had seen for seven dreary weeks. “Come, now; let
me go with you. Steady me, Jan--the light and walking by sight seems
queer to me.”

Jan steadied Gwen with her arm around her waist, and felt her tremble,
but she knew that it was with joy. Then, with Gwen’s hand resting on
her shoulder, Jan led her triumphantly down to the parlor. All her
school friends clustered around her, and for a few moments Gwen held
court. Then Sydney came into the middle of the room, and said: “Ladies
and gentlemen, this is a surprise party. Gwen is surprised that Gladys
and Jan have a party, and they are surprised that Gwen has one. So you
are the party and they are the surprise--which isn’t the usual way
of having surprise parties. Gladys and Jan’s party is to celebrate
Gwen’s recovery. Gwen’s party is because it is Jan’s birthday. So
you can consider yourself celebrating which you prefer--for myself
I’m celebrating both with all my might. When our cousin came on we
called her ‘Miss Lochinvar,’ because she ‘came out of the West,’ and
now we think we were sort of prophets, because the name fits her in
lots of ways--chiefly because no one ‘e’er heard of gallant like young
Lochinvar.’ There never was such an all-round trump of a girl as our
cousin Janet Howe, alias Miss Lochinvar. We couldn’t find a picture of
that hero, Jan,” he added, turning to poor Jan, who looked ready to
sink through the floor from embarrassment. “But we wanted to give you a
picture, because you like them so much, and so you could have something
to remember this day by at home if ever you go back--and don’t you dare
to try going! So we got you this copy of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider; it
was the nearest we could come to young Lochinvar.” Sydney then gave
place to Jack, who proudly bore the picture to Jan, remarking briefly:
“Here, Jan. I made the verse.”

Jan received the large picture timidly, but suddenly she laughed, for
on its wrapping she read this verse of Jack’s:

  Jan:
  From Ivan
  And the Clan.

Gwen’s gift was a small, but exquisite, old Italian lamp. “Because you
were my light in darkness,” she whispered, and Jan choked.

Gladys had characteristically chosen a ring, a slender circle of
turquoise, for her gift. “I want you to wear something to remind you of
me every minute,” she said.

Viva and Jerry had been included with Jack in the gift of the picture,
but Mrs. Graham gave Jan all the Waverley novels, bound in soft
morocco, and her uncle’s gift was a check for fifty dollars, to do with
as she pleased, and which Jan looked at with wildly joyous visions of
what it would purchase for the young folk in Crescendo.

Gwen tired soon, and went away for a while to rest before supper while
the others had games and dancing. She reappeared for a short time to
take her place beside Jan at the head of the table, and be waited on
like one of a pair of queen bees, plied with honey, instead of waiting
on her guests, as she would have done at any ordinary party.

But, as the guests agreed when they departed early, it was not an
ordinary party in any sense, and Jan convulsed her hearers by declaring
that it was nicer--more like a Crescendo party--than any she had seen
in New York. “But,” she added, gloating over her treasures, “it would
be queer if I hadn’t thought it nice.”

Mrs. Graham, remembering the magnitude of her orders at expensive
caterers, smiled to herself at the notion of Jan’s birthday party
and Gwen’s “thanksgiving party,” as Sydney called it, resembling the
gaieties of Crescendo. But she understood that Jan had meant that it
was more simple and childish than the early-old functions which she had
seen since her arrival, and was well pleased.

“You’re all so good to me!” sighed Jan, as she kissed her uncle and
aunt good night, with an extra hug for gratitude. “I can’t ever thank
you!”

“Pshaw! It’s all because we never saw ‘gallant like young Lochinvar,’”
said Sydney, who was standing by.




CHAPTER XVII

“THERE WAS MOUNTING ’MONG GRAEMES OF THE NETHERBY CLAN”


The Graham family was at breakfast, the same group assembled--with
the addition of Jan herself--as on that morning nearly half a year
before when Mr. Graham had struck consternation to it, individually and
collectively, by announcing Jan’s coming.

Susan no longer stood behind Jerry’s chair, for she no longer
misbehaved sufficiently to require special watchfulness, so Susan
supplemented the waitress in small tasks, and now brought in the mail
and laid it at Mr. Graham’s place.

Mr. Graham sorted it, handed three or four notes to his wife, gave
Sydney a notice from his school-club secretary, handed Jack the paper
with the adventure serial he was pursuing rather than perusing, smiled
as he gave Gladys a pink envelope suggestive of heliotrope and
addressed in a girl’s hand, and kept several letters for himself.

