Celia stretched an eager hand, for a letter from Uncle John Rayburn—­middle-aged, a bachelor, and an ex-army officer, retired by an incurable injury which did not make him the less the best uncle in the world—­could not fail to be welcome.  But she had not read a page before she dropped the sheet and stared helplessly and anxiously at Lanse.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Why, Uncle Rayburn writes that he would like to come to spend the winter with us,” answered Celia.

“What luck!”

“Luck—­with Charlotte in the kitchen?”

“Uncle Ray is a crack-a-jack of a cook himself.  His board bill will help out like oil on a dry axle, and if we don’t have a lot of fun, then Uncle Ray has changed as—­I know he hasn’t.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER V

“Two cripples,” declared Capt.  John Rayburn—­honourably discharged from active service in the United States Army on account of permanent disability from injuries received in the Philippines,—­“two cripples should be able to keep a household properly stirred up.  I’ve been here five days now, and my soul longs for some frivolity.”

He leaned back in his big wicker armchair and looked quizzically across at his niece Celia, who lay upon her couch at the other side of the room.  She gave him a somewhat pale-faced smile in return.  Four weeks of enforced quiet were beginning to tell on her.

“Some frivolity,” repeated Captain Rayburn, as Charlotte came to the door of the room.  “What do you say, Charlie girl?  Shall we have some fun?”

“Dear me, yes, Uncle Ray,” Charlotte responded, promptly, “if you can think how!”

“I can.  Is there a birthday or anything that we may celebrate?  I’ve no compunction about getting up festivities on any pretext, but if there happened to be a birthday handy—­”

“November—­yes.  Why, we had forgotten all about it!  Lanse’s birthday is the fourth.  That’s—­”

“Day after to-morrow.  Good!  Can you make him a birthday-cake?  If not, I—­”

“Oh, yes, I can!” cried Charlotte, eagerly.  “I’ve just learned an orange-cake.”

“All right.  Then we’ll order a few little things from town, and have a jollification.  Not a very big one, on account of the lady on the couch there, who reminds me at the moment of a water-lily whom some one has picked and then left on the stern seat in the sun.  She looks very sweet, but a trifle limp.”

Celia’s smile was several degrees brighter than the previous one had been.  Nobody could resist Uncle Ray when he began to exert himself to cheer people up.

He was a young, or an old, bachelor, according to one’s point of view, being not yet forty, and looking, in spite of the past suffering which had brought into his chestnut hair two patches of gray at the temples, very much like a bright-faced boy with an irrepressible spirit of energy and interest in the life about him.  It could hardly be doubted that Capt.  John Rayburn, apparently invalided for life and cut off from the activity which had been his dearest delight, must have his hours of depression, but nobody had ever caught him in one of them.