“And it really doesn’t matter a bit what they do say, except for you, Aunt Katherine,” Katherine offered. “There are four of us now, four in this family. Enough of us to stand together, I should think, and not ask much from society.”
“Four? Five!” Kate left Elsie’s side on the divan to perch on the arm of her great-aunt’s chair. “Why, five of us are quite enough to start a colony and make our own society.”
“Bless you, dear child, for counting me in,” Miss Frazier said with sheerest gratitude.
“But of course, we all count you in, and there are five of us,” Katherine cried, “only we don’t want you to sacrifice too much.” And that was the signal for a second close formation of happy people about Aunt Katherine’s chair.
“Sacrifice! Why, all I want in the world is my family. Don’t talk about sacrifice!”
It was much later that Aunt Katherine began wondering about dinner. What had become of it? Nick and Katherine had utterly forgotten that one does usually dine sometime before bedtime. They laughed at the suddenness of their return to earth.
“Ring the bell, Kate, and see if the servants are dead or asleep,” Miss Frazier said.
But at that instant Effie appeared in the door. She had heard Miss Frazier’s words. “Julia put dinner off an hour,” she explained. “It’s served now.”
The “now,” however, was almost lost in Katherine’s sudden pounce upon the servant and her hearty handshake.
“Julia often takes a good deal upon herself,” Miss Frazier observed, as linked with Katherine she led their little procession toward the dining-room.
And their first view of the table justified Aunt Katherine in this criticism of Julia. The polished surface of the cherished antique was hidden under an enormous damask cloth. But worse than that, the jade dish with its exquisite floating blossoms had given way to a huge, and to Miss Frazier’s mind hideous, cut-glass punch-bowl full of roses, dozens and dozens of roses, pink, red, and yellow!
“Why, they have made it into a festival,” Katherine cried, surveying the effect. “Smell those roses.”
“See them, rather,” Miss Frazier responded. “It’s the servants. They must have known you both were here; and yes, there are two extra places set.”
“It’s Julia, the lamb!” Katherine declared. “Bless her dear heart. I saw her looking from the kitchen window as we ran in. I’d go and kiss her this second, but she wouldn’t approve of that until after dinner. Julia’s a lion for etiquette.”
“Please be so considerate as not to begin spoiling the servants, Katherine.”
Nick and Kate and Elsie looked at Aunt Katherine, surprised. But Katherine simply answered lightly, “It’s they who spoil me.” She accepted the tone of her aunt’s command without dismay. She knew that the apparent sharpness had been only Aunt Katherine’s old habit of criticism reasserting itself toward a beloved niece, who to her mind could never possibly be anything but the child she had “brought up.” Katherine had begun to understand her aunt to-night for the first time, to see her in the “other light” that the King of the Fairies knew.
“You’d better excuse yourself to wash your hands and remove that odd-looking rain-soaked tam,” Aunt Katherine picked on her again, the minute they were seated. “Use my bathroom, it’s the nearest. And hurry right back, or this surprisingly sumptuous-looking soup that Julia has provided will get cold.”
Katherine, obediently leaving the room, looked rather like a humble child, but Nick’s eyes, as he stood, followed as though hers might have been the departure of an empress.
* * * * * * * *
Late that night the doors between the girls’ rooms blew shut in the wind that was clearing the air of storm and rain. Never mind about the doors, though; the spirit of Miss Frazier’s rule rather than the letter was being kept to-night. For Kate and Elsie were curled up within whispering distance of each other on Kate’s bed. Both were in dressing gowns; they were supposed to have been asleep for an hour past.
“I’ve never been abroad, or even anywhere out of New England,” Kate was whispering. “You went with Aunt Katherine last summer. Will it be so wonderful as I expect?”
“We were only in England. And it will be a million times more wonderful than then, for we shall be together. Why, two weeks from now, sooner, we ought to be in Switzerland.”
“And two weeks ago we had never heard of each other,” Kate added.
“And one day ago,” Elsie took it up, “if you had told me that I would spend the rest of the summer away from my father, travelling in Europe with you and Aunt Katherine, I would have said you were crazy.”
“Oh, Elsie,” Kate asked quickly, “I haven’t said anything, but is that awfully hard for you, leaving them in Ashland, while we go so far away?”
“Not any more awful for me to leave my father than for you to leave your mother, I guess. Anyway, when they like the plan so much, we’d be funny daughters not to be pleased, too.”
“You say ‘My father, your mother’—Oh, Elsie, do you realize in just a day or two it will be ‘our father and our mother’?”
Elsie nodded. “Yes, Kate,” she said. “You have given me a mother and I have given you a father, and now we are a family. I feel, do you know, as though my heart might burst!”
“Don’t let it,” Kate warned quickly. “You’ll need it strong for climbing the Alps! Imagine! Oh, how glorious it all is!”
“And when we come home again and live in that funny little barn-house of yours—I am thinking of that,” Elsie whispered. “That will be better than travelling.”
“The Hart boys are going to be simply flabbergasted,” Kate said, remembering them. “They kept telling me to bring you home with me, but they never guessed you’d be my sister when you did come.”
“But do you think they will want to have anything to do with me?” Elsie asked, diffidently.
“Why not, I should like to know?”
“Well, you see, that letter they wrote——”
Kate’s face reddened. “What a creature I was! Of course, they will forget all about that now. Even if you weren’t my sister and Mother’s daughter, they’d like you awfully just the first second they saw you. They couldn’t help it.”
Before going to bed, finally, the girls put out the lights and went out on to Kate’s flowery balcony to look at the clearing night. They stood close together, their arms about each other’s shoulders, their dressing gowns billowing in the fresh wind. Elsie lifted her face up toward the sky. “It’s going to be a fair day to-morrow,” she affirmed. “See the stars!”
Kate’s face was lifted, too. “Yes,” she said. “Do you remember what the King of the Fairies told Hazel and her lover about the magic they had made their very own, how it’s safer than the stars from troubling? Well, do you know, as a family, I think we are going to have a lot of that magic.”
THE END
THE VANISHING COMRADE
by Ethel Cook Eliot
Kate Marshall had plenty of boys for friends and a very companionable mother. But when she visited her interesting Great Aunt Katherine she did hope to find in Elsie a girl comrade of her own age to share her dreams and enthusiasms.
However, this new comrade had a disturbing way of vanishing unexpectedly.
And it all centered about the orchard house, where windows were found open, doors were found locked, and lights flickered at night.
Parties and pretty clothes, misunderstandings and unusual mystery make this an unusual story that girls will enjoy from start to finish.
Another of Mrs. Eliot’s distinctive books for girls.
Transcriber’s Notes
- Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.
- Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.
- In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)