The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary Part 11

She laughed merrily.

"Yes, surely. You must promise me that.-No," she stopped and looked thoughtful, "I'll tell you what I want you to promise me. Promise me that you'll come once a week or else write me why you can't come. Will you?"

"You can't suppose that you'll ever see my handwriting under such circ.u.mstances-can you?" Jack asked.

She laughed again.

"Is it a promise?"

"Yes, it's a promise."

Oh, joy unmeasured in the time of spring! No other February like that had ever been for them-nor ever would be. The drive came to an end, the day came to an end, but the good-nights, which were good-bys, too, were not so fraught with hopelessness as he had dreaded, for the promise asked and given paved a broad road illuminated by the most hopeful kind of stars,-a broad road leading straight from college to town,-and his fancy showed him a figure treading it often. A figure that was his own.

CHAPTER EIGHT - THE RESOLUTION HE TOOK

That first meeting was in February, you know, and by the last of April it had been followed by so many others that Burnett remarked one day to his chum:

"Say, aren't you going a little faster than auntie'll stand for?"

Jack turned in surprise.

"I never went so straight in my life before," he exclaimed, not in indignation but in astonishment.

"I didn't mean that," said Burnett. "Perhaps instead of 'auntie' I should have said 'Betty.'"

Jack hoisted the colors of Harvard, and was silent.

"I warned you at first that that was Tangle town," his friend went on.

"Don't suppose I'm saying anything against her-or against you; but she's just as much to ten other men as she is to you, and they all are old enough to carry lots of weight."

"And I suppose I'm not," Jack answered, going over by the fireplace. "I know that as well as anyone, of course."

"_Naturlich_," said Burnett, with conclusiveness that was not meant to be cruel, yet cut like a two edged knife.

There was silence in the room. Jack stood by the chimney-piece, his hands upraised to rest upon its lofty shelf, his head dropped forward, and his eyes fixed on the empty blackness below.

"I wonder," he said at last, "I wonder what will become of me if-if-"

He stopped.

Burnett didn't speak.

"I wonder if she thinks of me as a boy," the young man continued. "I wonder if she's so good to me because I'm her youngest brother's friend."

Burnett did not comment on this speech.

"I don't know what to do," the other said. "When I first met her I wanted to cut college and get out in the world and go to work like a man. I told her so. But she wanted me to stay in college, and as it was the first thing she'd ever wanted of me, I did it. I'd do anything she asked me.

I've quit drinking. I'm going at everything as hard as it's in me to go; but-I don't know-I feel-I feel as if it isn't me-it's just because she wants me to, and, do you know, old man, it frightens me to think how-if she-if she went out of my-my life-"

He stopped and his broken phrases were not continued to any ending.

Another long silence ensued.

It was finally terminated by the brother's saying:

"You must confess, old man, that you aren't fixed so as to be able to say one really serious word to any woman-unless it is, 'Wait.'"

"I know that," Jack answered; "but I suppose-"

"She'd be taking so many chances," the friend interrupted. "A man in college is never the real thing. You'd better give it up."

Then the other whirled about and faced him.

"Give it up, did you say?" he asked almost angrily.

"Yes, that's what."

For a minute they looked at one another. Then:

"I shall never give it up," the lover said very slowly and steadily-"never, until she gives me up."

Burnett sucked in his breath with a sudden compression of his lips.

"All right," he said, not unkindly; "but I don't believe you'll ever get her, and that's flat. There are too many being entered for that race, and long before you and I get out of here she'll be Mrs. Somebody Else."

Jack stared at him as if he hardly heard, and then suddenly he stepped nearer and spoke.

"Did she ask you to have this talk with me?"

"No," said the brother in surprise, "she never says anything about you to me."

A look of relief fled across his friend's face, and then a look of resolution succeeded it.

"I'm not going to be discouraged," he said; "not for a while, at any rate."

"You'd better be."

Jack laughed. The laugh sounded a trifle hollow, but still it was a laugh, and that in itself was a triumph of which none but himself might ever measure the extent.

Because in that moment he decided to lay the whole case before her the next time that he went to town, and the coming to a resolution was a relief from the uncertainty that clouded his days and nights-even if a further black curtain of darkest doubt hung before the possibilities of what her answer might be.