A Man's Hearth
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor M. Ingram
Chapter 20: The Cornerstone
When they looked for Fred Masterson, he was not there. Elsie remembered, then, that he had gone into Holly’s room while Anthony and his father were intent on each other. On the bed where the baby was asleep they found an envelope upon which was scrawled a message.
“I’m off for the present,” Anthony read. “I’ll drop in to-morrow or next day, when Holly is awake. Thank Mrs. Adriance for me. I’m going to be old-fashioned, Tony—God bless you both.”
“He never will come, I know it!” Elsie exclaimed, her heavy lashes wet. “Can’t we do something? Can’t we go after him?”
“I will go after him,” her husband agreed. “But not to-night.” He crumpled the envelope and flung it aside. “Fred Masterson is not going under without a fight. If doctors, sanitariums, his love for Holly and our help can set him on his feet again, he shall be cured and do all he dreams of doing. To-morrow I will find him.”
“Not to-night?”
“Not to-night. Elsie, don’t you understand? He loved his wife. If I lost you so—if you married someone else——”
She put her small fingers across his lips, stilling the sacrilege.
“No! Do not let our little house even hear you say it!”
“Nor any house of ours! To-morrow I will buy the house we looked at together, and you shall have an orgy of shopping to furnish it. Oh, yes, you shall, and I’ll help you. Have lots of dark red things and brown leather in that front room where you told me about Alenya of the Sea. And—do nurseries have to be pink?”
“Of course not, foolish one. We might make ours sunshine-color, like the satiny inside of a buttercup or a drop of honey in a daffodil. Anthony——”
“Yes?”
The rain-gray eyes laughed up at him, demure and daring.
“Please, I want a cloak all gorgeous without and furry within; a shimmery, glittery, useless brocaded cloak like those in the cloak-room of that restaurant. I—I just want it!”
“How do you know?” he wondered at her. “How do you always know the gracious way to delight me most? What a time we are going to have, girl! I’m going to drag Cook out of his rut and start him up the ladder, for one thing. If he hadn’t given me a chance, and then brought Mr. Goodwin down to see how I handled it, who can tell how much I might have missed? I shall bring him here for you to see, before we move, too. You won’t mind?”
“Try it and see.”
“And we will spend my first vacation in Louisiana! Can’t we take a trunkful of junk to each girl—including your mother? Let’s bribe a publisher to bring out the poetic drama, if it’s ever finished. Ah, be ready to come to Tiffany’s next week. I’m going to buy you a ruby as big as the diamond advertisements on the backs of the magazines.”
“Anthony!”
“Two of them!”
“Dear,” she hesitated, “are we going to have so much money? I do not quite see——”