Carl’s reply was good-humored and apologetic. He was a cad, he said, to break his promise to his mother, but he positively had never been tipsy.
“I suppose, though, I can drink more than most fellows and not be affected by it,” he wrote. “But that is no excuse, and to prove that I am in earnest I have taken the pledge and shall keep it, too, as bravely as Jack Fullerton did that night. I never respected a man more in my life than I did him, even while chaffing him a little and calling him an old maid. He is the right kind of stuff, and I don’t see why you don’t marry him.”
“Carl’s advice is good,” I said. “Why don’t you marry Jack?”
There was an upward turn of Fan’s chin as she answered me—
“Poor, too poor. I can struggle with poverty at home but when I have one of my own I must have some luxuries. So I’ll wait awhile. I am only twenty-five, if old Granny Baker did say at the sewing society that ‘it was time them Hathern girls were married, as they are gettin’ to be old maids.’ Old maids, indeed! Do I look like one?”
She had never been more beautiful and attractive than she was then in the full bloom of her womanhood. Jack thought so, too, and often asked her to be his wife, while she as often answered him in a manner which, while it did not mean yes, certainly was not a decided no.
Chapter II.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE FEVER.
That summer our town was visited with typhoid fever in its most malignant form. Jack’s mother was among the first to take it, and in their fear of the disease her servants forsook her, and as nurses were scarce Jack was left alone with her until Fan joined him and together they cared for her until she died. A week later our father was smitten with the terrible scourge, which found him an easy prey. He had never been himself since Mrs. Hathern died, and now it seemed to me as if he gladly lay down upon the bed from which he was never to rise again.
“I am so tired,—so tired!” he said, as he folded his thin hands like a child going to sleep, and scarcely moved or spoke again until toward the last when he asked that we send for Carl. “I want to see him,” he said; “there’s something very winsome about Carl, and I must talk to him about the little boy!”
Jack, who had been with us all the time, hiding his own pain to comfort us, telegraphed to Carl’s address in Boston. It was Norah who replied, and her answer was so like her that we could not repress a smile as we read it: “He is scurripin’ around the country, the Lord only knows where, but I’ll find him,—sure.”