It come dinnertime; about a dozen boarders straggling in, with Vida in a pretty frock anxious because darling Clyde was ten minutes late and of course something fatal must of happened to him in crossing a crowded street.  But nothing had.  He showed up safe and sound and whistling in another ten minutes, and became the life of the party.  He looked near as happy as Vida did when she embraced him out in the hall, a fine handsome young fellow, the best-natured in the world, jollying the boarders and jollying me and jollying Vida that he called Baby Girl, or Babe.  I saw, too, that I must of been mistaken about the job he was holding down.  He was dressed in a very expensive manner, with neat little gold trinkets half concealed about him, the shirt and collar exactly right and the silk socks carefully matching the lavender tie.

He kept the table lively all through dinner with jokes and quips from the latest musical comedies and anecdotes of his dear old college days, and how that very afternoon he had won a silver cup and the pool championship of his college club—­and against a lot of corking good players, too, he didn’t mind saying.  Also I noticed we was eating a mighty good dinner; so darned good you didn’t see how Vida could set it up at the price boarders usually pay.

After dinner Clyde sat down to the piano in the parlour and entertained one and all with songs of a comic or sentimental character.  He knew a piano intimately, and his voice was one of these here melting tenors that get right inside of you and nestle.  He was about the most ingratiating young man I’d ever met, and I didn’t wonder any more about Vida’s look of joy being permanent.  She’d look in on the party every once in a while from the kitchen or the dining room where she was helping her Swede do the dishes for fifteen people and set the table for breakfast.

She was about an hour at this, and when at last she’d slipped out of her big apron and joined us she was looking right tuckered but still joyous.  Clyde patted his Baby Girl’s hand when she come in, and she let herself go into an easy-chair near him that one of the boarders got up to give her.  I got the swift idea that this was the first time all day she’d set down with any right feeling of rest.

Then Clyde sung to her.  You could tell it was a song he meant for her and never sung till she’d got the work done up.  A right pretty old song it was, Clyde throwing all the loving warmth of his first-class tenor voice into the words: 

Good night, good night, beloved! 
I come to watch o’er thee,
To be near thee, to be near thee.

I forget the rest, but there was happy tears in Vida’s eyes when he finished in one climbing tenor burst.  Then Clyde gets up and says he has an engagement down to his college club because some of his dear old classmates has gathered there for a quiet little evening of reminiscence and the jolly old rascals pretend they can’t get along without him.  Vida beams on him brighter than ever and tells him to be sure and have a good time, which I’d bet money he’d be sure to.