"Then 'on with the dance—let joy be unconfined.'"
Rose obediently went back to the piano. The arrival of the trunk and the composition of a hopeful telegram to Colonel Kent occupied the resourceful visitor for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he went back to his patient, who had already begun to miss him.
"You forgot to tell me your name," Allison suggested.
"Sure enough. Call me Jack, or Doctor Jack, when I'm not here and have to be called."
"But, as you said yourself a few minutes ago, I can't begin that way.
What's the rest of it?"
"If you'll listen," responded the young man, solemnly, "I will unfold before your eyes the one blot upon the 'scutcheon of my promising career. My full name is Jonathan Ebenezer Middlekauffer."
"What—how—I mean—excuse me," stammered Allison.
The young man laughed joyously. "You can search me," he answered, with a shrug. "The gods must have been in a sardonic mood about the time I arrived to gladden this sorrowful sphere. I've never used more of it than I could help, and everybody called me 'Jem' until I went to college, the initials making a shorter and more agreeable name. But before I'd been there a week, I was 'Jemima' or 'Aunt Jemima' to the whole class. So I changed it myself, though it took a thrashing to make two or three of 'em remember that my name was Jack."
"How did you happen to come here?" queried Allison, without much interest.
"The man who was down here on the fifth sent me. He told me about you and suggested that my existence might be less wearing if I had something to do. He just passed along his instructions and faded gracefully out of sight, saying: 'You'd better go, Middlekauffer, as your business seems to be the impossible,' so I packed up and took the first train."