One item of this description of himself the badgered
Herbert could not bear in silence, although he had
just declared that since the truth was so ill-respected
among his persecutors he would open his mouth no more
until the day of his death. He passed over “bad,”
but furiously stated his height in feet, inches, and
fractions of inches.
Aunt Fanny shook her head in mourning. “That
may be, Herbert,” she said gently. “But
you must try to realize it can’t bring poor young
Mr. Dill back to his family.”
Again Herbert just looked at her. He had no indifference
more profound than that upon which her strained conception
of the relation between cause and effect seemed to
touch;—from his point of view, to be missing
should be the lightest of calamities. It is true
that he was concerned with the restoration of Noble
Dill to the rest of the Dills so far as such an event
might affect his own incomparable misfortunes, but
not otherwise. He regarded Noble and Noble’s
disappearance merely as unfair damage to himself,
and he continued to look at this sorrowing great-aunt
of his until his thoughts made his strange gaze appear
to her so hardened that she shook her head and looked
away.
“Poor young Mr. Dill!” she said.
“If someone could only have been with him and
kept talking to him until he got used to the idea a
little!”
Cousin Virginia nodded comprehendingly. “Yes,
it might have tided him over,” she said.
“He wasn’t handsome, nor impressive, of
course, nor anything like that, but he always spoke
so nicely to people on the street. I’m
sure he never harmed even a kitten, poor soul!”
“I’m sure he never did,” Herbert’s
mother agreed gently. “Not even a kitten.
I do wonder where he is now.”
But Aunt Fanny uttered a little cry of protest.
“I’m afraid we may hear!” she said.
“Any moment!”
These sympathetic women had unanimously set their
expectation in so romantically pessimistic a groove
that the most tragic news of Noble would have surprised
them little. But if the truth of his whereabouts
could have been made known to them, as they sat thus
together at what was developing virtually into his
wake, with Herbert as a compulsory participant, they
would have turned the session into a riot of amazement.
Noble was in the very last place (they would have said,
when calmer) where anybody in the world could have
even madly dreamed of looking for him! They would
have been right about it. No one could have expected
to find Noble to-night inside the old, four-square
brick house of H. I. Atwater, Senior, chief of the
Atwaters and father of too gentle Julia. Moreover,
Mr. Atwater himself was not at present in the house;
he had closed and locked it the day before, giving
the servants a week’s vacation and telling them
not to return till he sent for them; and he had then
gone out of town to look over a hominy-mill he thought
of buying. And yet, as the wake went on, there
was a light in the house, and under that light sat
Noble Dill.