One of these he read with a lengthening face, and, when his eyes had
traveled down to the foot of the last page, looked over at Jan so
gravely that her heart gave an apprehensive bound, and Gwen exclaimed:
“There’s nothing wrong, is there, papa?”

“No--at least, yes, I think there is.--Nothing wrong at your home, Jan,
so don’t look so startled, child,” said Mr. Graham, smiling at Jan, who
was waiting his answer with wide, frightened eyes. “Your mother has not
been well, but she’s recovered now; this letter is from your father.”

“Mamma ill? What was it? Do you suppose she really is well again, Uncle
Howard? What does papa say?” cried Jan.

“He says--let me see. ‘Tell Jan not to feel the slightest anxiety; I am
not concealing anything from her; her mother is quite herself again,
except for a remnant of weakness. But--’ and the rest is what I do not
like to tell you, and still less to tell my own children.” And Mr.
Graham stopped, frowning hard at Jan.

“He wants Jan!” guessed Gwen, jumping at the thing she most dreaded.

“That’s precisely what he does want,” assented her father. “He says it
is now April, and the brief time left in school will not be serious
loss, and Jan’s mother is so hungry for a glimpse of her that he wants
us to send her back to Crescendo. He doesn’t say what he expects us to
do without her.”

A dead silence fell on the entire table. Gwen and Gladys stared aghast,
Viva turned crimson and began to cry soundlessly, while Jack looked as
though he would like to follow her example. Sydney and his mother both
pushed back their plates with a simultaneous movement, and Jan herself
seemed uncertain whether to be glad or sorry.

Jerry looked from one to the other; then suddenly her voice pierced the
stillness shrilly: “She’s my Jan, she’s my Jan! She san’t go away f’
ever’ n’ ever, amen,” she fairly shrieked, and was borne from the room
in a violent fit of coughing by the patient Susan.

“We can’t express our feelings in precisely the same way as Jerry,”
said Mrs. Graham, “but they are quite as much ours. You are our Jan,
and we really can not let you go.”

“O Jan! you won’t go, will you?” said Gladys reproachfully.

“If mamma wants me, and papa says to come, how can I help going?” asked
Jan.

“I suppose we must admit their claim,” said her uncle. “I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. I’ll write Jan’s father, begging him to spare her a
little while longer, and telling him how dear she is to each of us. If
he is hard-hearted enough to take her in spite of that, we’ll have to
send her to him, with a nice, strong little cable attached, to pull her
back by in a short time.”

“I don’t think we ought to let mamma wait while we write papa, and he
answers. That will take nearly a week, and if he says mamma has been
sick and wants me, I think I ought to go right away, don’t you?” asked
Jan.

“O Miss Lochinvar! You want to go?” said Sydney reproachfully.

“I want to go and stay at the same time,” said Jan truthfully. “I am
just as happy here as I can be, and I love you heaps and heaps, and
when I get back I’ll talk about every one of you until they’ll think
I can’t speak of anything else. But when I think of mamma--and all of
them--why I could fly! You know how you’d feel if you hadn’t seen any
of this family for six months.”

“There are such quantities of things to do,” said Gwen, speaking for
the first time, though there was no one else to whom the loss of
Miss Lochinvar meant so much as to her. “You haven’t been down to
Trinity nor to St. Paul’s--and you like places where great people are
buried. You’re so crazy about history you must at least see Alexander
Hamilton’s grave--and the Jumel house.”

“That wouldn’t take long; besides New York will be here when she
returns, for I would put her in the safe-deposit vaults and lock her
up, if I didn’t think she would come back in the fall,” said her uncle.
“Then you would rather not have me write, asking an extension of
time--a stay of proceedings, little Miss Lochinvar?”

“I think when papa says he wants me, and mamma is longing for me, it
means just that, and it would not be right to keep them waiting,” said
Jan, wishing she were not obliged to choose.

“It’s a shame, a shame!” cried Jack, emotion, so long suppressed, so
far mastering him that two tears would find their way out, though he
tried to hope that they would be mistaken for coffee.

“Well, Jack, here’s a chance to be noble. There are people who would
rather another had a treasure than possess it themselves,” smiled Mrs.
Graham.

“That’s goody-goody people!” said Jack wrathfully, not in a frame of
mind to admire virtue utterly beyond his reach.

