"You, and Robert, and Jack, go," continued Gorham. "I won't. That would be rather too much of a good thing; but I can get a room at the Beach Hotel, and that is near by. I propose to spend a good deal of time at the Fair. I want to go through it with some degree of thoroughness. Of course no one will really see half of it. I understand that, giving one minute to each exhibit, it is estimated that it would take thirty-two years for a man to get around."
His brother groaned. He was stout and not energetic save in the matter of wholesale dry-goods.
"Thank Heaven it won't take thirty-two years to see Mrs. Van Tassel," he remarked devoutly.
There were no doubts or scruples in Jack's mind as to accepting his invitation, at least for the present. Indeed, this reconciliation between himself and the Bryants, as he still often found himself calling his old friends, altered the whole trend of his life. He felt a new satisfaction in living; a new desire for home; a willingness which amounted to necessity to shake the dust of Boston from his feet, and once more to make of Chicago a permanent abiding-place. His sense of loneliness, an aching one still at times, abated. His own place waited for him. The friendship of these cousins, kind and helpful in their way, could never be to him like that of those girls, the only sisters he had ever known, who had so long divided with him his father's affection and care. He was going home. It was the first sensation of the sort that he had had for years.
He did not try to conceal his satisfaction from Mrs. Page when he said to her his au revoir. He expressed sincere gratitude for her kindness and hospitality, but she saw that he was not sorry to have no plan for returning to Boston, and felt a little piqued despite Jack's enthusiasm over the plan which would soon make them a reunited family party.
"I have not seen Jack so gay since Uncle Richard died," she said that night to Gorham.
"No. His alienation from Mrs. Van Tassel and her sister has worried him a good deal, I know," responded Page. "This final burial of the hatchet must be a great relief to a fellow so sensitive as Jack is."
But this explanation was not sufficient to account to Mrs. Page for Van Tassel's jubilant spirits. He had not sprung up three stairs at a time, and whistled and sung over his packing, just because of obtaining the forgiveness of two young women whose feelings he had outraged.
"Men are stupid," she soliloquized. "I know that Jack is in love."
With this truly feminine solution of her cousin's conduct she was the better satisfied because she would so soon have opportunity of verifying her own perspicacity by ocular proof. But her diagnosis would have been a surprise to Jack. No lover-like haste mingled with the impatience he felt at the lateness of his train on the June afternoon when he reached Chicago; and when finally he found himself on the familiar home street, even its unfamiliarity seemed representative of the pleasant new state of things which had come into his life. His flying visit during the bad weather of six weeks before had not shown the old neighborhood in its present finished condition.