“It wasn’t! Where, then?”
“Downstairs in the hall closet.” He paused, then could not forbear adding, “And it wasn’t in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all over it.”
“Why, Jonathan! Aren’t you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Under such praise he expanded. “The fact is,” he said confidentially, “I had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself, ‘Jonathan, don’t be a man! Think what she’d do if she were here now.’ And then I got busy and found it.”
“Jonathan!” I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.
“Well,” he said, proud, yet rather sheepish, “what is there so funny about that? I gave up half a day to it.”
“Funny! It isn’t funny—exactly. You don’t mind my laughing a little? Why, you’ve lived down the fountain pen—we’ll forget the pen—”
“Oh, no, you won’t forget the pen either,” he said, with a certain pleasant grimness.
“Well, perhaps not—of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I say, then, that we’ll always regard the pen in the light of the violet hat-box?”
“I think that might do.” Then he had an alarming afterthought. “But, see here—you won’t expect me to do things like that often?”