Mary bridled.
"Go and see for yourself, Miss Dale, if you don't believe me. When I tried to stop her eating a good half of that broth, and chicken as high as 'tis, he the same as called me a fool for meddling. But you'd better go up-stairs. You won't be satisfied till you've heard for yourself."
In that Mary spoke truly. Her story was too incredible to be accepted without investigation. Persis' incredulity did not desert her till half-way up the stairs she was met by a child's voice, fond and confident.
"Uncle Joel, ain't God cruel to make some dogs without tails?"
And then as her brother's unfamiliar laugh reached her ears, Persis turned and went softly down the stairs.
CHAPTER XVII
ENID
If Persis Dale's extraordinary action in adopting a family en masse had stirred Clematis from center to circumference, that agitation was trivial in comparison with the flutter produced by Joel's capitulation. Mrs. West, backed up by Mary, told the news to auditors frankly incredulous who yet were sufficiently impressed by her sincerity to resolve on looking into the thing for themselves. Consequently the Dale homestead became a magnet for the curious, and many a skeptic came and went away convinced that the day of miracles had returned.
As a matter of fact Joel's surrender was in accord with the most elemental of psychological laws. With the characteristic caprice of her sex in matters of the heart, Celia had taken a violent fancy to this pale-blooded hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming Celia's abject slave. He ignored the other children for the most part, seldom betraying, unless perhaps by an impatient gesture or a frown, that he was aware of their existence. But his eyes were always on Celia, and when she spoke, he listened.
As was to be expected, that morsel of femininity improved every opportunity to parade her conquest. She took Joel to walk, holding tightly to his hand and entertaining him with an outpouring of those quaint fancies which have been the heritage of childhood from the beginning and yet always seem to the older generation so marvelously new. She inveigled him into playing whatever rôle she assigned in fantastic dramas of her own creation. He was Celia's father or her little boy as the whim took her, the wolf which devoured Red Riding Hood's grandmother, or the hapless old lady herself, attacked ruthlessly by Celia as wolf. Crawling on all fours he played elephant, or with the handle of a basket between his teeth, he submitted to be patted on the head and addressed as Towser. Persis looked on with a wonder that never lost its poignancy. That the self-centered Joel should succumb to the innocent spell of childhood had never entered her calculations, and she reproached herself that she had so little understood him.