"If she could only hear that!" said I.
"She's going to hear it," he declared with great earnestness. "She's kept me quiet all summer, but—by a man's impatience!—she can't keep me quiet any longer. Do you blame me?" he inquired, wheeling to look intently at me through the September twilight.
"Not a bit," said I. "I've only wished she could stand still until Lad grows up."
"You must think well of her, to say that," said he delightedly. "And, on my word, I don't know but she will continue to stand still, as far as looks go. But in mind—and heart—well, the only thing is, I'm so far below her I don't dare to hope. All I know is that, for sheer womanly sweetness and strength, there's nobody her equal. And yet, when I try to put my finger on what makes her what she is—I can't tell."
"One can't analyze her charm," said I, "except as you've just done it—womanly sweetness and strength. Hepatica is—Hepatica. And being that, we love her."
"We do," said he, half under his breath, and caught my hand and gave it a grip which stung.
The next morning the Gay Lady came home. We had not expected her until evening, and when we heard a light footstep approaching through the hall as we sat at breakfast, we looked at one another in dumb astonishment and disbelief. But the next instant she stood smiling at us from the doorway.
She was glad to see us, too. From Lad's ecstatic embrace she came into mine, and I heard her eager whisper—"I'm so glad to get back to you!" The Skeptic and the Philosopher wrung her hand until I know her little fingers ached, and they stared at her, the one like a brother, the other like—well, she must have seen for herself. No, they were not rivals. The Philosopher had seen the Skeptic's case, I think, from the first, and being not only a philosopher but a man, and the Skeptic's best friend, had never allowed himself to enter the race at all. I had detected a wistful light in his eyes now and then, and had my own notion of what might have happened if he had let it, but—there was only a very warm brotherliness in the greeting he gave the Gay Lady, and she looked back into his eyes too frankly for me to think he had ever let her see anything else.
She sat down at the table with us for a little, while we finished, and you should have seen the difference in the look of the room. It was another place. She ran upstairs to her own room, and I followed her, and from being a deserted bedroom with a lonely aspect it became a human habitation with an atmosphere of home. She took off her travelling dress, talking gayly to me all the while, and brushed her bright locks, and put on one of the charming white frocks which her own hands had made, and then came and held me tight, and laughed, and was very near crying, and said there was never such another place as this.