“They’re better than baddy-baddy people at least,” said Gwen. “If Jan
must go, let’s not make it worse.--When would she have to start, papa?”

“Her father doesn’t say. I think we are entitled to a little time in
which to get used to the amputation,” said Mr. Graham. “I won’t let her
go under a week.”

“Then we’ll make it a lively week,” said Gwen with a quiver in her
voice indicating no especial liveliness in the speaker. Mrs. Graham
pushed back her chair, and the children all rose; there had been no
more thought of breakfast since the dreadful tidings had fallen upon
them that they were to lose Jan.

It was the week of the Easter holidays, so there was nothing to
prevent her cousins from devoting themselves to Jan for the short time
remaining.

The three girls retired to Jan’s room to have a cry and feel better,
though that was not consciously the object of the tears. Tommy Traddles
came stretching and purring to meet them, and Jan caught him to her
heart.

“O my poor, dear Tommy Traddles!” she cried. “He has got so handsome,
and strong, and loving! And he does play hide and seek so beautifully
with me. Will you promise to take just as good care of him as I do,
Gwen and Gladys? And will you swear--honest, true, black and blue--not
to let him get left behind to starve in the streets when you go to the
country?”

“Now, Jan, if you suppose we’d be the sort of people to turn an animal
out! Of all the mean, selfish things to do! It makes me furious to
see the poor creatures who are used to being petted wandering around
frightened, sick, and hungry! I don’t see why you ask us such a
thing as that! We don’t have to swear it,” said Gwen, with genuine
indignation.

“Well, I beg your pardon. I know you wouldn’t, but so many people are
careless,” said Jan contritely. “Syd will look after Drom. And now I’m
going to pack.”

“If you touch one thing I’ll go crazy!” exclaimed Gladys energetically.
“I could not stand it! I won’t believe you’re going. Get on your things
and come down to your stuffy historical graves, but don’t you pack! You
haven’t the least, dimmest idea of how Gwen and I feel--you don’t care
one bit for leaving us!”

Jan turned and flung her arms around Gwen and Gladys with a face as
variable as the month, all smiles and tears. “O my dears, my dears!
Yes, I do!” she cried. “I wish I were twins! Can’t you understand how
glad I’ll be to see dear old Crescendo and my precious family, and yet
how I want, and want, and want you? I’d like to go and stay at the same
time.”

“And we only want you to stay, you see,” said Gwen, trying to smile.
“It’s almost like losing my eyes over again, Janet Lochinvar! You have
been such a dear old darling, and done so much for me!”

“Not as much as for me,” said Gladys mournfully. “I’m another girl.”

“Never mind if you are, Gladys; you’re nicer all the time,” said Jan.
“So try to bear up.”

“We’ll go down and see St. Paul’s, and then we’ll go to Trinity,”
announced Gladys, rising with the air of one ready to sacrifice herself
for the public weal. “And we’ll rally around you every minute that’s
left.”

“Syd, Jack, will you go with us down in town to explore mustiness for
Jan?” called Gwen up the stairs. And the boys threw themselves on the
banisters, and slid down promptly, ready for any expedition.

Jan stood, awe-struck, beside the tomb where Alexander Hamilton
was laid to sleep after his tragic end, and where now the hurrying
thousands of the modern city surge up the narrow, steep street skirting
his resting-place in the pursuit of a little of the success he sought,
attained, and which slipped through his fingers at last.

Still more was she thrilled by the old-time pew in St. Paul’s where
Washington sat praying in his strong heart for the nation struggling
into life. Gwen shared her enthusiasm, and Sydney understood, though he
pretended to laugh at it. But Gladys declared she could not see what
there was to get excited about. Suppose Washington _had_ sat in
that pew, what then? He was a real man, who really lived; he had to
sit somewhere. If it hadn’t been there, it would have been somewhere
else--what was there to make a fuss about? Gladys’s prosaic mind, which
had not a grain of the poet’s nor the student’s element in its make-up,
tolerated, but could not share her cousin’s raptures.

