"I tried a love poem next. I don't write them very often. They're so common. You see 'em everywhere, you know. But I thought I would try it—'twould be different, anyhow, in this new kind of verses. So I wrote this:
Oh, love of mine,
I love
Thee.
Thy hair is yellow like the
Golden squash.
Thy neck so soft
An' slender like a goose,
Is encompassed in filtered lace
So rich an'
Rare.
Thy eyes in thy pallid face like
Blueberries in a
Saucer of milk.
Oh, love of mine,
I love
Thee."
"Have you sent—any of these away yet, Susan?" Daniel Burton was on his feet now, his back carefully turned.
"No, not yet; but I'm goin' to pretty quick, an' I guess them will sell." Susan nodded happily, and smiled. But almost instantly her face grew gravely earnest again. "But all the money in the world ain't goin' to do no good Mr. Burton, unless we do our part, an' our part is to get him well an' strong for that operator. Now I'm goin' to send Keith in to you. I ain't goin' to TELL him he's goin' to walk with you, 'cause if I did he wouldn't come. But I'm expectin' you to take him, jest the same," she finished severely, as she left the room.
Keith and his father went to walk. It was the first of many such walks. Almost every one of these crisp November days found the two off on a tramp somewhere. And because Daniel Burton was careful always to accompany, never to lead, the boy's step gained day by day in confidence and his face in something very like interest. And always, for cold and stormy days, there were the books at home.
Daniel Burton was not painting pictures—pigment pictures—these days. His easel was empty. "The Woodland Path," long since finished, had been sent away "to be sold." Most of Daniel Burton's paintings were "sent away to be sold," so that was nothing new. What was new, however, was the fact that no fresh canvas was placed on the easel to take the place of the picture sent away. Daniel Burton had begun no new picture. The easel, indeed, was turned face to the wall. And yet Daniel Burton was painting pictures, wonderful pictures. His brushes were words, his colors were the blue and gold and brown and crimson of the wide autumn landscape, his inspiration was the hungry light on a boy's face, and his canvas was the soul of the boy behind it. Most assuredly Daniel Burton was giving himself now, heart and mind and body, to his son. Even the lynx-eyed, alert Susan had no fault to find. Daniel Burton, most emphatically, was "doing his part."
CHAPTER XIV
A SURPRISE ALL AROUND
The week before Christmas Dorothy Parkman brought a tall, dignified-looking man to the Burtons' shabby, but still beautiful, colonial doorway.
Dorothy had not seen Keith, except on the street, since her visit with Mazie in October. Two or three times the girls had gone to the house with flowers or fruit, but Keith had stubbornly refused to see them, in spite of Susan's urgings. To-day Dorothy, with this evidently in mind, refused Susan's somewhat dubious invitation to come in.