the facts. She went out immediately and stripped
the nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it
when you came in, there’s hardly a blossom left.
She took the decorations of Lemuel’s room into
her own hands at once; and if there is any saving
power in nasturtiums, he will be a changed person.
She says that now the great object is to keep him from
feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be
reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him.
I don’t know how she knows.”
“Barker might feel that he was disgraced,”
said the minister, “but I don’t believe
that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect
that he needed to be reclaimed.”
“He makes me suspect that I need to be
reclaimed,” said Miss Vane, “when he looks
at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.”
Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations
yet?”
“Not at all. They are to steal upon him
when he comes in to-night. The gas is to be turned
very low, and he is to notice everything gradually,
so as not to get the impression that things have been
done with a design upon him.” She laughed
in reporting these ideas, which were plainly those
of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered
at the end.
A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted
in upon their group like an apparition. She had
heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue eyes under
them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour.
“Aunty!” she said severely, “have
you been telling?”
“Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said
Miss Vane. “Their knowing won’t
hurt. He’ll never know it.”
“If he hears you laughing, he’ll know
it’s about him. He’s in the kitchen,
now. He’s come in the back way. Do
be quiet.” She had given her hand without
other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the
Sewells in turn, and now she passed out of the room.
“What makes Lemuel such a gift,” said
Miss Vane, in a talk which she had with Sewell a month
later, “is that he is so supplementary.”
“Do you mean just in the supplementary sense
of the term?”
“Well, not in the fifth-wheel sense. I
mean that he supplements us, all and singular—if
you will excuse the legal exactness.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Sewell; “I
should like even more exactness.”
“Yes; but before I particularise I must express
my general satisfaction in him as a man-body.
I had no idea that man bodies in a house were so perfectly
admirable.”
“I’ve sometimes feared that we were not
fully appreciated,” said Sewell. “Well?”
“The house is another thing with a man-body
in it. I’ve often gone without little things
I wanted, simply because I hated to make Sarah bring
them, and because I hated still worse to go after them,
knowing we were both weakly and tired. Now I deny
myself nothing. I make Lemuel fetch and carry
without remorse, from morning till night. I never
knew it before, but the man-body seems never to be
tired, or ill, or sleepy.”
