“If mamma wants me, and papa says to come, how can I help going?” asked Jan.
“I suppose we must admit their claim,” said her uncle. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll write Jan’s father, begging him to spare her a little while longer, and telling him how dear she is to each of us. If he is hard-hearted enough to take her in spite of that, we’ll have to send her to him, with a nice, strong little cable attached, to pull her back by in a short time.”
“I don’t think we ought to let mamma wait while we write papa, and he answers. That will take nearly a week, and if he says mamma has been sick and wants me, I think I ought to go right away, don’t you?” asked Jan.
“O Miss Lochinvar! You want to go?” said Sydney reproachfully.
“I want to go and stay at the same time,” said Jan truthfully. “I am just as happy here as I can be, and I love you heaps and heaps, and when I get back I’ll talk about every one of you until they’ll think I can’t speak of anything else. But when I think of mamma—and all of them—why I could fly! You know how you’d feel if you hadn’t seen any of this family for six months.”
“There are such quantities of things to do,” said Gwen, speaking for the first time, though there was no one else to whom the loss of Miss Lochinvar meant so much as to her. “You haven’t been down to Trinity nor to St. Paul’s—and you like places where great people are buried. You’re so crazy about history you must at least see Alexander Hamilton’s grave—and the Jumel house.”
“That wouldn’t take long; besides New York will be here when she returns, for I would put her in the safe-deposit vaults and lock her up, if I didn’t think she would come back in the fall,” said her uncle. “Then you would rather not have me write, asking an extension of time—a stay of proceedings, little Miss Lochinvar?”
“I think when papa says he wants me, and mamma is longing for me, it means just that, and it would not be right to keep them waiting,” said Jan, wishing she were not obliged to choose.
“It’s a shame, a shame!” cried Jack, emotion, so long suppressed, so far mastering him that two tears would find their way out, though he tried to hope that they would be mistaken for coffee.
“Well, Jack, here’s a chance to be noble. There are people who would rather another had a treasure than possess it themselves,” smiled Mrs. Graham.