In the meantime, back in Iowa, the Starrs in their separate households, were running riot. Never was there to be such a wonderful visit for anybody in the world. Jerry and Prudence bundled up their family, and got into a Harmer Six and drove down to Mount Mark, where they ensconced themselves in the family home and announced their intention of staying until Connie had gone. As soon as Fairy heard that, she hastened home too, full of the glad tiding that she had found a boy she wanted to adopt at last. Lark and Jim neglected the farm shamefully, and all the women of the neighborhood were busy making endless little odds and ends of dainty clothing for Carol, who had lived ready-made during the three years of their domicile in the shadowland of sunshine.
A hurried letter was despatched to David's doctor, asking endless questions, pledging him to secrecy, and urging him to wire an answer C. O. D. Little Julia was instructed as to her mother's charms and her father's virtues far beyond the point of her comprehension. And Jerry spent long hours with Connie in the car, explaining its mechanism, and making her a really proficient driver, although she had been very skilful behind the wheel before. Also, he wrote long letters to his dealer in Denver, giving him such a host of minute instructions that the bewildered agent thought the "old gent in Des Moines had gone daft."
Carol wrote every day, pitifully, jubilantly, begging Connie to hurry and get started, admonishing her to take a complete line of snapshots of every separate Starr, to count each additional gray hair in darling father's head, and to locate every separate dimple in Julia's fat little body. And every letter was answered by every one of the family, who interrupted themselves to urge everybody else not to give anything away, and to be careful what they said. And they all cried over Julia, and over Carol's letters, and even cried over the beautiful assortment of clothes they had accumulated for Carol, using Lark as a sewing model.
Twenty minutes after the train left Mount Mark, came a telegram from Carol: "Did she get off all right? Did anything happen? Wire immediately." And the whole family rushed off to separate rooms to weep all over again.
But Aunt Grace walked slowly about the house, gathering up blocks, and headless dolls, and tailless dogs, and laying them carefully away in a drawer until little Julia should return to visit the family in Mount Mark.
For the doctor had said it was all right to restore the baby to her heart-hungering parents in the mountain land. Carol was fairly strong, David was fairly well. The baby being healthy, and the parents being sanitary, the danger to its tiny lungs was minimized,—and by all means send them the baby.
So Julia was arrayed in matchless garments destined to charm the eyes of the parents, who, in their happiness, would never realize it had any clothes on at all, and Connie set out upon her journey with the little girl in her charge.
On Tuesday morning, Carol was a mental wreck. She forgot to salt David's eggs, and gave him codeine for his cough instead of tonic tablets for his appetite. She put no soda in the hot cakes, and made his egg-nog of buttermilk. She laughed out loud when David was asking the blessing, and when he wondered how tall Julia was she burst out crying, and then broke two glasses in her energetic haste to cover up the emotional outbreak. Altogether it was a most trying morning. She was ready to meet the train exactly two hours and a half before it was due, and she combed David's hair three times, and whenever she couldn't sit still another minute she got up and dusted the railing around the porch, brushed off his lounging jacket, and rearranged the roses in the vase on his table.
"David, I honestly believe I was homesick. I didn't know it before. I got along all right before I knew she was coming, but now I want to jump up and down and shout. Why on earth didn't she take an earlier train and save me this agony?"
At last, in self-defense, David insisted that she should start, and, too impatient to wait for cars and to endure their stopping at every corner, she walked the two miles to the station, arriving breathless, perspiring and flushed. Even then she was thirty minutes ahead of time, but finally the announcer called the train, and Carol stationed herself at the exit close to the gate to watch the long line of travelers coming up from the subway. No one noticed the slender woman standing so motionless in the front of the waiting line, but the angels in Heaven must have marked the tumult throbbing in her heart, and the happiness stinging in her bright eyes.