One pleasant little interlude occurred when Mr. Van Meter said that Jannet had not yet heard how he found her. “You would never guess it, my child,” he said, and reached into his desk for a booklet tied with gay ribbons.
“Why, that’s our annual ‘Stars and Stripes,’” cried Jannet, recognizing it at once.
“The same,” said her uncle. “One of our guests left it here in my library and I idly picked it up one evening. Glancing through it, my eye fell on your picture first, then on your name, and I read your history at once.” Mr. Van Meter smiled as he handed the open book to his sister.
“Is this ‘Who’s Who,’ my daughter?” lightly asked Jannet’s mother, taking the book and looking at the account on the page of photographs reproduced with a short account of each pupil.
“It is of our school, Mother, and those girls are all in my class.” Wasn’t it great that her mother had a sense of humor and was smiling over the booklet? But she began to read the account of her own child aloud:
“‘Janet Eldon is one of the fixed stars in the firmament of our Alma Mater, and her brilliancy is of the first magnitude. She is the daughter of Douglas Eldon and has her Scotch Janet from his mother’s side of the house. Janet came originally from the Buckeye state, but claims Philadelphia as her real home. She sings and plays and enjoys our wild rides about Fairmount Park,—’”
Here Mrs. Eldon stopped. “No wonder that you looked Jannet up when you read that. It was providential!”
Mrs. Eldon’s story supplied the rest of the explanation. She had returned from the hospital, after wondering why her husband did not continue his visits there, and realizing that he must be sick, to find some one else in their little apartment and her trunks packed and stored. The woman in charge was shocked and startled upon seeing her, having been told that she had not lived through her illness. “Douglas must have been delirious then,” said Mrs. Eldon. “The poor boy was taking his baby to his mother, he told the woman, and when she asked if she should pack up the things he ‘thanked her kindly’ and paid her, she said.
“Then I telegraphed and wrote, frantically. No word came from anyone. I see now that Mother Eldon was in a strange place, at the hospital, and probably had not yet arranged to have her mail forwarded, if she was only in the midst of her moving. She was seeing that my baby was pulled through, and very likely the final burial of my poor Douglas was postponed, for I even found the name of the minister of their old church and wrote to him about it. If he ever wrote to me, I was gone by that time. Meanwhile I had traced another young father who had been traveling about the same time with a sick baby that died. Kind people had buried the little one, and the father had wandered from the hospital in the night and found a grave in the river.” Mrs. Eldon did not add to the sober look on Jannet’s face by telling her that for years flowers had been placed at Easter upon a tiny grave in the far West.
“I was ill again, and then friends that I had known in New York chanced upon me in Los Angeles. They urged an ocean voyage to strengthen me. It was Hawaii, then the East and then Europe and music and I have been in America only a few weeks, coming to arrange for engagements.”