Cassowary turned uneasily on his bench.
“And before we quit all this foolishness,” Hood resumed with a glance at the chauffeur, “there’s one thing I want to ask you, Mr. Deering, as a special favor. That chap lying over there is Tommy Torrence, whom you kicked off your door-step for daring to love your daughter. He’s one of the best fellows in the world. Just because his father, the old senator, didn’t quite hit it off with you in a railroad deal before Tommy was born is no reason why you should take it out on the boy. He started for the bad after you made a row over his attentions to your daughter, but he’s been with me six months and he’s as right and true a chap as ever lived. You’ve got to fix it up with him or I’ll—I’ll—well, I’ll be pretty hard on your boy if he ever wants to break into my family!”
With this Hood rose and drew from his pocket a handful of newspaper clippings which he threw into the air and watched flutter to the floor.
“Those are some of your advertisements offering handsome rewards for news of me dead or alive. In collecting them I’ve had a mighty good time. Let’s all go to sleep; to-morrow night the genial Fogarty will get us out of this. He’s over there now sawing the first bar of that window!”
X
A year has passed and it is May again and the last day of that month of enchantment. There has been a house-party at the Deering place at Radford Hills. Constance came from Wyoming to spend May with her father, bringing with her, of course, her husband, sometime known as Cassowary, who has been elected to the legislature of his State and, may, it is reported, be governor one of these days. The Tyringhams are there, and this includes Robert Tyringham, alias R. Hood, and his wife (whose authorship of “The Madness of May,” has not yet been acknowledged) and also her father, Augustus Davis, who continues to find recreation in frequent attacks upon any inoffensive piano that gets in his way. Mr. and Mrs. Edward Ranscomb, too, have shared Mr. Deering’s hospitality. Marriage has not interrupted Mrs. Ranscomb’s career as an artist, though she has dropped illustrating, and is specializing in children’s portraits with distinguished success.
The senior Deering, wholly at peace with his conscience, does not work as hard as he used to before his taste of adventurous life gained in the pursuit of Hood. He is very proud of his daughter-in-law, whose brown eyes bring constant cheer and happiness to his table. If she does not hang moons in trees any more, she is still quite capable of doing so, and has no idea of permitting her husband to wear himself out in the banking-house. They are going to keep some time every year for play, she declares, to the very end of their lives.
Hood had been devoting himself assiduously to mastering the details of his business affairs, living as other men do, keeping regular office hours in a tall building with an outlook toward the sea, and taking his recreation on the golf-links every other afternoon.