Dear old Jim! He gave me such a squeeze and let loose a big, blundering kind of a laugh, and then we brought him in and we all sat around the fire and talked. I never knew just how much like a brother he seemed to me till that moment.
We asked him to name the cottage for us, but he could think of nothing, and then, quite suddenly it came to me. I would call it “Delight Cottage” in honor of my own dear Delight Ravanel.
Don’t you agree with me that it is a good idea?
But I haven’t told her yet. I thought I would keep it a secret until she came to visit me, which will be in a few days now. Keefe said he would himself make the sign and place it at the gateway—the same gateway being nothing less than two of my beloved tulip trees.
Keefe told me he had come down to finish some paintings, and that he would go on living right there in the cottage, working on certain parts of the house himself, such as the staining of the wood, the making of fire screens and benches for the chimney side, and various other things. He said there was work enough to keep him busy in his odd moments for a year or two. Mrs. Babb is coming over to cook for him and to keep “Delight Cottage” tidy.
Well, a little later in the evening Jim started me on my way again, only this time both he and Keefe were my cavaliers, and I burst into the drawing-room at the Shoals expecting to give them the greatest sort of a surprise, but I was vastly disappointed. They only laughed at me. They had known all along that Keefe was building the house, and they had met him at the train and had taken him up to Delight Cottage themselves, I all the while toiling away in my shop. He wanted, it seems, to make the place look as well as it could in its incomplete state before I saw it.
Ah, what a happy, happy girl I am! Only one thing troubles me, and that is your possible disapproval. Keefe is writing you, I believe. He said to me more than once:
“I do hope your uncle and aunt are not going to think that I have done wrong. I have cared more for your happiness, Azalea, than for anything on earth, and if I had for one moment believed that you would have been happier if I had withdrawn myself entirely from your life, I would have done so without regard to my lifelong loneliness. But when I heard that you had resigned your inheritance and come back here, I was forced to conclude that it was a sign and token to me.”
“It was,” I confessed. “Just that.”
Well, my dear kinfolk, Christmas came with all its pleasures, and it brought me your beautiful gift, also my ring from Keefe, and lovely things from the Carsons and from many other friends. Even there were many remembrances from my mountain people.