CHAPTER XXX.

Mr. Armstrong telegraphs to Mrs. Turner, who is still in occupation at Nutsgrove, and the old place is dusted, swept, aired, and garnished. One soft April day Addie comes home again, and walks heavily through the familiar rooms, leaning on her husband's arm. Almost from the first day he notices a change for the better in her appearance and manner; her step gains firmness, her appetite improves; and one night, about a week after their return, when she stands by the drawing-room window, her face buried in a bunch of lilac-blossoms, there comes a radiance to her eyes, an eager softness to her voice that thrills him with wild hope.

"I'm glad we came home; aren't you, Tom?" she whispers, nestling close to him. "Let us never go away again. I'm tired of wandering; and I shall get well here, I know, without going to Madeira or Algiers. I feel to-night that I should like to live. Things are coming back to me again that I once loved—you amongst them, Tom. I am growing fond of you again—oh, yes, life is coming to me with the summer, and even good looks also! Look!" she cries gayly, pulling him to a glass and putting her face close to his swarthy one. "Am I not almost pretty to-night? You'd know me if you met me in the streets now, wouldn't you, Tom? Why, I want only a little red in my cheeks, a few freckles on the bridge of my nose, and some curliness in my fringe to be myself again—quite my old self again!"

"You can do without the fringe, young lady," says Armstrong, who has the old-fashioned male distaste for the modern style of hairdressing, pushing back two or three lank locks from her forehead.

"No, no; I must have a fringe, a regular Skye-terrier one too; my face looks so bald and hard without it. It's all that horrible cod-liver oil that's coming out in my hair and making it so thin and straight! I won't take any more of it, Tom; it's of no use trying to force me," she adds, with a low soft laugh that comes to him like a strain of sweetest music. "I'm going to get well without it—you'll see."

Later on that evening she startles him by alluding for the first time to her sisters and brothers, quite casually too, as if the thought of them had just struck her incidentally. She has been looking over an old photographic album, and, stopping before one of her sisters—Pauline—she says lightly—

"The others, Tom? They are doing well, aren't they—dear old Jo and Polly and Bob and Hal and Lottchen?"

"Yes, yes, love," he answers eagerly. "They are all doing well, every one of them."

"I should like to see them again," she says, after a pause—"to see them all together sitting here around me as in the old days. Will you ask them to come, Tom?"

"Yes, if you think you feel quite—quite rested enough, dear, after your journey," he answers reluctantly.

So they all come in haste and trembling, Lady Saunderson giving up two important appointments with Worth, traveling up from London with her elder brother, who seems paralyzed by the news that he had heard so unexpectedly.

Armstrong interviews them first, and in a few stern impressive words gives them the outline of their sister's story, and warns them against exciting her with ill-timed emotion in her critical state.

So with smiling faces and cheerful words they welcome her back as if she has been on a pleasant trip. There are no passionate tears, no hysterical kisses, no entreaties for forgiveness, no remorseful appeals. The meeting which Armstrong has been dreading opens and closes in sunshine, and Addie, propped up with cushions, greets them with glistening unresentful glance and gentle loving words.

"How well they look! Don't they, Tom?" she cries, turning a beaming face to her husband, against whose shoulder she is resting. "And, take them all in all, what a good-looking family they are to be sure! Why, Lottie, what an immense girl you have grown! And you've got all the doubtful bloom of my teens, roses, flesh, and freckles—all. I don't suppose it would become me to call you pretty, would it? Polly, what a swell you are—just like pictures from Le Follet. But your face hasn't changed much. Bob, I won't believe that mustache is genuine until I pull it. Come over here, sir, and face the light at once! What! You are afraid? I thought so," she adds with a gay laugh, as the boy turns away swiftly to hide the burning tears he can not keep from his eyes.

They sit together all the afternoon, chatting merrily, recalling old family jokes, making plans for the future; and, when tea is brought in, Addie insists on pouring it out, her husband's large hand covering hers and guiding the spout to the tea-pot. She makes them all drink her health, declares she has never felt so well and happy in her life, and sends a loving message to poor Aunt Jo, who is laid up with rheumatic fever, which Lottie promises to deliver without fail. Then she makes engagements to spend a week with Bob at Aldershot during the maneuvers, to visit Hal at the Naval College, to stop a month at the Park with Pauline, and to take Lottie for a trip abroad during the holidays. Toward evening she seems a little tired; so, at a signal from Armstrong, the family withdraw by degrees, and she sinks into a light doze, from which she awakes with an uneasy start.

"Tom, Tom, where are you?"

"Here, here, where I always am—by your—side, sweetheart."

"They have all gone?"

"Yes, for the present."

She raises herself up, puts her warm arms round his neck, and whispers—

"And now only you—only you to the end!"

Seeing the spasm of pain that crosses his dark face, she turns the sob into a laugh, and, taking a pink anemone from a glass on the table, begins to fray it childishly.

"'Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, gentleman, plowboy, apothecary—' Apothecary! Oh, you stupid, empty-headed flower—much you know about it! I wish I had a daisy—a big milky-petaled daisy; they always tell the truth—always."

"What did they tell you, love?"

