“I’ve got an idea, but it’s sort of a joke and I don’t want to take the edge off it by telling it now,” admitted James.
It proved that all of them were in the same predicament.
“I’ll tell you—let’s have Helen and Roger the committee to arrange this program,” suggested Tom. “Then we can each one tell the committee what our particular idea is, and they’ll be the only ones who will know all the jokes.”
They decided that this would be the best way, and the committee withdrew to a corner where it was visited by one after the other of the rest of the members, while the unoccupied people drew around the piano on which Ethel Blue was playing popular songs.
“When do you go?” Tom asked her as she stopped for a few minutes to hunt up a new piece of music.
“The wedding is the day after our breakfast; then they go off on a week’s trip and when they come back they’ll pick me up here and take me on to Fort Myer with them.”
“That means that you’ll only be here about ten days longer?”
Ethel Blue nodded, her eyes filling.
“I wish you’d give us your idea now, Tom,” called Helen, seeing from across the room that her little cousin was not far from tears, and Tom went away, leaving her to let her fingers slip softly through a simple tune that her Aunt Marion had taught her to play in the dusk without her notes. She wondered if she would ever do it again; if her new mother and her father would want her to play it to them; if she should be happy, the only young person in the household when she had been accustomed to a large family; if she could ever get along without Dicky to tease her and to be teased.
“Aunt Marion says that every change in life has its good points and its bad ones,” she thought. “I must make the most out of the good points and try not to notice the bad ones or to change them into good ones.”