“He’s lonely and we must have him come up often.”
“Do you think,” asked Harlan, “that I look like Uncle Ebeneezer?”
“Indeed you don’t!” cried Dorothy, “and that reminds me. I want to take that picture down.”
“To burn it?” inquired Harlan, slyly.
“No, I wouldn’t burn it,” answered Dorothy, somewhat spitefully, “but there’s no law against putting it in the attic, is there?”
“Not that I know of. Can we reach it from a chair?”
Together they mounted one of the haircloth monuments, slipping, as Dorothy said, until it was like walking on ice.
“Now then,” said Harlan, gaily, “come on down, Uncle! You’re about to be moved into the attic!”
The picture lunged forward, almost before they had touched it, the heavy gilt frame bruising Dorothy’s cheek badly. In catching it, Harlan turned it completely around, then gave a low whistle of astonishment.
Pasted securely to the back was a fearsome skull and cross-bones, made on wrapping paper with a brush and India ink. Below it, in great capitals, was the warning inscription: “LET MY PICTURE ALONE!”
“What shall we do with it?” asked Harlan, endeavouring to laugh, though, as he afterward admitted, he “felt creepy.” “Shall I take it up to the attic?”
“No,” answered Dorothy, in a small, unnatural voice, “leave it where it is.”
While Harlan was putting it back, Dorothy, trembling from head to foot, crept around to the back of the easel which bore Aunt Rebecca’s portrait. She was not at all surprised to find, on the back of it, a notice to this effect: “ANYONE DARING TO MOVE MRS. JUDSON’S PICTURE WILL BE HAUNTED FOR LIFE BY US BOTH.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Dorothy, somewhat viciously, when Harlan had joined her. “What kind of a woman do you suppose she could have been, to marry him? I’ll bet she’s glad she’s dead!”
Dorothy was still wiping blood from her face and might not have been wholly unprejudiced. Aunt Rebecca was a gentle, sweet-faced woman, if her portrait told the truth, possessed of all the virtues save self-assertion and dominated by habitual, unselfish kindness to others. She could not have been discourteous even to Claudius Tiberius, who at this moment was seated in state upon the sofa and purring industriously.
IV
Finances
“I’ve ordered the typewriter,” said Dorothy, brightly, “and some nice new note-paper, and a seal. I’ve just been reading about making virtue out of necessity, so I’ve ordered ‘At the Sign of the Jack-o’-Lantern’ put on our stationery, in gold, and a yellow pumpkin on the envelope flap, just above the seal. And I want you to make a funny sign-board to flap from a pole, the way they did in ‘Rudder Grange.’ If you could make a wooden Jack-o’-Lantern, we could have a candle inside it at night, and then the sign would be just like the house. We can get the paint and things down in the village. Won’t it be cute? We’re farmers, now, so we’ll have to pretend we like it.”
Harlan repressed an exclamation, which could not have been wholly inspired by pleasure.
“What’s the matter?” asked Dorothy, easily. “Don’t you like the design for the note-paper? If you don’t, you won’t have to use it. Nobody’s going to make you write letters on paper you don’t like, so cheer up.”
“It isn’t the paper,” answered Harlan, miserably; “it’s the typewriter.” Up to the present moment, sustained by a false, but none the less determined pride, he had refrained from taking his wife into his confidence regarding his finances. With characteristic masculine short-sightedness, he had failed to perceive that every moment of delay made matters worse.
“Might I inquire,” asked Mrs. Carr, coolly, “what is wrong with the typewriter?”
“Nothing at all,” sighed Harlan, “except that we can’t afford it.” The whole bitter truth was out, now, and he turned away wretchedly, ashamed to meet her eyes.
It seemed ages before she spoke. Then she said, in smooth, icy tones: “What was your object in offering to get it for me?”
“I spoke impulsively,” explained Harlan, forgetting that he had never suggested buying a typewriter. “I didn’t stop to think. I’m sorry,” he concluded, lamely.
“I suppose you spoke impulsively,” snapped Dorothy, “when you asked me to marry you. You’re sorry for that, too, aren’t you?”
“Dorothy!”
“You’re not the only one who’s sorry,” she rejoined, her cheeks flushed and her eyes blazing. “I had no idea what an expense I was going to be!”
“Dorothy!” cried Harlan, angrily; “you didn’t think I was a millionaire, did you? Were you under the impression that I was an active branch of the United States Mint?”
“No,” she answered, huskily; “I merely thought I was marrying a gentleman instead of a loafer, and I beg your pardon for the mistake!” She slammed the door on the last word, and he heard her light feet pattering swiftly down the hall, little guessing that she was trying to gain the shelter of her own room before giving way to a tempest of sobs.
Happy are they who can drown all pain, sorrow, and disappointment in a copious flood of tears. In an hour, at the most, Dorothy would be her sunny self again, penitent, and wholly ashamed of her undignified outburst. By to-morrow she would have forgotten it, but Harlan, made of sterner clay, would remember it for days.
“Loafer!” The cruel word seemed written accusingly on every wall of the room. In a sudden flash of insight he perceived the truth of it – and it hurt.
“Two months,” bethought; “two months of besotted idleness. And I used to chase news from the Battery to the Bronx every day from eight to six! Murders, smallpox, East Side scraps, and Tammany Hall. Why in the hereafter can’t they have a fire at the sanitarium, or something that I can wire in?”
“The Temple of Healing,” as Dorothy had christened it in a happier moment, stood on a distant hill, all but hidden now by trees and shrubbery. A column of smoke curled lazily upward against the blue, but there was no immediate prospect of a fire of the “news” variety.
Harlan stood at the window for a long time, deeply troubled. The call of the city dinned relentlessly into his ears. Oh, for an hour in the midst of it, with the rumble and roar and clatter of ceaseless traffic, the hurrying, heedless throng rushing in every direction, the glare of the sun on the many-windowed cliffs, the fever of the struggle in his veins!
And yet – was two months so long, when a fellow was just married, and hadn’t had more than a day at a time off for six years? Since the “cub reporter” was first “licked into shape” in the office of The Thunderer, there had been plenty of work for him, year in and year out.
“I wonder,” he mused, “if the old man would take me back on my job?
“I can see ’em in the office now,” went on Harlan, mentally, “when I go back and tell ’em I want my place again. The old man will look up and say: ‘The hell you do! Thought you’d accepted a position on the literary circuit as manager of the nine muses! Better run along and look after