"That I was to marry a gentleman, Tom—a gentleman. I consulted them every day nearly for three weeks before I married you, and they always gave me the same answer. If—if I were going to die—which I have not the slightest intention of doing—I should ask you, Tom, to plant only daisies on my grave."

"I think it would be more to the point," he answers lightly, "if I made the request of you, considering that I am almost twenty years your senior, and that I, not you, my dear, was the object of the pointed and persistent compliment."

"Very well then," she says, laughing; "I'll plant your grave all with big daisies, Tom Armstrong, gentleman, and I'll come and water them every evening—when you're dead."

"'Ah, if you did, my own, my sweet, Were it ever so airy a tread, My dust would hear you and beat Had I lain for a century dead— Would start and tremble under your feet, And blossom in purple and red!'"

"'My dust would hear you and beat had I lain for a century dead,'" she repeats softly. "There is fiber as well as music in that idea; I like it. 'Had I lain for a century dead'—the old tune of the immortality of love, Tom, sung by poets and psalters since the world began. And so you think your dusty old heart would feel me, your drumless ear would hear me a century hence?" Then, after a pause, looking up into his face with a twitching mouth that brings a dead dimple to life—"But suppose, Tom—suppose my second husband carried the watering-pot—would your dust blossom into purple and red then?"

"You little Goth! You soulless barbarian!" he exclaims, in mock indignation. "Catch me ever dropping out of prose for your edification again!"

"There—don't be cross; I'll always leave him at home when I come to call on your poor ghost. Now are you satisfied?"

The stars come out, faintly studding the purple vault of heaven; a tiny breeze sweeps the budding world, bringing to the sick girl the perfume of a thousand flowers, telling her of the sweets and the joys, the bloom of the coming summer, which she may never know.

"'Were it ever so airy a tread, My dust would hear you and beat Had I lain for a century dead,'"

she repeats softly; then, suddenly starting to her feet with a peevish wailing cry—"Why do you talk to me of death—death, only death? Oh, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I tell you! I can not die now—it would be double death! I am so young, I have suffered so"—sinking upon her knees and clasping her hands piteously—"not yet, dear Heaven, ah, not yet! Give me this summer—this one summer; it is all I ask! Tom, why don't you speak—why don't you look at me? Ah, you have no hope—no hope! I saw it in their faces to-day; I see it in yours every time you look at me. You know I'm doomed—you know I'm doomed!"

"I know nothing, nothing," he answers, in a smothered voice, clasping her to his breast and kissing the tears from her gray scared face, "but that they say that the Almighty's power is great and His mercy infinite."

"And I have one lung left, you know; I have one lung left!" she pleads peevishly. "The doctors at the hospital told me that; and people have been known to live for years with one lung, with great care and love. And I have both—I have both! I ought to last the summer; it is so near now; the roses are budding outside the window, the apple trees are white with blossom—it is so near! Oh, Tom, my love, my life, keep me with you this one summer, this one summer, please!"

She lives to see the summer, to see the tall daisies and sleepy cowslips bow their scorched heads to the dust, and the roses drop leaf by leaf from their thorny stem—lives to welcome the golden sheaves of autumn; and, when the first bud shrivels in the grove, she is carried, not to that quiet garden behind the church to lie beside her mother, but to the balmy shores of Algiers, where summer meets her again and lingers with her so kindly and helpfully that three years go by before Tom Armstrong sets eyes on the tall chimneys of his native town again.

One bright July day two ladies are seated at the window of the old drawing-room at Nutsgrove. One, old and massively spectacled, is busy knitting a diminutive jersey; the other, with a pretty air of chronic invalidism that Mrs. Wittiterly might have copied with effect, is lying in an easy-chair, her white hands idle on her lap, watching a baby, unwieldy and almost shapeless with the quantity of flesh his tender age has to carry, playing with a kitten at her feet, pulling its tail, turning back its ears, clasping it ecstatically to a fat heaving chest, until at last, with one frantic wriggle and a smart little tap on the chubby arm torturing it, the unfortunate brute gets free, and, with a spring, clears the open window.

"Well done, puss, well done!" says Addie, laughing. "For the last ten minutes I've been trying to summon up energy to come to your rescue, but couldn't. Well done!"

For a moment the baby looks in utter silence from the thin red streak on his arm to his mother's callous face; then, having taken in the full measure of his grievance, he stiffens out his limbs, clinches his fists, closes his eyes, opens his mouth until the corners almost reach his ears, and gives vent to the most soul-piercing, stupendous roar that has ever echoed through the walls of Nutsgrove within the memory of a Lefroy.

The mighty volume electrifies the household, and brings servants and friends from all quarters—brings Armstrong from his study, his face pale with apprehension.

"What is it? He is killed—my boy?"

"No," pants Addie, "not quite. There is, I think, a little life left in him still."

"But he has frightened, he has excited you, my love; you look quite flushed. You must drink this glass of wine at once, Addie."

"He is gone?" asks Miss Darcy, cautiously withdrawing her fingers from her tortured ears, and, turning to her host and hostess, exclaims contemptuously—

"And that—that is the child you would have me believe is the offspring of a woman with one lung! Adelaide, my niece, excuse plain speaking; but it's my impression you're nothing more nor less than a humbug—an arrant humbug!"

THE END.

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