“And you are going to invite that hateful, horrid Vaughn girl?”
“I heard Buttertub boast that he was going to invite her, and I thought it would be rather a pleasant thing for him to receive his ticket back again with the information that as she had already accepted mine she had no need for it.”
Jim could hardly believe his ears. “Well, of all things,” he said. “You shan’t do it, Stacey; you shan’t do it! I’ll invite Miss Milly, with sister, if you don’t want to, but it’s a downright insult to fill her place with such a pimply faced, common, loud——”
“I do not see that it is the young lady’s fault if she has a humorous disposition, and as for her being loud——”
“You said yourself that you could hear her hat at the Battery if she was walking in Central Park. Sister says she toadies fearfully, and she flirted like a silly at the games, and at the drill. I think you must be hard up to ask her.”
Stacey coloured, but was too proud to back down, and he left Jim in tears. Poor little fellow, as he expressed it, it seemed as if all the sticks which he tried to stand up straight were determined to fall down. He could see that something was wrong with his hero, for Stacey’s disappointment at the games had cut deeply, and the boy was on the verge of falling into a dangerous state of “don’t care.” When Jim asked him what subject he intended to choose for his essay, Stacey said that he had about decided not to compete. The subject must be connected with Greek history or life, and he despised the whole business, and the honour wasn’t worth the trouble.
Adelaide took Stacey in hand and suggested a subject, in which he manifested some interest, but all this worried Jim and kept him from recovery.
Adelaide watched him anxiously. She had at first thought it best not to notify her parents of Jim’s accident, fearing to spoil their tour; but as she felt certain that he was not improving she sent a cablegram, and received an answering one stating that they would sail for America at once. Adelaide watched eagerly for their coming. Jim pined for his mother, and one day, to give her little invalid something pleasant to look forward to, Adelaide told him that their parents were on the way home. The news did him more good than all the physician’s tonics. He brightened every day and talked of his mother incessantly. Once it seemed to occur to him that his delight was a poor return for Adelaide’s care, and he asked her anxiously, “You don’t mind, do you, sister, that I am so glad mother is coming? You are the very best sister in all the world, but then you are not quite mother. You never can know just what she was to me when we were so very poor.”
“Of course, I am not jealous, dear Jim,” Adelaide replied. “I can well understand that you and mother are bound together even more closely than most mothers and sons, by that long fight together with poverty. I only wish that I had been with you to help you bear it. But then I do not know what father would have done. He suffered so much while you were lost to us, that if I had not been there to live for I think he would have died or have gone insane.”
“I don’t wonder that father loves you so much and is so proud of you, sister. I am very glad you were not with us when we were so very wretched. You ought not to know what it is to be poor, Adelaide. You ought to be a queen.”