Jan turned and flung her arms around Gwen and Gladys with a face as variable as the month, all smiles and tears. “O my dears, my dears! Yes, I do!” she cried. “I wish I were twins! Can’t you understand how glad I’ll be to see dear old Crescendo and my precious family, and yet how I want, and want, and want you? I’d like to go and stay at the same time.”
“And we only want you to stay, you see,” said Gwen, trying to smile. “It’s almost like losing my eyes over again, Janet Lochinvar! You have been such a dear old darling, and done so much for me!”
“Not as much as for me,” said Gladys mournfully. “I’m another girl.”
“Never mind if you are, Gladys; you’re nicer all the time,” said Jan. “So try to bear up.”
“We’ll go down and see St. Paul’s, and then we’ll go to Trinity,” announced Gladys, rising with the air of one ready to sacrifice herself for the public weal. “And we’ll rally around you every minute that’s left.”
“Syd, Jack, will you go with us down in town to explore mustiness for Jan?” called Gwen up the stairs. And the boys threw themselves on the banisters, and slid down promptly, ready for any expedition.
Jan stood, awe-struck, beside the tomb where Alexander Hamilton was laid to sleep after his tragic end, and where now the hurrying thousands of the modern city surge up the narrow, steep street skirting his resting-place in the pursuit of a little of the success he sought, attained, and which slipped through his fingers at last.
Still more was she thrilled by the old-time pew in St. Paul’s where Washington sat praying in his strong heart for the nation struggling into life. Gwen shared her enthusiasm, and Sydney understood, though he pretended to laugh at it. But Gladys declared she could not see what there was to get excited about. Suppose Washington had sat in that pew, what then? He was a real man, who really lived; he had to sit somewhere. If it hadn’t been there, it would have been somewhere else—what was there to make a fuss about? Gladys’s prosaic mind, which had not a grain of the poet’s nor the student’s element in its make-up, tolerated, but could not share her cousin’s raptures.
The Graham quartet dutifully escorted Jan up to the Jumel house, and up to Columbia Library, and to see the tablet commemorating the battle of Harlem Heights, but in turn they demanded of her less improving, and more amusing pilgrimages. They took her down to Manhattan Beach to see the ocean for the first time, and Miss Lochinvar had to admit that nothing in the West could equal that stupendous first sight of the breakers rolling in from England, and tumbling at her feet—though she retracted the admission with a possible reservation in favor of the Yellowstone, which she had not seen. And at last there were no more expeditions, but three days of absolute devotion to one another, in which Jan packed, while the others watched her rearrange her treasures, and tried to keep up the cheerfulness which they had agreed must speed their parting guest, though it was a cheerfulness veiled in deep purple.
Jan had to have a large new trunk to supplement the shabby little one with which she arrived, for many and marvelous were the contributions the Grahams poured into Jan’s hands to take to the children in Crescendo.