"Going to get his discus. He'll have no appetite for dinner unless he gets in a few dozen slings," the young man declared. "Let's turn in here at the sign of the roses, Jerry. I'm too lazy to take another step."
"You should have come out with me in the car," Jerry replied as they sat down in the cool arbor made for youth and June-time. "I didn't know you were in the city."
"Well, little cousin girl, I'll confess I didn't dare," the young man declared, boldly. "I've been studying awfully hard this year, and, now I'm needed to paint The Great American Canvas, I can't end my useful career under a big touring-car at the bottom of an embankment out on the Winnowoc bluff road. So when I saw you coming into Uncle Cornie's office in the bank I slipped away."
"And as to my own risk?" Jerry asked.
"Oh, Jerry Swaim, you would never have an accident in a hundred years. There's nobody like you, little cousin mine, nobody at all."
Eugene Wellington put one well-formed hand lightly on the small white hand lying on the wicker chair-arm, and, leaning forward, he looked down into the face of the girl beside him. A handsome, well-set up, artistic young fellow he was, fitted to adorn life's ornamental places. And if a faint line of possible indecision of character might have suggested itself to the keen-eyed reader of faces, other traits outweighed its possibility. For his was a fine face, with a sort of gracious gentleness in it that grows with the artist's growth. A hint of deeper spirituality, too, that marks nobility of character, added to a winning personality, put Eugene Wellington above the common class. He fitted the rose-arbor, in "Eden" and the comradeship of good breeding. When a man finds his element, all the rest of the world moves more smoothly therefor.
"Nobody like me," Jerry repeated. "It's a good thing I'm the only one of the kind. You'd say so if you knew what Aunt Jerry thinks of me. She has been analyzing me and filing me away in sections this afternoon."
"What's on her mind now?" Eugene Wellington asked, as he leaned easefully back in his chair.
"She says I am heir—" Jerry always wondered what made her pause there. Years afterward, when this June evening came back in memory, she could not account for it.
"Heir to what?" the young artist inquired, a faint, shadowy something sweeping his countenance fleetly.