Meantime, life grew quite vivid to his sister. Elizabeth had once said that Nannie was "born an old maid"; and certainly these tranquil, gently useless years of being very busy about nothing, and living quite alone with her stepmother, had emphasized in her a simplicity and literalness of mind that was sometimes very amusing to the other three friends. At any rate, hers was a pallid little personality—perhaps it could not have been anything else in the household of a woman like Sarah Maitland, with whom, domestically, it was always either peace, or a sword! Nannie was incapable of anything but peace. "You are a 'fraid-cat," Elizabeth used to tell her, "but you're a perfect dear!" "Nannie is unscrupulously good," Blair said once; and her soft stubbornness in doing anything she conceived to be her duty, warranted his criticism. But during the first year that David and Elizabeth were engaged, her stagnant existence in the silent old house began to stir; little shocks of reality penetrated the gentle primness of her thought, and she came creeping out into the warmth and sunshine of other people's happiness; indeed, her shy appreciation of the lovers' experiences became almost an experience of her own, so closely did she nestle to all their emotions! It was a real blow to her when it was decided that David should enter a Philadelphia hospital as an interne. "Won't he be at home even for the long vacations?" Nannie asked, anxiously; when she was told that hospitals did not give "vacations," her only consolation was that she would have to console Elizabeth.
But when Robert Ferguson heard what was going to happen, he had nothing to console him. "I'll have a love-sick girl on my hands," he complained to Mrs. Richie. "You'll have to do your share of it," he barked at her. He had come in through the green door in the garden wall, with a big clump of some perennial in his hands, and a trowel under one arm. "Peonies have to be thinned out in the fall," he said grudgingly, "and I want to get rid of this lot. Where shall I put 'em?"
It was a warm October afternoon, and Mrs. Richie, who had been sitting on the stone bench under the big hawthorn in her garden, reading, until the dusk hid her page, looked up gratefully. "You are robbing yourself; I believe that is your precious white peony!"
"It's only half of it, and I get as much good out of it here as in my own garden," he grunted (he was sitting on his heels digging a hole big enough for a clump of peonies with a trowel, so no wonder he grunted); "besides, it improves my property to plant perennials; my next tenant may appreciate flowers," he ended, with the reproving significance which had become a joke between them.
"Oh," said Mrs. Richie, sighing, "I don't like to think of that 'next tenant.'"
He looked up at her a little startled. "What do you mean? You are not going to Philadelphia with David next April?"
"Why, you didn't suppose I would let David go alone?"
"What! You will leave Mercer?" he said. In his dismayed astonishment he dropped his trowel and stood up. "Will you please tell me why I should stay in Mercer, when David is in Philadelphia?"
Robert Ferguson was silent; then he tramped the earth in around the roots of the white peony, and said, sullenly, "It never occurred to me that you would go, too."
"You'll have to be extra nice to Elizabeth when we are not here," Mrs.
Richie instructed him. David's mother was very anxious to be nice to
Elizabeth herself; which was a confession, though she did not know it,
of her old misgivings as to David's choice.