The Little Colonel's House Party Part 21

weeks, but when they tested her eyes she _saw_! And she isn't goin' to be blind!"

Eugenia gave a great, deep sigh of thankfulness, and leaned limply back in the carriage. "Oh, papa," she exclaimed, "you can't imagine what a relief it is to hear that! I felt so much to blame, that now it seems as if a great weight had been lifted off from me."

They were having a jubilee in Betty's room when Eugenia and her father reached the house. Mrs. Sherman told them so, from the head of the stairs and called them to come on up and join in it.

It was a very quiet jubilee. The doctor had insisted on that; but the unspoken joy of the little face on the pillow made happiness in every heart. It was the first time that Mr. Forbes had seen Betty. She was lying with her brown curls tossed back on the pillows, her eyes still bandaged; but the smile on the little mouth was one of the sweetest, gladdest things he had ever seen. Involuntarily he stooped and kissed her softly on the forehead.

"Who is it?" asked Betty, reaching out a wondering little hand, "Eugenia's father?"

"Lloyd calls me Cousin Carl," answered Mr. Forbes, taking the groping fingers in his, "and I think that the little Betty that everybody is so fond of might call me that, too."

"I'll be glad to--Cousin Carl," said the child, bashfully, and that was the beginning of a warm and steadfast friends.h.i.+p.

Eugenia waited until later, when her father and Mrs. Sherman had left the room, before she opened her packages.

"Hold fast all I give you!" she exclaimed, gaily, tossing a tiny white box into Joyce's lap and another into Lloyd's. But the third one she opened, and, taking out the ring it held, slipped it on Betty's finger.

"They are all like the one papa gave me," she said, "and have Tusitala's name inside to help me remember the Memory roads that Betty told us about."

"It will remind me of more than that," said Betty gratefully, when she and the girls had expressed their thanks in a chorus of delighted exclamations. "It will remind me of the happiest day in my life. This is the first ring I ever owned," she added, turning it proudly on her finger. "I wish I could see it." Then, with a gladness in her voice that thrilled her listeners,--"But I _shall_ see it some day! Oh, girls, you couldn't know, you couldn't possibly imagine how much that means to me, unless you'd been shut up as I have in this awful darkness."

There was silence for a moment, and then Eugenia stooped over and gave her a quick, impulsive kiss. "Well, your blindness did some good, Betty," she said, speaking hurriedly and with very red cheeks. "It made me see how hateful and selfish I've always been, and I'm never going to be so mean again to anybody as I was to you. I'm trying to dig a road like Tusitala's and I never would have thought of it, if it hadn't been for you."

With that she turned hastily, and, running across the hall to her own room, shut the door behind her with a bang.

CHAPTER XVI.

A FEAST OF LANTERNS.

The first week of July had come to an end, and with it came the end of the house party.

"Oh, deah," croaked the Little Colonel like a dismal raven, as she waited at the head of the stairs for the girls to finish dressing. "This is the la-st mawnin' well all go racin' down to breakfast togethah! I'm glad that Betty isn't goin' away for a while longah. If you all had to leave at the same time, it would be so lonesome that I couldn't stand it."

"I am glad, too," said Betty, groping her way slowly out of her room with a green shade over her eyes. Her long night was nearly over now, although it would be several months before she would be allowed to read.

Her G.o.dmother had written to Mrs. Appleton, saying that she wanted to keep Betty with her until her eyes were stronger, and the child had clapped her hands with delight when she received permission to stay, never dreaming how long it would be before she ever saw the Cuckoo's Nest again.

"This is the la-st time we'll ever ride together," sighed Joyce, as she mounted Calico after breakfast. "Oh, it has been such fun, Lloyd, and I've enjoyed this little clown pony more than I can ever tell. He is the dearest, ugliest little beast that ever wore a halter, and I'll never forget him as long as I live."

"And this is the last time we can go galloping out of this gate together, and see the boys coming up the road to meet us," cried Eugenia. "There they are, all three of them. Oh, they haven't heard the news yet! I'm going to dash on ahead and tell them."

Eugenia's news was that she was going abroad with her father in the fall. It had all been arranged since he came to Locust. Finding that business required one of the members of his firm to spend a month in England, he telegraphed back to the office that he would go.

"I don't know which is the most excited over the prospect, myself, or my maid," said Eugenia to the boys. "Poor old Eliot is simply wild with delight at the thought of seeing her home and family again, and I am nearly as much upset as she is. We're to be gone five or six months.

Papa says that while we are over there we might as well go the rounds, so maybe we'll spend Christmas in France, in the same place that Joyce did."

"What time do you leave Locust to-night?" asked Malcolm.

"On the ten o'clock train, I think. Joyce is going with us, part of the way, as papa has to make a trip to St. Louis before we go back to New York."

"And which way are you all going now?" asked Keith. The others had joined them, and the seven ponies were standing in a ring in the middle of the road, their noses almost touching.

"We're going down to your house," answered Joyce, "to bid your Grandmother MacIntyre and Miss Allison good-bye. They have been so good to us all the time we have been here. Your Aunt Allison has done so much to entertain us, and as for your grandmother, I couldn't begin to tell you how she cheered us up when we had the measles. There was something from her every day, fruit and flowers and wine jellies and messages. One of my sweetest memories of Kentucky will be of your beautiful grandmother."