The Graham quartet dutifully escorted Jan up to the Jumel house, and
up to Columbia Library, and to see the tablet commemorating the battle
of Harlem Heights, but in turn they demanded of her less improving,
and more amusing pilgrimages. They took her down to Manhattan Beach to
see the ocean for the first time, and Miss Lochinvar had to admit that
nothing in the West could equal that stupendous first sight of the
breakers rolling in from England, and tumbling at her feet--though she
retracted the admission with a possible reservation in favor of the
Yellowstone, which she had not seen. And at last there were no more
expeditions, but three days of absolute devotion to one another, in
which Jan packed, while the others watched her rearrange her treasures,
and tried to keep up the cheerfulness which they had agreed must speed
their parting guest, though it was a cheerfulness veiled in deep purple.

Jan had to have a large new trunk to supplement the shabby little one
with which she arrived, for many and marvelous were the contributions
the Grahams poured into Jan’s hands to take to the children in
Crescendo.

All the girls--and most of the boys--whom Jan had known since her
arrival came often to see her, for to the surprise, not only of herself
but her cousins, who did not realize that outsiders had felt modest
Janet’s charm, Miss Lochinvar seemed to have won everybody’s affection.
“Come and see me in Crescendo,” she said to them all with boundless
hospitality, and Gladys felt no dismay at the thought that they might
take her at her word; so thoroughly had she learned true values.

Gwen and Gladys grudged a moment spent on visitors; the moments were
growing so few in which they should see Jan’s pretty face, and watch it
cloud at the thought of parting or break into dimples over something
pleasant. Even Cena North and Dorothy Schuyler were in the way, though
the latter was the one to whom Gwen looked for consolation when she
should be bereft of Jan.

At last the night came when for the last time Jan should lie down in
her pretty room, and all the cousins hung around her till the latest
possible moment--even Jerry being allowed to sit up until she fell
asleep in Jan’s lap.

“We’ll keep a diary and send it to each other twice a week--that’s
settled,” said Gwen. “And I want to tell you one thing, Jan. I know now
I was a silly to think North & Company would publish my novel, and I
was a greater silly to think I could write a novel, and the greatest
silly of all to think that it was nicer to be famous than a lovely,
homely girl. If you like to know that you turned your cousin from a
goose into a girl with a grain of sense, you may have that pleasure.”

“And here’s another,” said Gladys. “You know I’m not quite as bad a
goose as I was, and it’s all your doing.”

Sydney said nothing then, but when, later, Jan went up to say good
night to Drom, he put out his hand. “I may not get a chance to tell
you to-morrow when they’re all around,” he said, “but I’m getting on
better at school--working better and all that--and I don’t see much of
the wild boys, and I’m getting on fine working with the professor up at
college. And father says I may take up civil engineering if I like, so
I guess I’ll go to college after all. And if you hadn’t come and made
things pleasant here I don’t believe I’d have been anywhere. I thought
you might like to know.”

“It’s all because you are so good to me that you fancy I’ve done
things. I never did a thing, but just be a humdrum, every-day little
girl,” said Jan.

“Nothing but be Janet Howe--Miss Lochinvar, I mean; we know,” said
Sydney. And Jan ran down-stairs to cry a little and laugh a little that
on the morrow she was to set out for Crescendo, and to be glad and
grateful that the clan of Graham rated her so inexplicably high.




CHAPTER XVIII

“WITH A SMILE ON HER LIPS AND A TEAR IN HER EYE”


The household was early astir on the following morning, although Miss
Lochinvar was not to go into the West until early in the afternoon--not
to start, that is.

But it was a pity to waste time sleeping, when, as Gladys pathetically
said, Jan would have time enough to sleep on the cars when she was all
alone.

The cook--who was usually as grumpy as her profession seems liable to
make people--outdid herself in her efforts to get up a luncheon-box for
Miss Jan which should lighten her journey and weighten--now isn’t it a
shame there is not such a fine verb as that?--her own slender frame.
Susan was clipping the stems of the flowers she had gone out early to
buy and putting them between damp cotton on the ice in the butler’s
pantry. There seemed to be no one, from the top to the bottom of the
big house, which had struck Jan on her entrance to it as so cold and
empty, who was not eager to show regret at losing, and desire to serve
Miss Lochinvar.

Gwen and Gladys had begged Jan to bring her things into Gwen’s room,
and let them all dress together, not to lose one moment of the precious
few left them. And it was with no small difficulty that Jan managed her
toilet, for one cousin insisted on buttoning her shoes, while the other
brushed her hair; Gwen tied her ribbon, while Gladys fastened down her
collar in the back, and she was so inundated with tender services,
interspersed with sighs and caresses that she--not being accustomed
to a maid--began to wonder if she should be ready, not merely for
breakfast, but for the train at somewhere about two in the afternoon.

