"I can. Is there a birthday or anything that we may celebrate? I've no compunction about getting up festivities on any pretext, but if there happened to be a birthday handy--"
"November--yes. Why, we had forgotten all about it! Lanse's birthday is the fourth. That's--"
"Day after to-morrow. Good! Can you make him a birthday-cake? If not, I--"
"Oh, yes, I can!" cried Charlotte, eagerly. "I've just learned an orange-cake."
"All right. Then we'll order a few little things from town, and have a jollification. Not a very big one, on account of the lady on the couch there, who reminds me at the moment of a water-lily whom some one has picked and then left on the stern seat in the sun. She looks very sweet, but a trifle limp."
Celia's smile was several degrees brighter than the previous one had been. Nobody could resist Uncle Ray when he began to exert himself to cheer people up.
He was a young, or an old, bachelor, according to one's point of view, being not yet forty, and looking, in spite of the past suffering which had brought into his chestnut hair two patches of gray at the temples, very much like a bright-faced boy with an irrepressible spirit of energy and interest in the life about him. It could hardly be doubted that Capt. John Rayburn, apparently invalided for life and cut off from the activity which had been his dearest delight, must have his hours of depression, but nobody had ever caught him in one of them.
"I should like some music at this festival," Captain Rayburn went on. "Is the orchestra out of practice?"
"We haven't played for six weeks," Charlotte said. "And Celia's first violin--"
"You couldn't play, bolstered up?"