Instantly both the boys lifted their hats in acknowledgment, but Keith exclaimed in boyish impatience, "Oh, pshaw! I thought we were all going over to the mill this morning. The last time, you know. There's no need of your going down to bid them good-bye when we'll see you at--"

But Lloyd stopped him with a finger on her lip and a threatening shake of her head. "Come on!" she cried, starting Tarbaby down the road at full gallop. "We can't stand heah in the road all day."

Keith dashed after her, laying a detaining hand on her bridle when he reached her side. "What's the matter, Miss Savage?" he asked. "What do you mean, by shaking your head at me in that way?"

"Can't you keep a secret?" she demanded, crossly. "You know well enough we want to surprise the girls to-night."

"Oh, I forgot!" he exclaimed, clapping a hand over his mouth.

"They are not to know a thing about it until time to light the lanterns," she said, severely. "And I think it would be very rude indeed for them not to make a good-bye call at yo' house this mawnin', even if you all are comin' up to-night."

"Oh, I say, Lloyd, leave a little piece of me, please ma'am," he begged, in a meek voice. "At least enough to help wind up the house party, to-night. Say you'll forgive me!" he insisted, clasping his hands together and looking at her cross-eyed, with such a comical expression that she could not help laughing.

The last time! It's the last time! They said it as they stopped once more for the mail at the little post-office; as they turned regretfully homeward; as they went down the long avenue in the shade of the friendly old locusts. They said it again when they wandered four abreast, and arm in arm about the place, for a farewell glance at every nook and corner, where they had romped and played in the five weeks just gone. Even when the words were not wailed out disconsolately by one of them and echoed by the others, the thought that each thing they were doing was for the last time, went with them like a mournful undercurrent.

"Did you ever have a day fly by as fast as this one?" asked Joyce that afternoon, looking up from the trunk that Mom Beck was helping her to pack. "Here it is nearly six o'clock, and I haven't been down to the mulberry-tree. I wanted one more swing on the grape-vine swing before I dressed for dinner. It's like flying to go sailing through the air, across the ravine, on that grape-vine that covers the mulberry-tree."

"There won't be time now," said the Little Colonel, casting an anxious look toward the front windows. If the girls had not been so busily occupied, they might have noticed how she had been manoeuvring for some time to keep them away from the front windows. She even took them down the back stairs when they were ready for dinner, with the excuse that she wanted them to see the hamper in which Joyce's puppy was to travel.

Eugenia's Bob was to be left at Locust until after she had made her trip abroad.

Joyce had a fresh blue satin ribbon packed away in her satchel to tie around her Bob's neck just before reaching home. "Oh, girls!" she exclaimed, "don't you know that those children are going to be delighted when this fat little dumpling comes rolling out of the hamper? They will all grab for him at once, and Mary will be so tickled she will squeal.

She always does when she is excited, and it is _so_ funny. I wish I could hear her do it this blessed minute. Somehow I can hardly wait to see them all now, although I don't want to leave Locust one bit. I have had _such_ a good time!"

Mom Beck came out just then to tell them that dinner was waiting, and Lloyd hurried them through the back hall again, although she herself ran to the front door and looked out, before she took her seat at the table.

It was a merry meal, for Papa Jack told his best stories, and Cousin Carl, as they all called Mr. Forbes now, recalled his funniest jokes to make the children forget how near they had come to the parting hour. And when the dessert was brought on they sang a duet they had learned when school-boys together, at which every one laughed until the tears stood in their eyes.

While they lingered at the table, Alec and Walker and Mom Beck, and all the servants on the place who could lend a hand, were turning the lawn into fairy-land. They had been busy for several hours putting up strings of lanterns, and now they were lighting them, row after row. Big lanterns, and little lanterns, round ones and square, of every size, colour, and shape, lit up the darkness of the summer night. Huge red dragons swung between the white, vine-covered pillars of the porch.

Luminous fish and beasts and birds, hanging from the shrubs and trees on the lawn, set every bough a-twinkle, while all through the gra.s.s and all through the flower beds the flas.h.i.+ng of hundreds of tiny fairy lamps made it seem as if the glow-worms were holding carnival.

There were tents pitched on the lawn and tables set out here and there, and every tent was brilliant with festoons of light and every table had a canopy fringed with flaming b.a.l.l.s of ruby and emerald and amber.

But the most beautiful part of the whole dazzling scene was the old locust avenue, strung from top to bottom with lights. The trees seemed suddenly to have burst into bloom with stars, when all down that long arch, from entrance gate to mansion, shone the soft glow of a myriad welcoming lanterns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "LET'S ALL SIT DOWN ON THE STEPS."]

"Let's all sit down on the steps and enjoy it before the people begin to come," said the Little Colonel, after the first burst of surprise and enthusiastic admiration was over.

"Everybody in the Valley will be heah in a little bit to say good-bye to you all, and we told 'em to come early, because your train leaves so soon."

Even as she spoke there was a sound of wheels turning in at the gate, and the band in the honey-suckle arbour began tuning their violins. It was not long before the place was gay with many voices, and people were streaming back and forth over the lawn and porches. Grown people as well as children were there. All who had been at the pillow-case party; all who had entertained the girls in any way, and all who had been friends of Betty's mother and Joyce's in their girlhood.

After awhile, when the guests were being served with refreshments, under the lantern-hung canopies on the lawn, Mr. Forbes looked around for Betty. She was nowhere to be found at first, but presently he stumbled over her in a dark corner of the porch, with her shade pulled over her eyes.