Wild Wings. Margaret Piper Chalmers

think I could do it up here where it is all still and purple and sweet and sacred. But when we got down to the valley again I am afraid I couldn't live up to it, nor to you, Philip, my king. Forgive me."

      Phil bent and kissed her again—not passionately this time, but with a kind of reverent solemnity as if he were performing a rite.

      "Never mind, sweetheart. I don't blame you any more than you blame me. We've got to take life as we find it, not try to make it over into something different to please ourselves. If some day you meet the man who can make you happy in your way, I'll not grudge him the right. I'm not sure I shall even envy him. I've had my moment."

      "But Phil, you aren't going to be awfully unhappy about me?" sighed Carlotta. "Promise you won't. You know I never wanted to hurt the moon, dear."

      Philip shook his head.

      "Don't worry about the moon. It is a tough old orb. I shan't be too unhappy. A man has a whole lot of things beside love in his life. I am not going to let myself be such a fool as to be miserable because things started out a little differently from what I would like to have them." His smile was brave but his eyes belied the smile and Carlotta's heart smote her.

      "You will forget me," she said. It was half a reproach, half a command.

      Again he shook his head in denial.

      "Do you remember the queen who claimed she had Calais stamped on her heart? Well, open mine a hundred years from now and you'll read Carlotta."

      "But won't you ever marry?" pursued Carlotta with youth's insistence on probing wounds to the quick.

      "I don't know. Probably," he added honestly. "A man is a poor stick in this world without a home and kiddies. If I do it will be a long time yet though. It will be many a year before I see anybody but you, no matter where I look."

      "But I am horrid—selfish, cowardly, altogether horrid."

      "Are you?" smiled Phil. "I wonder. Anyway I love you. Come on, dear.

       We'll have to hurry. The car is nearly due."

      And, as twilight settled down over the valley like a great bird brooding over its nest, Philip and Carlotta went down from the mountain.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      A BOY WHO WASN'T AN ASS BUT BEHAVED LIKE ONE

      Baccalaureate services being over and the graduates duly exhorted to the wisdom of the ages, the latter were for a time permitted to alight from their lofty pedestal in the public eye and to revert temporarily to the comfortable if less exalted state of being plain every day human girls.

      While Philip and Carlotta went up on the heights fondly believing they were settling their destinies forever, Tony had been enjoying an afternoon en famille with her uncle and her brother Ted.

      Suddenly she looked at her watch and sprang up from the arm of her uncle's chair on which she had been perched, chattering and content, for a couple of hours.

      "My goodness! It is most four o'clock. Dick will be here in a minute. May

       I call up the garage and ask them to send the car around? I'm dying for a

       ride. We can go over to South Hadley and get the twins, if you'd like.

       I'm sure they must have had enough of Mt. Holyoke by this time."

      "Car's out of commission," grunted Ted from behind his sporting sheet.

      "Out of commission? Since when?" inquired Doctor Holiday. "It was all right when you took it to the garage last night."

      "I went out for a joy ride and had a smash up," explained his nephew nonchalantly, and still hidden behind the newspaper.

      "Oh Ted! How could you when you know we want to use the car every minute?" There was sharp dismay and reproach in Tony's voice.

      "Well, I didn't smash it on purpose, did I?" grumbled her brother, throwing down the paper. "I'm sorry, Tony. But it can't be helped now. You'd better be thankful I'm not out of commission myself. Came darn near being."

      "Oh Ted!" There was only concern and sympathy in his sister's exclamation this time. Tony adored her brothers. She went over to Ted now, scrutinizing him as if she half expected to see him minus an arm or a leg. "You weren't hurt?" she begged reassurance.

      "Nope—nothing to signify. Got some purple patches on my person and a twist to my wrist, but that's all. I was always a lucky devil. Got more lives than a cat."

      He was obviously trying to carry matters off lightly, but never once did he meet his uncle's eyes, though he was quite aware they were fixed on him.

      Tony sighed and shook her head, troubled.

      "I wish you wouldn't take such risks," she mourned. "Some day you'll get dreadfully hurt. Please be careful. Uncle Phil," she appealed to the higher court, "do tell him he mustn't speed so. He won't listen to me."

      "If Ted hasn't learned the folly of speeding by now, I am afraid that nothing I can say will have much effect. I wonder—"

      Just here the telephone interrupted with an announcement that Mr. Carson was waiting downstairs. Tony flew from the phone to dab powder on her nose.

      "Since we can't go riding I think I'll take Dick for a walk in Paradise," she announced into the mirror. "Will you come, too, Uncle Phil?"

      "No, thank you, dear. Run along and tell Dick we expect him back to supper with us."

      The doctor held open the door for his niece, then turned back to Ted, who was also on his feet now, murmuring something about going out for a stroll.

      "Wait a bit, son. Suppose you tell me first precisely what happened last night."

      "Did tell you." The boy fumbled sulkily at the leaves of a magazine that lay on the table. "I took the car out and, when I was speeding like Sam Hill out on the Florence road, I struck a hole. She stood up on her ear and pitched u—er—me out in the gutter. Stuck her own nose into a telephone pole. I telephoned the garage people to go after her this morning. They told me a while ago she was pretty badly stove up and it will probably take a couple of weeks to get her in order." The story came out jerkily and the narrator kept his eyes consistently floorward during the recital.

      "Is that all?"

      "What more do you want?" curtly. "I said I was sorry, if that is what you mean."

      "It isn't what I mean, Ted. I assume you didn't deliberately go out to break my car and that you are not particularly proud of the outcome of your joy ride. I mean, exactly what I asked. Have you told me the whole story?"

      Ted was silent, mechanically rolling the corner of the, rug under his foot. His uncle studied the good-looking, unhappy young face. His mind worked back to that inadvertent "u—er—me" of the confession.

      "Were you alone?" he asked.

      A scarlet flush swept the lad's face, died away, leaving it a little white.

      "Yes."

      The answer was low but distinct. It was like a knife thrust to the doctor. In all the eight years in which he had fathered Ned's sons, both before and since his brother's death, never once to his knowledge had either one lied to him, even to save himself discomfort, censure or punishment. With all their boyish vagaries and misdeeds, it had been the one thing he could count on absolutely, their unflinching, invariable honesty. Yet, surely as the June sun was shining outside, Ted had lied to him just now. Why? Rash twenty was too young to go its way unchallenged and unguided. He was responsible for the lad whose dead father had committed him to his charge.

      Only a few weeks before his death Ned had written with curious prescience, "If I go out any time, Phil, I know