The Camerons of Highboro Part 24

Supper? Who cared about supper? The Camerons forgot it. When they remembered, the steaming-hot creamed potato was cold and the salad was wilted, but that made no difference. They were too excited to know what they were eating.

To make a.s.surance trebly sure there were more messages. Bob cabled of Pete's escape through the Hun lines and the government wired from Was.h.i.+ngton. The Camerons' happiness spilled over into blithe exuberance. They laughed and danced and sang for very joy. Priscilla jigged all over the house like an excited brown leaf in a breeze. None of them, except Father Bob, Mother Jess, and Laura, could keep still.

Laura went about like a person in a trance, with a strange, happy quietness in her ordinarily energetic movements and a brightness in her face that dazzled. There was no boisterousness in any one's rejoicing, only a gentleness of gaiety that was very wonderful to see and feel.

As for Elliott, she felt as though she had come out from underneath a great dark cloud, into a place where she could never again be anything but good and happy. She had been coming out ever since Aunt Jessica reached home, but she hadn't come out the same as she went in. The Elliott Aunt Jessica and Laura had left in charge when they went to Camp Devens seemed very, very far away from the Elliott whose joy was like wings that fairly lifted her feet off the ground. Smiles chased one another among her dimples in ceaseless procession across her face.

She didn't try to discover why she felt so different. She didn't care.

The dimples, of course, were the very same dimples she had always had, and at the moment the girl was entirely unconscious of their existence, though as a matter of fact those dimples had never been busier and more bewitching in all Elliott Cameron's life.

"I suppose," Mother Jess said at last, "we shall have to go to bed, if we are to get Stannard off in the morning."

Going to bed isn't a very exciting thing to do when you are so happy you feel as though you might burst with joy, but by that time the Camerons had managed to work out of the most dangerous stage, and inasmuch as Stannard's was an early train, going to bed was the only sensible thing to do. So they did it.

What was more remarkable, the last sleepy Cameron straggled down to the breakfast-table before the little car ran up to the door to take Stannard away. They were really sorry to see him go and he acted as though he were just as sorry to go, which would seem to indicate that Stannard, too, had changed in the course of the summer. He looked much like the long, lazy Stannard who had rebelled against a vacation on a farm, but his carriage was better and his figure st.u.r.dier, and his hands weren't half so white and gentlemanlike. Underneath his lazy ease was a hint of something to depend on in an emergency. Perhaps even his laziness wasn't so ingrained as it used to be.

They all went out on the veranda to say good-by and waved as long as the car was in sight.

"Sorry you're not going, too?" Bruce asked Elliott.

"Oh, no! I wouldn't go for anything."

"For a girl who didn't want to come up here at all," he said softly, "you're doing pretty well. Decided to make the best of us, didn't you?"

She looked at him indignantly. "Indeed, I didn't! I wouldn't do such a thing. Why, I just _love_ it here!" Then she saw the twinkle in his eye. "You tease!"

"I'm going away, myself, next week, S. A. T. C. I can't get any nearer France than that, it seems, just yet. Father Bob says he can manage all right this winter and he has a notion of something new that may turn up next spring. He says, 'Go,' and so does Mother Jess. So--I'm going."

Elliott stole a quick glance at the firm, clear-cut face, chiseled already in lines of purpose and power.

"I'm glad," she said, "but we shall--miss you."

"Shall _you_ miss me?"

"Yes."

"I'd hate to think that you wouldn't."

Elliott always remembered the morning, three days later, when Bruce went away. How blue the sky was, how clear the suns.h.i.+ne, how glorious the autumn pageant of the hills! Beside the gate a young maple burned like a shaft of flame. True, Bruce was only going to school now, but there was France in the background, a beckoning possibility with all that it meant of triumph and heroism and pain. That idea of France, and the fiery splendor of the hills, seemed to invest Bruce's strong young figure with a kind of glory that tightened the girl's throat as she waved good-by from the veranda. She was glad Bruce was going, even if her throat did ache. Aches like that seemed far less important than they used to. She waved with a thrill coursing up her spine and a shy, eager sense of how big and wonderful and happy a thing it was to be a girl.

With a last wave to Bruce turning the curve of the road Mother Jess stepped back into the house.

"Come, girls," she said. "I feel like getting very busy, don't you?"

Elliott followed her contentedly. Others might go, but she didn't wish to, not while Father was on the other side of the ocean. It made her laugh to think that she had ever wished to. That laugh of pure mirth and happiness proved the completeness of Elliott Cameron's evacuation.

"What is the joke?" Laura asked, smiling at the radiant charm of the dainty figure enveloping itself in a blue ap.r.o.n.

"Oh," said Elliott lightly, "I was thinking that I used to be a queer girl."

THE END