But Helen was not at her quarters. No one knew where she had gone, except Bricktop, who said that he had sent her away in Peter's car for a rest. But after her plea of parental right he directed her to the little house which Peter had taken for the Sanfords.
Helen was sitting in a long chair in the small garden, punctuating the happiness of two white heads and of Peter himself by her remarks about her nose, which was in bandages, and how she was going to help Peter ruin his farm; which he said she could ruin in any way she pleased without regard to priority of claim in that line by either himself or Phil.
Instead of cutting Peter, when she was actually in the presence of the personified millions Madame Ribot was most affable to him, as well as to the Sanfords, speaking of the common feelings of mothers when she embraced Mrs. Sanford. To Helen she was demonstratively maternal, kissing her on the forehead and cheek many times and stroking her hand; and Helen reciprocated, the light in her eyes welcoming belated affection long craved, which crowned her happiness. When they spoke of her coming to America, Madame Ribot expressed her delight, but in her inner consciousness, despite her flare, something cold and logical built of the past and her predilections told her that she would never go. And that same day she slipped away to Paris and back to her old routine.
The next time that Phil sat under the portrait of the English ancestor and facing the American ancestor the Jehovah cablegram, now framed, was also on the wall. There were still some patches of plaster on his chin, but otherwise he looked the same; only there had come to him a great experience of battle, of suffering, of reflection, taking youth over the boundary into a manhood which still might be boyish.
Across from him in her old place was Helen, while Peter made the seventh of the party. Phil could see her as clearly as the first night that he was at Truckleford; he could hear every inflection in her voice, though the doctors said that he must have a long rest, free from shocks. In the lamplight the tiny scars on the lobes of her nose did not show, and he rather wished that they did. He did not want them to go away.
"You know, Helen is really very good-looking," the vicar had said again and again to his wife, who kept replying that it was perfectly evident.
The high white forehead, the fine eyes, the glorious hair—they were no longer under a handicap, as Peter put it. Mischievous challenge was still the privilege of the eyes and the expressive mouth seemed always smiling these days. The Helen that the world saw was the real Helen, radiant with the spirit that had kept a man from slipping and cried "Good!" after that upper cut, which was still a source of many chuckles to the vicar and the Marquis of Truckleford.
The call was home. She was eager for her first glimpse of the valley of Longfield; to be welcomed at the station by Bill Hurley. "One becomes an American, or he does not;" she was one already.
"I should not need any one to direct me," she said. "Across the bridge, up Maple Avenue, turn to the left in front of the ancestor along the path under the elms—and that is it, a simple, old frame house in a yard facing the biggest elm of all."
"Don't forget the farm!" Peter suggested. "I don't mean to be as lonely as I have been."