“I believe he supplied Mrs. Fitch and Fanny with most of their funds, but I think they seldom saw him. He was rather eccentric and a good deal of a recluse.”
“Let’s hope the funds continue, anyhow,” said Cary, lightly, “in the shape of a big bequest. That will alleviate the sense of loss, besides providing a tender memory. These recluse uncles with large bank accounts and generous dispositions are all too uncommon—I never saw the shadow of one. If I only had one now! How I’d leap to make him a farewell visit—in uniform—if I ever get mine. I’m mightily afraid I shan’t get it, by the way, till I’m about to sail, so I’ll have no chance to strut around this town and call on you all with an air of conscious modesty.”
“Too bad,” laughed Nan. “But we’re quite sufficiently impressed now just by the knowledge that you’ll soon be off. What is the war-correspondent’s insignia, do you know?”
“Two fountain pens, crossed, on the collar, and a large splotch of ink on the left sleeve,” announced Cary, promptly. “Also, in time, presumably, a three-cornered tear over the right knee, and a couple of black eyes, from trying to push to the rear out of danger while rapidly taking notes on what a highly developed imagination assures him is undoubtedly occurring at the front.”
“Great! My imagination, though not so highly developed, pictures a quite different scene.... Oh, isn’t that the train coming in?”
“It is. The station clock lies, as usual. We must sprint for it if we want to be on the platform.”
They quickened their steps, and were in time to see Frances Fitch appear in the vestibule of her car, and to stare up at her with surprised and—at least in Cary’s case—appreciative eyes.
“Oh, Fanny!” It was Nan Lockhart’s inner cry to her incomprehensible friend, though her lips made no comment. “How could you? Don’t you think we must know you’re acting? You don’t care enough for that.”
For Fanny was apparently in mourning, certainly in black, the most simple but effective black the eye and hand of skilled dressmaker and milliner could conceive, and in it she was undeniably a picture. Not all the cunning frills and artful colour combinations of her former dressing could approach in the setting forth of her blonde beauty the unrelieved black silks and misty chiffons of this new garb. To Nan’s sophisticated eye Fanny’s mourning was something of a travesty, for it was all of materials not ordinarily considered available for the trappings of woe; but it was undoubtedly only the more effective for that. Perhaps, Nan acknowledged, in that first quick glance, it represented the precise shade of honour due a recluse uncle who had been represented in his niece’s life principally by monthly cheques and not at all by intimate association.
“My word, but she’s a ripping beauty in that black, isn’t she?” came from Cary Ray under his breath, as he waved an eager greeting at the girl above him, and received an answering smile slightly touched with pensiveness. “Looks as if she’d been pretty unhappy, too. He was about all she had in the world, anyhow, wasn’t he?—except the invalid mother. Poor girl!”