“You really think they’re not? Well, I devoutly hope they’re not; but I believe I’ll ask her.”
“I think I’d ask her,” said Morris, significantly.
And Captain Frank Pollock walked up-town with a look of determination on his face.
CHAPTER XXXVI
WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE
“I think I have begun to live,” said Zelda the next afternoon.
She sat in the parlor at home, talking to her Uncle Rodney.
Her father was out walking about the neighborhood. He had not been down-town since the crisis in his affairs, which had left him much broken. He had been disposed to accept his brother-in-law’s kind offices warily at first, but Zelda had reassured him as to her uncle’s friendly intentions, and it was a relief to him to be able to shift the responsibility of adjusting his affairs to other shoulders.
To all intents and purposes nothing had changed, and beyond the short-lived gossip of business men who knew him personally, Ezra Dameron’s losses passed unnoticed. Olive, who was Zelda’s closest friend, never knew just what had happened. Zelda merely told her cousin that her father had gone through some business trouble, but that it had all been straightened out again. Mrs. Forrest knew even less than this; there was, Rodney Merriam said, no manner of use in discussing the loss of Zelda’s fortune with his sister, and talking about family matters was a bore anyhow. Rodney was surprised at his own amiable acceptance of the situation; but it had resulted in linking him closer to Zelda’s life; she was dependent on him now as she might never have been otherwise; and as for Ezra Dameron, he was a pitiful object, whose punishment was doubtless adequate. It was possible for Rodney Merriam to sit in the parlor of the old house in which he had been born, and talk to Zelda with an ease and pleasure that he had not known since she came home and went to her father instead of going to live with her aunt or with himself, which would have been the sensible thing for her to do.
“I think I have begun to live,” repeated Zelda.
“I hope you are happy, Zee. To be happy’s the main thing. There is nothing else in the wide world that counts; and I say it, whose life has been a failure.”