“Never mind,” Dal said reassuringly.
“He can borrow Aunt Selina’s comfort.
Make the old lady discard from weakness. Anyhow,
Bella, if I know anything of human nature, the old
lady will make it hot enough for him. Poor old
Jim!”
Then they shook hands again, and with that there came
a terrible banging at the door, which we had locked.
“Open the door!” some one commanded.
It was one of the guards.
“Open it yourself!” Dallas called, moving
a kitchen table to reenforce the lock.
“Open that door or we will break it in!”
Dallas put his hands in his pockets, seated himself
on the table, and whistled cheerfully. We could
hear them conferring outside, and they made another
appeal which was refused. Suddenly Bella came
over and confronted Dallas.
“They have brought them back!” she said
dramatically. “They are out there now;
I distinctly heard Jim’s voice. Open that
door, Dallas!”
“Oh, don’t let them in!” I
wailed. It was quite involuntary, but the disappointment
was too awful. “Dallas, don’t
open that door!”
Dal swung his feet and smiled from Bella to me.
“Think what a solution it is to all our difficulties,”
he said easily. “Without Aunt Selina I
could be happy here indefinitely.”
There was more knocking, and somebody—Max,
I think—said to let them in, that it was
a fool thing anyhow, and that he wanted to go to bed
and forget it; his feet were cold. And just then
there was a crash, and part of one of the windows
fell in. The next blow from outside brought the
rest of the glass, and—somebody was coming
through, feet first. It was Jim.
He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped
in a bundle of red and yellow silk comfort that proved
to be Aunt Selina, also feet first. I had a glimpse
of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters.
Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt
Selina’s legs so that she could walk, offered
his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs, without
a word!
None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and
went upstairs and took off our wraps and went to bed.
It had been almost a fiasco.
Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina
declared that her feet were frost-bitten and kept
Bella rubbing them with ice water all morning.
And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to
any of us and he watched Bella furtively, as if he
suspected her of trying to get him out of the house.
When luncheon time came around and he had shown no
indication of going to the telephone and ordering
it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen to remind
him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio,
and we waited together in the hall while Max went up.
When he came down he was somewhat ruffled.
“He wouldn’t open the door,” he
reported, “and when I told him it was meal time,
he said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t
give a whoop about the rest of us. He had asked
us here to dinner; he hadn’t proposed to adopt
us.”
