"Alfred doesn't know you're coming," she said with a bright smile, "he'll be so pleased!"
As is usual when the fatted calf is killed for a medicine man he takes that occasion to be an hour late—an emergency case at the last minute, or some one at the office that it took an unreasonable time to get through with. I hardly heard the excuse which Alfred made when he came in, but I knew it was true, whatever it was, and, as Doctor Gordon was not going to be able to come at all, we three went in and gave ourselves up to the joy of the occasion.
I was absently eating everything that was brought to me, and was thinking all the while how perfectly preposterous it was that Richard Chalmers—a man like Richard Chalmers—should have such weak-minded females attached to him; and I had just reached the conclusion that there could never, never be anything like friendship between us, no matter what there might be as an occasion for friendship, when the dessert was brought in, and with it a great, beautiful cake, iced in forget-me-nots.
"Now, don't you think I'm sentimental?" Ann Lisbeth asked with a smile, after we had used up all the adjectives that we had at our command. "You see, I thought maybe Alfred's next birthday might be spent in London, or Vienna, or somewhere far away—and I knew that I was going to have you here to-day, Ann—so I told the woman who made the cake to be sure and use forget-me-nots. So when he thinks of us on his next birthday he will have to remember how much we all love him!"
All of a sudden I had that uncomfortable feeling that comes in my throat sometimes when I don't want it to, and I realized that if something did not happen to divert my mind I should certainly cry. Ever since his graduation Alfred had been trying to devise means for this course of study abroad, and I had known how much better his practice had been lately, but somehow, I had not thought of his going so far away so soon. Suppose Mammy Lou should have gall-stones again!
I wrestled for a moment with that awful lump in my throat; then I spoke, and my voice was natural again.
"Is this sudden 'wanderlust' the outcome of collecting all those nickels?" I asked with a laugh.
After we left the table Alfred and I went into the library for a while, and Ann Lisbeth stayed in the dining-room to keep her husband company while he ate, for he had come in just as we were finishing, and declared that he was starved.
"Ann, I have a surprise for you," Alfred said, springing up from the big leather chair into whose depths he had lazily thrown himself a moment before. He sometimes took a short nap after luncheon, when he had been out all the night before, and I had picked up a magazine to amuse myself with in case he deserted me in favor of his siesta.
"A surprise?" He had given me a surprise the last time I spent the day at the Gordons'.