Chapter 10

The long, summer months dragged their length for Miss Lady, months of heartache and rebellion, of loneliness and tears. Then came a day when, without apparent reason, the shadows lifted. She was tramping across the river flats, with Mike at her heels, when once again she heard the world singing, and before she knew it an answering song sprang to her lips.

Uncle Jimpson, plowing near by, looked up and smiled:

“Dat’s right, Honey; sounds lak ole times to hear you singin’ ag’in. I was jus’ settin’ here steddyin’ how good I’d feel ef de Cunnel could come a stompin’ ‘long an’ gimme one of his ‘fore-de-war cussin’s fer bein’ lazy.”

“Oh, Uncle Jimpson, if he could! It seems so long since he left us. I have just been over to Miss Ferney’s, but she wasn’t there. I want to get her to come and stay with me until I know what I am going to do. They expect to take the Doctor home to-morrow.”

“Yas’m, Carline was tellin’ me. Looks to me lak he’s been well enough to go fer some time.” Uncle Jimpson scratched his head wisely.

“I don’t know what’s to become of us,” said Miss Lady ruefully twisting Mike’s ears. “They say unless I sell the rest of Thornwood, we won’t have money enough to live on. But I won’t sell another acre. I’ll teach school first.”

Uncle Jimpson was scandalized: “Now, Miss Lady, chile, don’t you git dem notions in your head. Dem’s ole maid notions, you ain’t no ole maid yit! Why don’t you git married, and git a kerridge, an’ I’ll dribe an’ Carline’ll cook an’ tak’ care de chillun.”

“I’m never going to marry, Uncle Jimpson,” Miss Lady declared, with the passionate assurance of youth. “And I am never going to leave Thornwood. If you see Miss Ferney going down the road, ask her to stop by a minute. Come on, Mike, we are late now.”

And they were late, five minutes, by the open-faced watch that lay in the Doctor’s hand as they entered the garden. He was sitting in his wheel-chair with his books and manuscripts on a table at his elbow, and he lifted an expectant face toward the gate as she entered.

It was strange what two months at Thornwood had done for the Doctor. He had been brought there unconscious, a serious, middle-aged professor, who had run in the same groove for twenty years. The same surroundings, the same people, the same monotonous, daily routine had rendered him as rusty and faded as the text-books he lived with. Nothing short of a collision could have jolted him out of his rut, and the collision had arrived.

The sudden change from the grim realism of a lecture platform, with its bleak blackboard and creaking chalk, to the romance of an old flower garden where blossoms flirted with each other across the borders, and birds made love in every bough, was enough to freshen the spirit of even a John Jay Queerington. His cosmic conscience, which usually worked overtime, striving to solve problems which Nature had given up, seemed to be asleep. His fine, serious face relaxed somewhat from its austerity, and as the days passed he read less and observed more.

His observations, before long, resulted in a discovery; he, who was so weary of the cultivated hothouse species of femininity, had chanced quite by accident upon a rare, unclassified wild-flower, that piqued his curiosity and enlisted his interest. For two months he had depended almost entirely upon his young hostess for companionship, and the fact that the large box of books he had ordered from the city remained unopened, gave evidence that the Doctor had not been bored.

During the hours when he was not engrossed in verifying statistics, and appending references to those voluminous and still accumulating notes for the fifth volume of his great work, he devoted himself to sorting and arranging the odds and ends of facts and fancies that he found stored away in Miss Lady’s brain. Under ordinary circumstances he would have dismissed a pupil to whom clearness and accuracy were strangers, and whose attention wandered with every passing butterfly. In the classroom he not only demanded but practised order and system. He arrived at his conclusions by as methodical a series of mental actions as he arrived at his desk every morning at twenty-nine minutes to nine. But these were not ordinary circumstances.