“And what sort of a girl is that Miss Bolton?” There was no curiosity—­merely for information.  “Uncle Peter was so full of her brother and how badly he had been hurt he hardly mentioned her name”

“I did not see her very well; she was just coming out of her brother’s room, and the hall was dark.  Oh, here’s my book—­I knew I had left it here.”

“Pretty?” continued Ruth, in a slightly anxious tone.

“No,—­I should say not,” replied the old lady, moving to the door.

“Then you don’t think there is anything I can do?” Ruth called after her.

“Not now.”

Ruth picked up Miss Felicia’s wrap from the chair where that lady had thrown it, mounted the stairs, peered from between the pots of geraniums screening a view of the street with the Hicks Hotel dominating one corner, wondered which window along the desolate front gave Jack light and air, and with whispered instructions to the nurse to be sure and let her know when her father awoke, shut herself in her room.

As for the horrible old ogre who had made all the trouble, nipping off buds, skewering butterflies and otherwise disporting herself after the manner of busybodies who are eternally and forever poking their thin, pointed noses into what doesn’t concern them, no hot, scalding tears, the Scribe regrets to say, dimmed her knowing eyes, nor did any unbidden sigh leap from her old heart.  Foolish young people ought to thank her really for what she had done—­what she would still try to do—­and they would when they were a year older.

Poor, meddling Miss Felicia!  Have you forgotten that night thirty years ago when you stood in a darkened room facing a straight, soldierly looking man, and listened to the slow dropping of words that scalded your heart like molten metal?  Have you forgotten, too, the look on his handsome face when he uttered his protest at the persistent intermeddling of another, and the square of his broad shoulders as he disappeared through the open door never to return again?

CHAPTER XVII

Some of the sunshine that had helped dry the muddy road, making possible the path between Jack’s abode and MacFarlane’s hired villa—­where there was only room for Miss Felicia, Peter still occupying his cell at Mrs. Hicks’s, but taking his meals with Ruth, so that he could be within call of MacFarlane when needed—­ some of this same sunshine, I say, may have been responsible for the temporary drying up of Ruth’s tears and the establishing of various ways of communication between two hearts that had for some days been floundering in the deeps.  Or, perhaps, the rebound may have been due to the fact that Peter had whispered something in Jack’s ear, or that Ruth had overheard Miss Felicia praising Jack’s heroism to her father—­it was common talk everywhere—­or it may have been that the coming of spring which always brings hope and cheer—­making old into new, may have led to the general lighting up of the gloom that had settled over the house of MacFarlane and its dependents; but certain it is that such was the case.