Jerry looked straight at Mrs. Bahrr with wide-open eyes. Something in her face recalled Jim Swaim's face to York Macpherson, and he forgot the girl's words as he stared at her.
"When I was a child," Jerry continued, "they used to say to me, 'The goblins 'll git you ef you don't watch out.' Now I know it is the Teddy Bear that gits you ef you don't watch out."
Mrs. Bahrr's lips seemed to snap together and her eyes tore their way out of Jerry and turned to the window. Jerry stepped softly across to her chair and, laying a hand on her shoulder, said, with a smile:
"Hereafter it will be all right between us."
And it was—apparently.
As they walked slowly homeward York and Jerry said little. The girl's mind was busy with thoughts of her new work—the only work she had ever attempted in her life; and York's thoughts were busy with—Jerry.
That night York sat alone on the porch of "Castle Cluny" until far toward morning, beginning at last to fight out with himself the great battle of his life. The big, kindly, practical man of affairs, arrow-proof, bullet-proof, bomb-proof to all the munitions of Cupid, courted and flattered and admired and looked up to by a whole community, seemed hopelessly enmeshed now in the ripples of golden-brown hair, held fast by the beautiful dark-blue eyes of a young lady whose strength to withstand what lay before her he very much doubted.
"If I speak to her now, she'll run away from us and leave Laura lonely. She can't go to the hotel, because I know Ponk has tried and failed. I'm one degree behind him in that. Where would she go? And how would the Big Dipper act? I've no faith in her keeping still if Jerry did use some magic on her to-night. Nobody will ever Rumpelstilskin her out of herself. I'll be a man, and wait and befriend my little girl whenever I can, although I'm forced every day to see how she is growing to take care of herself. When nothing else can decide events, time is sure to settle them."
All this happened at the beginning of the three years whose ending came in a June-time on the Kansas plains. Summer and winter, many a Sabbath afternoon saw the hotel-keeper and the pretty mathematics-teacher strolling out to the cemetery "to call on mother." The quaint, firm faith of the pompous little man that "mother knew" had no place in Jerry Swaim's code and creed. But she never treated his belief lightly, and its homely sincerity at length began to bear fruit.
Not without its lasting effect, too, was the silent influence of Laura Macpherson upon her guest. The bright, happy life in spite of a hopeless lameness, the cheerful giving up of what that lameness denied the having, all unconsciously wrought its beauty into the new Jerry whom the "Eden" of an earlier day had never known. Nobody remembered when the guest and friend of the Macphersons began to be a factor in the New Eden church life, but everybody knew at the close of the third year that the churches couldn't do without her. And neither the Baptist minister, holding tenaciously to salvation by immersion, nor the Presbyterian, clinging to the doctrine of infant damnation, nor the Methodist, demanding instantaneous revival-meeting conversion from sin, asked once that the fair Philadelphian should "become united with the church." That would necessitate the query, "Which church?" And that would mean a loss to two and a gain to only one. As far as the blowout sand differed from "Eden" on the Winnowoc, so far Jerry's religious faith now differed from the disbelief that followed the death of her father. In Kansas where the artistic Eugene Wellington had declared his own faith would perish, she had learned for the first time how to pray.