* * * * *

“Larry, I think your Ruth is the dearest thing I ever laid eyes on,” declared Tony next day to her brother.  “Her name ought to be Titania.  I’m not very big myself, but I feel like an Amazon beside her.  And her laugh is the sweetest thing—­so soft and silvery, like little bells.  But she doesn’t laugh much, does she?  Poor little thing!”

“She is awfully up against it,” said Larry with troubled eyes.  “She can’t stop trying to remember.  It is a regular obsession with her.  And she is very shy and sensitive and afraid of strangers.”

“She doesn’t look at you as if you were a stranger.  She adores you.”

“Nonsense!” said Larry sharply.

Tony opened her eyes at her brother’s tone.

“Why, Larry!  Of course, I didn’t mean she was in love with you.  She couldn’t be when she is married.  I just meant she adored you—­well, the way Max adores me,” she explained as the tawny-haired Irish setter came and rested his head on her knee, raising solemn worshipful brown eyes to her face.  “Why shouldn’t she?  You saved her life and you have been wonderful to her every way.”

“Nonsense!” said Larry again, though he said it in a different tone this time.  “I haven’t done much.  It is Uncle Phil and Aunt Margery who are the wonderful ones.  It is great the way they both said yes right away when I asked if I could bring her here.  I tell you, Tony, it means something to have your own people the kind you can count on every time.  And it is great to have a home like this to bring her to.  She is going to love it as soon as she is able to get downstairs with us all.”

Up in her cool, spacious north chamber, lying in the big bed with the smooth, fine linen, Ruth felt as if she loved it already, though she found these Holidays even more amazing than ever, now that she was actually in their midst.  Were there any other people in the world like them she wondered—­so kind and simple and unfeignedly glad to take a stranger into their home and a queer, mysterious, sick stranger at that!

“If I have to begin living all over just like a baby I think I am the luckiest girl that ever was to be able to start in a place like this with such dear, kind people all around me,” she told Doctor Holiday, senior, to whom she had immediately lost her heart as soon as she saw his smile and felt the touch of his strong, magnetic, healing hand.

“We will get you out under the trees in a day or two,” he said.  “And then your business will be to get well and strong as soon as possible and not worry about anything any more than if you were the baby you were just talking about.  Can you manage that, young lady?”

“I’ll try.  I would be horrid and ungrateful not to when you are all so good to me.  I don’t believe my own people are half as nice as you Holidays.  I don’t see how they could be.”

The doctor laughed at that.