219

XIX Mostly Uncle Peter 234

XX The Makings of a Triple Wedding 251

XXI Eleanor Hears the News 261

XXII The Search 271

XXIII The Young Nurse 281

XXIV Christmas Again 292

XXV The Lover 304

TURN ABOUT ELEANOR

TURN ABOUT ELEANOR

CHAPTER I

ENTER ELEANOR

A child in a faded tam-o'-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a
shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting
uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at
the traffic of Fifth Avenue.

The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in
eye-glasses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he
was engaged in a palpable effort to make conversation--to manufacture
out of the thin crisp air of that November morning and the random
impressions of their progress up the Avenue, something with a general
resemblance to tete-a-tete dialogue as he understood it. He was
succeeding only indifferently.

"See, Eleanor," he pointed brightly with his stick to the flower shop
they were passing, "see that building with the red roof, and all
those window boxes. Don't you think those little trees in pots outside
look like Christmas trees? Sometimes when your Aunts Beulah and
Margaret and Gertrude, whom you haven't met yet--though you are on
your way to meet them, you know--sometimes when they have been very
good, almost good enough to deserve it, I stop by that little flower
shop and buy a chaste half dozen of gardenias and their accessories,
and divide them among the three."

"Do you?" the child asked, without wistfulness. She was a good child,
David Bolling decided,--a sporting child, willing evidently to play
when it was her turn, even when she didn't understand the game at all.
It was certainly a new kind of game that she would be so soon expected
to play her part in,--a rather serious kind of game, if you chose to
look at it that way.

David himself hardly knew how to look at it. He was naturally a
conservative young man, who had been brought up by his mother to
behave as simply as possible on all occasions, and to avoid the
conspicuous as tacitly and ta