Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“ I’ll come Thursday—but say, look here, Eudora. This is a quiet road, not a soul in sight, just like an outdoor room to ourselves. Why shouldn’t I know now just as well as wait? Say, Eudora, you know how I used to feel about you. Well, it has lasted all these years. There has never been another woman I even cared to look at. You are alone, except for that baby, and I am alone. ”

“ We could do anything we wanted to do for him, and we should not have to live alone. Say, Eudora, you may not think it’s the thing for a man to own up to, but, hang it all! I’m alone, and I don’t want to face the rest of my life alone. Eudora, do you think you could make up your mind to marry me, after all?”
They had reached the turn in the road. Just beyond rose the stately pile of the old Yates mansion. Eudora stood still and gave one desperate look at her lover. “I will let you know Thursday,” she gasped. Then she was gone, trundling the baby-carriage with incredible speed. ”

“ No man who ever loved Eudora would ever get over loving her. And he will not be shocked when he sees her. She is no more changed than a beautiful old statue.”
“HE is changed, though,” said Amelia. “I saw him the other day. He didn’t see me, and I would hardly have known him. He has grown stout, and his hair is gray.”
“Eudora’s hair is gray,” said Sophia. ”

“ Sophia looked much older than her sisters, but with that exception the resemblance between all three was startling. They always dressed exactly alike, too, in silken fabric of bluish lavender, like myrtle blossoms. Some of the poetical souls in the village called the Lancaster sisters “The ladies in lavender.”
There was an astonishing change in the treatment of the blue and white bundle when the sisters and Eudora were in the stately old sitting-room, with its heavy mahogany furniture and its white-wainscoted calls. Amelia simply tossed the bundle into a corner of the sofa ”

“ Joseph Glynn, with an air of wisdom, “that it is the beautiful dispositions which are the most set the minute they get a start the wrong way. It is the always-flying-out people who are the easiest to get on with in the long run.”
“Well,” said Abby, “maybe that is so, but folks might get worn all to a frazzle by the flying-out ones before the long run. I’d rather take my chances with a woman like Eudora. She always seems just so, just as calm and sweet. ”

“ Lawton looked bewildered. “But that is a real baby in there,” he said, jerking an elbow toward the other room.
“Oh yes,” replied Eudora. “I adopted him yesterday. I went to the Children’s Home in Elmfield. Amelia Lancaster went with me. Wilson drove us over. I know a nurse there. She took care of mother in her last illness. And I adopted this baby; at least, I am going to. He comes of respectable people, and his parents are dead. His mother died when he was born. He is healthy, and I thought him a beautiful baby.” ”

“ She stands on her pedestal, and time only looks at her to love her.”
“I thought you were a business man as hard as nails,” said the young man, wonderingly. Lawton laughed.
When Thursday came, Lawton, carefully dressed and carrying a long tissue-paper package, evidently of roses, approached the Yates house. It was late in the afternoon. There had been a warm day, and the trees were clouds of green and more bushes had blossomed. Eudora had put on a green silk dress of her youth. The revolving fashions had made it very passable, and the fabric was as beautiful as ever. ”

“ I always did despise a flunk. But you! I heard you had adopted a baby,” he said, with a sudden glance at the blue and white bundle in the carriage, “and I thought you were mighty sensible. When people grow old they want young people growing around them, staffs for old age, you know, and all that sort of thing. Don’t know but I should have adopted a boy myself if it hadn’t been for—”
The man stopped, and his face was pink. Eudora turned her face slightly away. ”

“ Glynn.
“Yes, haven’t you?” asked Ethel.
“Haven’t any of you heard?” asked Julia Esterbrook.
“No,” admitted Abby, rather feebly. “I don’t know as I have.”
“Do you mean about Eudora’s going so often to the Lancaster girls’ to tea?” asked Mrs. John Bates, with a slight bridle of possible knowledge.
“I heard of that,” said Mrs. Lee, not to be outdone.
“Land, no,” replied Mrs. Glynn. “Didn’t she always go there? It isn’t that. It is the most unheard-of thing she had done; but no woman, unless she had plenty of money to bring it up, would have done it.” ”

“ Wouldn’t do to wake him?”
“I think I had better not,” replied Eudora, in a hesitating voice. She began to walk along, and Harry Lawton fell into step beside her.
“I suppose it isn’t best to wake up babies; makes them cross, and they cry,” he said. “Say, Eudora, is he much trouble?” ”

“ She looked doubtfully at Amelia, then at Anna, and doubt flashed back and forth between the three pairs of blue eyes for a second. Then Sophia spoke with authority, because she was the only one of them all who had entered the estate of matrimony, and had consequently obvious cognizance of such matters.
“I think,” said she, “that Eudora should be told that Harry Lawton has come back and is boarding at the Wellwood Inn.”
“You think,” faltered Amelia, “that it is possible she might meet him unexpectedly?”
“I certainly do think so. ”

“ When the Ames’s barn, that was next to hers, burned down and the wind was her way, she just walked in and out of her house, carrying the things she valued most, and she looked like a picture—somehow she had got all dressed fit to make calls—and there wasn’t a muscle of her face that seemed to move. ”

“ Then she said, “Goodby, Amelia dear,” and resumed her progress with the baby-carriage.
PART II
“She never even asked who it was,” Amelia reported to her sisters, when she had returned to the house. “Because she knew,” replied Sophia, sagely; “there has never been any old friend but that one old friend to come back into Eudora Yates’s life.”
“Has he come back into her life, I wonder?” said Amelia.
“What did he return to Wellwood for if he didn’t come for that? All his relatives are gone. He never married. Yes, he has come back to see Eudora and marry her, if she will have him. ”