Viva, the unobtrusive, insisted on her right, as the elder, to take the
place beside Jan at breakfast for which Jerry was clamoring, and Jack
made himself detestable to both his small sisters by appropriating it
for himself while they were disputing.

The three girls came down like a group of the graces, Jan in the
middle, supported by tall Gwen on one side and Gladys on the other,
each with an arm around Miss Lochinvar, who encircled them with hers.

Sydney, who did not approve of sentimental affection, though he was
quite as sorry to part with Jan as his sisters could be, laughed as
they entered. “Hang on to one another, girls!” he said. “If you hug Jan
tight enough maybe the train won’t start till three.”

No one had much appetite that morning--no one but Mr. and Mrs. Graham,
who ate their breakfast with what Viva found almost heartless calmness.
She was not able to conceive of a state of mind in which departures
mean the possibility of return, nor had she journeyed far enough into
life to learn that “journeys end,” not only “in lovers’ meeting,” but
in all kinds of pleasant meetings. Jan’s uncle and aunt were confident
that she would return to them soon, but to the younger folk the
parting seemed eternal, the distance between New York and Crescendo an
impassable gulf, and even the recollection of what and whom awaited her
at the end of her travels could not sustain Jan’s spirits under the
present gloom.

“I’ll be down to the station, Miss Lochinvar, and start you properly
with the conductor of the train and of the sleeping-car, and with the
porter,” said Jan’s uncle, putting out his hand for a brief farewell.
“I’ve got you a whole section, so you won’t have any one dropping down
on you to-night through the ceiling of your berth, and there’ll be no
one sitting opposite to you through the day. Don’t forget that both
seats are yours, and don’t let any one bother you, by the way. However,
I’ll fix that with the proper authorities.--Get down to the train a
little early, Tina, and see that Jan’s trunks are checked, if I’m a
trifle late--it’s a bad hour to leave Exchange, just before closing,
but I’ll be there. Don’t look so melancholy, chicks; we couldn’t have
the fun of getting Jan back, if we never let her go.” And Mr. Graham
was off, wondering if he had ever taken small events so ponderously.

“Now, Aunt Tina, when are you all coming out to see us?” asked Jan,
as the family, excepting only its head, gathered in the library with
that tentative feeling of waiting one has when some one is going away,
although it is hours before the time to start.

“All of us? At once?” laughed her aunt. “Never, I hope, for your
mother’s sake.”

“Well, when will you let the children come? I want them all--first, the
three oldest, if you won’t send them all at once, and then Jack and
Viva. Still, it would be much better if you let them come with Syd and
Gwen and Gladys to look after them,” Jan persisted.

“I hardly see how we can arrange the details of their coming just now,”
Mrs. Graham said, smiling at Jan’s earnestness. “You see we are all
disposed of for the next five months at the seashore--and I can not
cease to regret that you could not have at least one week there with
us, for the New England coast is so glorious that you would not feel
that you had seen the sea at Manhattan Beach if you could get a glimpse
of it tumbling in over those piled-up rocks. However, next summer, I
hope, you will. Then after this summer comes school again, and Sydney
will enter college if he keeps up his present pace.” And his mother
smiled proudly at the handsome boy for whom in her secret heart there
was an especial soft spot. “I think the most probable thing is that you
will return to us. It would be very nice if you could come back in the
fall, and if in the summer your mother and one or two of the younger
children could join us. I don’t see much prospect of any of us going
West, Janet, for after Gwen and Gladys are a little further on in their
studies they must go to Europe to learn to see art properly, and to
learn something of other peoples than their own. But we can not plan;
we might be able to make a flying trip with the older children to the
Yellowstone, and stop at Crescendo. There’s no way of being sure of the
future, impatient Miss Lochinvar! If you girls are going to call on the
Misses Larned and Dorothy and Cena before luncheon you would better be
about it, for we must lunch at quarter after twelve to-day. There is
the transfer-wagon at the door, and I hear the man bringing down your
trunk, Jan.”

Gwen and Gladys mournfully accompanied Jan on her farewell visit to her
teachers, who parted from her with a glimmer of genuine regret showing
through their elaborate expressions of their sense of loss.

“It has been a great pleasure to teach you, Miss Howe,” said Miss
Larned. “You are faithful to your tasks, docile, and amiable. I trust
that the autumn will bring you back to us.”

