The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

The October sun was shining brightly into the windows of a handsome drawing room in New York, where two young people were talking earnestly together. The girl was scarcely twenty and looked younger. She was short and slight and dainty and sweet, with beautiful blue eyes which laughed when she laughed and gave a wonderful brightness to her face. There was something peculiar in their expression which was rapid and searching and made the young man beside her wonder if what they saw in him boded good or ill to his suit. He was twenty-two, tall and straight and broad shouldered, with something in his voice and features and manner which reminded one of the July morning twenty-three years before when Craig Mason sat on the north piazza of the Prospect House and talked to Alice Tracy. To one who had been in Ridgefield that summer there would have come back the scent of the new mown hay and the perfume of the white pond lilies Alice wore in her belt, and in the young man’s eyes he would have seen a likeness to Alice’s eyes, with thicker lashes and heavier brows.

After this the reader scarcely need be told that the young man was the son of Craig and Alice, born abroad where his parents had spent much of their time since their marriage, with occasional visits to America. Alice had been delighted with the old world, and as Craig’s health was better there they had staid on and on,—sometimes in Paris where their son Roy was born, sometimes in Switzerland, sometimes in Italy, and once for a winter in Cairo, and again in London, where Craig’s mother died. They had brought her back to Boston, and tired of wandering with no particular home, had decided to settle down quietly for a time at least. But not in the house Craig had looked at for himself and Helen. Nothing could have induced him to take that at any price. He preferred his mother’s old home, which, if not in so fashionable a part of the city, was dear to him for its associations with his boyhood and manhood and mother. Here they had lived for three years, two of which Roy had spent at Harvard, where he had entered as a Junior, studying hard in order to be graduated with honor, and still managing to join in a good many athletic sports and to fall in love with his pretty half cousin, Fanny Prescott, a pupil in a private school. She had thought him a boy at first and played with and teased him unmercifully, now sending him from her in a rage and then luring him back with a trick of her eyes which we have seen before. She had not inherited all her mother’s dazzling beauty and but little of her nature. In her frankness and perfect truthfulness she resembled Alice. Her Sundays when at school had been spent with the Masons, and thus Roy had every facility for falling in love with her. But while she kept him at fever heat with her innocent coquetries she gave him no encouragement. Once, when he said, “I must and will speak seriously to you,” she called him a big boy and told him to wait till he had his diploma and a mustache. He had them both now; the mustache was a very small one, which some might think did not add to his face. The diploma, received in June, was en regle, and he had come for the serious talk.

He had not seen her since May, at which time she had been called home by the sudden illness and death of her father, Judge Prescott. As it was so near the close of the term she had not returned to school, but had spent the summer with her mother at a quiet place among the Adirondacks. She did not know that he was coming but was glad to see him, and led him to a sofa on which they both sat down. Then her manner changed suddenly to one of shyness and almost shamefacedness as she moved away from him and put a sofa cushion between them. She was in mourning for her father and the black brought out the purity of her complexion and the brightness of her eyes which filled with tears when Roy spoke of her father and his grief when he heard he was dead.

“Don’t talk of him. I can’t bear it yet. Talk of something else, please,” she said, and Roy plunged at once into the object of his visit, reminding her that he had his diploma and his mustache, and now he wanted her love.

“Oh, Roy, it’s too bad in you to spoil our good times as friends. As lovers we might quarrel, and then we are cousins,” she said.

“Only seconds, which does not count,” Roy answered, moving nearer to her, while she put another cushion between them so that only her shoulders and head were visible.

Roy was of a more ardent nature than his father, and there was no stiffness or hesitancy in his wooing when once he was fairly under way.

“You can pile up the cushions till I can’t see you at all,” he said, “but it will not prevent you from hearing me tell you that I love you and have ever since I saw you in short dresses, with your hair down your back.”

For a time Fanny listened with her face bent down, and when she turned it to him there was a troubled look upon it and her lips quivered as she said, “I do care for you, Roy, and always have; but I must not any more. You will not want me to either when you know what I do.”

“What do you know?” he asked, beginning to slide his hand under the cushions.