“Good, Madeline!” he exclaimed. “You make me feel how great it is to be part of it.”
“Do I?” she said. “I thought of you when I wrote it. Oh, here come father and mother back from their drive.”
Mr. Davison rose hastily.
“I’d no idea it was so late,” he said. “I must be going. Miss Elton, I didn’t mean a word of all that about your being so clever. You’re all right.”
“Thanks for the tribute,” Madeline smiled as he disappeared down the drive. “Dick, I wish you’d always be on hand when he comes. He makes my brain feel like a woolly dog.”
“Rummy chap,” said Norris.
The older people came in to greet the boy they had known all his life, to ask the innumerable usual questions, to say the inevitable things through dinner.
Afterwards, when the last fragments of sunset burned through and across the water, they gathered on the piazza. It was that dreamy hour when women find it easy to be silent and men to talk. Madeline and her mother sat close, with hands restfully clasped in their joy at being together. Mr. Elton eyed the two young men from his vantage of years of shrewd wisdom. Both the boys were clean-shaven, after the manner of the day, a fashion that seems to become clean manliness, vigorous and self-controlled. Both were good to look at; but here the resemblance ended, for Dick’s long slender face and body lithe with its athletic training, was alive and restless, as though he found it difficult to keep back his passion for activity; Ellery, big but loosely joined, had the dogged look of one that held some of his energy in reserve. A good pair, Mr. Elton concluded, and felt a sudden spasm of longing for a son—not that he would have exchanged Madeline for any trousered biped that walked, but it would be a great thing to own one such well of young masculine vigor as these.
“It’s going to be great fun for us old fellows to sit back and watch you young ones,” the elder man ejaculated. “There are several good-sized jobs waiting for you.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Dick. “When there’s nothing to do, nobody’ll do it.”