“We wouldn’t be able to bear letting her go if we thought it wouldn’t,
Miss Larned,” said Gwen.

Dorothy Schuyler and Cena North clung to Jan in precisely the same
manner, though both assured her that they should be at the station to
see her off. Jan only wrenched herself away by dwelling on that fact,
and by promises to write very, very often.

Sydney met the three distressed girls at the door, as they returned to
luncheon. “Hallo, bluing-bags!” he cheerfully saluted. “They won’t have
to begin watering Fifth Avenue for two or three days yet, will they?”

“It wouldn’t be so bad to let you go if I could use my eyes to write
you often,” said Gwen, as they mounted the stairs. “But when I think
how lonely I’ll be, and how I can’t write, probably more than two or
three times a week, I can not see how I shall get on.”

“I’ll write you, and we’ll send that daily journal, and you’ll have
Gladys,” said Jan cheerily.

Gladys shook her head. “I shall only make it worse,” she said. “She’ll
see a girl around, and it will remind her of you fearfully. Like that
man in our Grecian mythology lesson--what’s his name?--who stood deep
in water, and when he put his head down to drink it all slipped away,
though he was nearly crazy with thirst.”

“Oh, gracious, Gladys! What nonsense! As though Gwen cared as much
for me as for you--her own sister!” cried Jan. “You’ve all been
getting so well acquainted this winter that you won’t miss me at all,
except at first. And you and Gwen enjoy each other fifty times more
than you did.” And Jan pinched Gwen’s arm to remind her to indorse
these statements, for they had agreed privately that Gladys needed
encouragement in her efforts to be more sensible, and also that she
needed affection to draw out her better side.

“Yes, that’s so, Glad,” said Gwen promptly. “What with my being sick
and in danger of being blind, and most of all with our having blessed
Miss Lochinvar here to bring us all together, we are a much nicer
family than we were, and I sha’n’t miss Jan anything like as much as
I should if we weren’t getting to be really sisters. And I hope I’ll
help you not to be lonely. And, Jan, I mean to do just what you say
with Viva and Jack and Syd--especially Syd--and with Jerry, too, though
she doesn’t count so much yet. I mean to be nice to them, and get them
to love me and tell me things, and I see what you mean about its being
better to have them than to have fame--though I can’t help hoping I’ll
do something fine in the world yet.”

“I’m certain sure you will; you can’t help it with all your talents,”
said Jan with the profound conviction so precious to an aspiring but
undeveloped genius.

“Maybe I can learn to teach the children to like me too,” said Gladys
with new and most becoming modesty, though not with the clearest form
of expression.

After luncheon, eaten hastily and with a certainty of being late for
her train on the part of the departing one, the Grahams’ landau drove
up to the door. Jan had arrived without other escort than Nurse Hummel,
but there was no question of Miss Lochinvar’s going away in like
manner. There was not one of the Grahams--not even Sydney--who did not
stand on the right to see Jan off. Sydney climbed up on the box with
Henry, and they took Jack between them. Mrs. Graham sat on the back
seat, with Jerry on her knee; Gladys, Jan, and Viva were to ride on the
front seat, with Gwen beside her mother.

“Come, girls!” called Mrs. Graham, consulting her watch. “Viva, get
out again and tell the girls to come.” Viva ran up the steps and
encountered Jan in the hall, held fast in Nurse Hummel’s capacious
embrace. Norah and Susan, Hannah the cook, and Maggie the laundress
were waiting a chance to shake Miss Lochinvar’s hand and wish her
Godspeed.

“May der lieber Gott keep you and pring you back quick und safe,
liebchen!” cried Hummie. “I haf not a little girl so goot und
useful among der Americans seen as you. I vish I might shake your
highly-to-be-respected mutter by der hant, und say to her how much
she is lucky to haf you.” And Nurse Hummel reluctantly gave up Jan and
ceased her eloquence, as badly Germanized as usual under emotion, as
Viva cried out that her mother wanted Jan to come at once.

“Good-by, Miss Janet; good luck to you!” said the other servants
heartily, shaking the firm, warm hand Jan extended. Then with one
parting squeeze for Drom, who implored, with eyes that seemed to see
that Jan was leaving him altogether, to be taken, too, and a kiss on
the glossy head of Tommy Traddles, whom Susan obligingly held, and
who was highly disturbed by the excitement around him, Jan ran down
the long steps which she had ascended for the first time with such
different feelings. Now she could hardly see them for the tears in her
eyes that she should see them no more.

