"Papa! Papa! Papa! I never had a 'fliction before. Oh, Papa, my heart will break itself apart. Papa, can't you know enough to comfort you little girl? I can't live wivout my Loveliness. Oh, Papa! Papa!"
This was in the decline of March. The winds went down, and the rains came on. The snow slid from the streets of the university town, and withdrew into dingy patches about the roots of trees and fences, and in the shady sides of cold back yards. The mud yawned ankle-deep, and dried, and was not, and was dust beneath the foot. Crocuses blazed in the gardens of the faculty,—royal purple, gold, and wax-white lamps set in the young and vivid grass. The sun let down his mask and looked abroad, and it was April. The newsboy, the carrier and the cab-driver laughed for very joy of living. But when they passed the professor's house they did not laugh. It came on to be the heart and glory of the spring, and the warm days melted into May. But the little dog had not been found.
The professor had exhausted hope and ingenuity in the dreary quest. The State, one might say without exaggeration, had been dragged for that tiny dumb thing,—seven pounds' weight of life and tenderness. Money had been poured like love upon the vain endeavor. Rewards of reckless proportion appealed from public places and from public columns to the blank eyes that could not or did not read. The great detective force, whose name is familiar from sea to sea, had supplemented the useless search of the local police and of the city press. And all had equally failed. The "dog banditti" had done their work too well.
Loveliness had sunk out of sight like forgotten suffering in a scene of joy.
In the window seat, propped with white pillows, "lame and lovely," Adah sat. The empty embroidered gray cushion lay beside her. Sometimes she patted the red puppies softly with one thin little hand; she allowed no one else to touch the cushion.
"Till Loveliness comes home," she said. In the window, silent, pale, and seeing everything, she watched. But Loveliness did not come home.
"TILL LOVELINESS COMES HOME"
The pitiful thing was that the child herself was so changed. She had wasted to a little wraith. For some time she had not walked without her crutch. Now she scarcely walked at all. At the first she had sobbed a good deal, in downright childish fashion; then she wept silently; but now she did not cry any more,—she did but watch. Her sight had grown unnaturally keen, like that of pilots; she gazed out of great eyes, bright, and dry, and solemn. Already she had taken on the look of children whose span of time is to be short. She weakened visibly.