Doctor Holiday watching in silence out of the tail of his eye understood better what was going on behind his nephew’s quiet exterior demeanor, and wondered sometimes if it had not been a mistake to keep the boy bound to the wheel like that, if he should not rather have packed him off to the uttermost parts of the earth, far away from the little lady with the wedding ring who was so little married.  And yet there was Granny, growing perceptibly weaker day by day, clinging pathetically to Larry’s young strength.  Poor Granny!  And poor Larry!  How little one could do for either!

Ruth’s memory did not return.  She remembered, or at least found familiar, books she had read, songs she must have sung, drifted into doing a hundred little simple everyday things she must have done before, since they came to her with no effort.  She could sew and knit and play the piano exquisitely.  But all this seemed rather a trick of the fingers than of the mind.  The people, the places, the life that lay behind that crash on the Overland never returned to her consciousness for all her anxious struggle to get them back.

It began to look as if her husband, if she had one, were not going to claim her.  No one claimed her.  Not a single response came from all the extensive advertising which Larry still kept up in vain hope of success.  Apparently no one had missed the little Goldilocks.  Precious as she was none sought her.

In the meanwhile she was an undisguised angel visitant to the House on the Hill.  If in his kindly hospitality Doctor Holiday had stretched a point or two in the first place to make the little stranger feel at home the case was different now.  She was needed, badly needed and she played the part of house daughter so sweetly and unselfishly that her presence among them was a double blessing to them all, except perhaps to poor Larry who loved her best of all.

CHAPTER XXIV

A PAST WHICH DID NOT STAY BURIED

Coming in from a lively game of tennis with Elsie Hathaway, his newest sweetheart, the Ancient History Prof’s pretty daughter, Ted Holiday found awaiting him a letter from Madeline Taylor.  He turned it over in his hands with a keen distaste for opening it, had indeed almost a mind to chuck it in the waste paper basket unread.  Hang it all!  Why had she written?  He didn’t want to hear from her, didn’t want to be reminded of her existence.  He wanted instead distinctly to forget there was a Madeline Taylor and that he had been fool enough to make love to her once.  Nevertheless he opened the letter and pulled his forelock in perturbation as he read it.