Tucked tightly in her third of the seat with Gladys and Viva, Jan
looked up at the big house as Henry started away from it. It looked
just as impassive and irresponsive as on the day when she saw it first,
but she loved it, for within its walls she had found love.

“Don’t eye the house so gloomily, Jan, dear,” said Mrs. Graham. “It is
only waiting for you to come back, and it will not wait long, I hope.”

At the station they found Dorothy Schuyler and Cena North there before
them, laden with flowers and candy, and a book apiece. Gwen and Gladys
had provided Jan with a book, Sydney and Jack had given her candy and
magazines, and flowers already filled her hands. They could not help
laughing as they saw Dorothy and Cena’s contributions, for Jan could
not have eaten and read on her journey all the food for body and mind
with which she was encumbered if she had been going across the ocean
on one of the slow Atlantic transports. Mr. Graham arrived just as his
wife came back from checking Jan’s trunks; he, too, carried a box of
candy, and stopped dismayed as he saw the supply already in Jan’s hands.

“Dear me, Janet; I wish I had brought you a box of pepsin tablets,
instead of more sweets! Pray don’t eat all this candy--bestow it on the
crying baby you’re certain to find on the train--it’s always there,” he
said. “Now, we will all go over on the ferry with Miss Lochinvar,
put her snugly in her section, and then sing: ‘Hurrah for the wild
and woolly!’” The smiles that met this effort at cheerfulness on Mr.
Graham’s part were feeble. The escort got into motion, and passed out
on the upper deck of the big ferry-boat, all trying to keep next Jan,
who could not have accommodated them all if she had had more sides than
an octagon.

[Illustration: The last glimpse of Jan.]

Mr. Graham and Sydney stowed away her bag and parcels in the rack.
Sydney suggested that they put up a sign, “Fresh every hour,” for
the parcels were so preponderatingly representative of a famous
confectioner.

“Good-by, Jan. Write every week at least,” cried Dorothy and Cena,
recognizing that Jan’s family had a claim to the last embraces.

“Good-by, dear little Janet. Tell Jennie to send you back by September
if she doesn’t want me to go out and get you,” said Jan’s uncle,
kissing her warmly.

“That wouldn’t scare her,” sobbed Jan, clinging to him.

“Good-by, dear. Tell your mother that I feel as though I had lost
one of the dearest of my own children,” said Aunt Tina, no longer
indifferent, but with something suspiciously like a sob in her voice.

“So long, Miss Lochinvar. I wish I were going with you,” said Sydney,
clasping both Jan’s hands tight with sixteen-year-old sensitiveness to
kissing his cousin publicly.

But Jan threw both arms around his neck, and kissed him many times,
quite speechless with emotion, and Sydney did not find it unpleasant to
have her love for him thus proved.

Jack gave Jan a fierce farewell hug, which she warmly returned.

Viva and Jerry were hanging on Jan’s neck as the others bade her
good-by, and Mr. Graham had to detach them violently and bear them away
under the inducement of waving their hands to her through the window.

Gladys kissed Jan good-by, sobbing with all her might. “Please, please
forgive me all over again, dear, dearest Jan,” she whispered.

Gwen came last of all, and to her Jan clung most fondly, realizing then
that of all the cousins she was leaving, this one was the dearest.

“I’m glad I had you, Miss Lochinvar,” whispered Gwen, feeling that
this name was the only one with which she could part from Jan.

Jan did not speak, but the kiss with which she said good-by to
noble-hearted Gwen told her how much Miss Lochinvar loved her.

The Grahams drew up in line outside the window, wiping away tears with
one hand as they waved the other, and made futile efforts to speak to
Jan through the double glass.

At last the wheels moved, the train got into motion, and rolled slowly
out of the station.

Jan knelt on the seat, and pressed her wet face against the glass,
crying, though they whom she was leaving behind could not hear her,
“Good-by, good-by!”

The last glimpse they had of Jan was a rainbow one, tears running down
her cheeks, while her lips smiled at them. And they turned away toward
the ferry feeling that a big piece of the heart of each of them had
gone with sweet little Miss Lochinvar back into the West.


THE END




Transcriber’s Note:

The text has been preserved as closely as possible to the original
publication with no known changes to spelling or punctuation.