CHAPTER II.

HOME FROM THE WARS.

“Oh dear, but it is good to be in our own house again! I had begun to
fear that we would never live here any more,” and Mrs. Carter sighed a
fluttering little sigh, settled herself luxuriously on her chaise-longue
and glanced contentedly around her charmingly appointed old rose and gray
bedroom. Mr. Carter had given especial attention to his wife’s room when
he had drawn up the plans for Carter House, sparing neither time nor
money to make it perfect, and indeed it was an attractive setting for the
exquisite little creature.

“Mummie dear, I am glad you are happy once more, though I am afraid you
will find the life we will lead here now very different to what it used
to be,” and Douglas bent over her mother and kissed her affectionately.

“It won’t take us long to get back into the old way of living. I will
give a series of little dinner parties next week to some of our oldest
friends. I want to remind Hiram G. Parker of what an attractive girl you
are. Then, too, we must have Jeffrey Tucker and his twins,” and Mrs.
Carter began to write a list of names busily.

A sudden wave of fatigue swept over Douglas. Was she to be forced day
after day to explain the situation to her mother? At first she had had
both Helen and her mother to deal with, but at last Helen had grasped the
state of affairs and realized that economy was demanded. With tears of
vexation and despair forcing their way to Douglas’ eyes, she said
wearily, “Oh, Mummie, Mummie, will you never learn that we aren’t rich
still? How can you give a series of little dinner parties with no one to
prepare them or to serve them? Have you forgotten that we are to have no
servants? As for Hiram G. Parker I hate him and all he stands for. I
don’t care if I never see his foolish face again,” and the usually
gentle, courteous Douglas fled weeping from her mother.

In her own room, she flung herself face down across the bed and gave way
to sobbing, hating herself all the time for her weakness. Nan, who was in
her own room across the hall writing, put down her pen and shoved the
loose sheets of paper into the desk and came quickly to her sister.

“You poor Douglas, what is it? Mummie again? What does she want this
time? A limousine for the cook we haven’t got, or is she planning a year
abroad to polish up the completely uncultured Lucy? Whatever it is, don’t
you mind, Doug; she is obliged to come to her senses again some time or
other,” soothed Nan. “I will just get you a wet wash cloth from your
bathroom and then we will powder you up and get you ready, because while
you were downtown Lewis Somerville ’phoned and said he would be around
about four-thirty. I did not hear you when you came home or I would have
told you before.”

With this startling news, Douglas sat up. “Why, Nan, I just had a letter
from him yesterday from the Walter Reed Hospital saying that he didn’t
know when they would let him out! His arm is allright now but the ill
effects of the gas are still present in his lungs, and he gets tired
awfully easily.”

“He called up about two o’clock and said he was crazy to see us all,
which I don’t believe was strictly true, for when he found that ‘us all’
was down town, he said he would be around about four-thirty, as that is
the time ‘us all’ expected to return,” and Nan gave the wet cloth to her
sister and watched with interest the transformation the news of Lewis
combined with the judicious use of powder wrought.

Douglas had not seen her cousin since his return, wounded and gassed,
from France several months after the armistice, but she had had frequent
letters from him. She had often regretted the fact that she had not
allowed herself to become engaged to him when he had asked her at camp,
as she knew now that the feeling of affection she had for him was not
only cousinly. This had been brought home to her when she had received
the news that Lewis was seriously wounded and had promptly fainted. His
last letters had been so unhappy and depressed that she longed to see him
and try to cheer him up as she believed she could. Lewis was a favorite
of them all and held a place in Bobby’s heart second only to George
Wright.

There was a sound of much stamping on the front porch and the bang of the
door announced Bobby’s arrival.

“Doug, Doug,” he shrieked. “What you reckon? Lewis is done come home from
the wars, but he ain’t got his arm in no sling like me an’ Josh hoped
for. But he is all wound stripes up one arm and serious stripes down the
other. He is got on bone glasses and looks mighty funny and gant. I told
him he looked most as bony as Josephus and then he said he wished he was
half as useful,” and the delighted Bobby paused, entirely out of breath.

“Come on with me, Bobby,” said the tactful Nan, confident that Douglas
would welcome a few minutes in which to compose herself after Bobby’s
terrible though unwitting picture of Lewis, “and let’s go get an ice
cream soda.”

“‘Half as useful as Josephus,’” Douglas repeated under her breath as Nan
and Bobby went down stairs. For the life of her she could not think of
Lewis as being useless nor of his regarding himself in such a light. She
remembered what a pillar of physical and moral strength he had been for
them all that first summer at camp. She dreaded the change in his
appearance that her little brother had described as ‘gant’. Above all she
wished that he had come at another time, for how was she to give him the
encouragement she knew he needed when she herself felt that the struggle
was too great for her?

The front door bell rang and with a heavy heart Douglas went slowly down
the stairs to answer it. She saw through the glass panel that it was
Lewis. He was standing with the erectness West Point gives to its men and
of which no amount of illness can rob them. It seemed to Douglas that his
thinness merely accentuated his splendid carriage. He was looking out
towards the street but turned as the door opened, and as his eyes met
Douglas’ she realized for the hundredth time all the horror of war. She
rushed into his outstretched arms, sobbing her joy to see him again.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, it is good to see you again,” she said, as still
clutching his hand she led him into the long low library.

Allready some of the misery seemed to have departed from Lewis’ deep-set
gray eyes. “You do care for me, then, Doug, the way I wanted you to at
camp, don’t you?” he asked.

“Can you doubt it, Lewis, after the unmaidenly and uncousinly way I threw
myself at you the moment I saw you?”

“Until I saw you, as one of the men in my company say, ‘I felt so low I
would have had to have a step ladder to climb up as far as Hell,’ but now
I feel like I am sitting on the world.”

Douglas laughed at the young officer’s unconscious use of the very
descriptive army slang. This meeting with Lewis had been easier than she
had dared hope for and she felt as if she too were ‘sitting on the
world.’

“That is, I feel like I am sitting on the world now that I am with you,
but when I leave I’ll get all nervous and restless; and I know it is
because I haven’t anything definite to do,” Lewis said. “I am one of
those poor unfortunates who has to be busy. Of course, you know, Mother
left me enough money for you and me to live very comfortably on, but I
can’t seem to see that sort of existence for me, and I know you wouldn’t
want it either. On the other hand, a West Point education hardly fits you
for business and I have no intention of continuing in the army. Doug, the
situation is this: I have ignorance and capital to start in business
with. You don’t mind my talking like this to you, do you?”

Douglas assured him satisfactorily that what affected him affected her,
and then said suddenly, “Why, you have more than capital and ignorance!
You have capital and an immense amount of knowledge. There is nobody in
the world who knows more about the innermost secrets of automobiles than
you do, unless perhaps Bill Tinsley.”

“What do you want me to do, be a jitney driver, a mechanician, or shall I
aspire to chauffeurdom?” Lewis asked with the amused scorn men always
have when a woman dares give the business advice they sometimes ask.

“No, nut! That is where your capital comes in. I don’t see why you and
Bill, who has capital, too, as far as that goes, don’t get the agency for
several automobiles.”

“I swear you are a wonder, Doug, I would have moped a million years and
never seen what was right at my door. Bill will be keen about it, I know.
It will be a wonderful arrangement all around. He is around at Tillie
Wingo’s now. I will call him up and make him drop by here and we’ll all
talk it over.” Douglas could but be amused at Lewis’s quick change from
amused scorn to sincere admiration of her advice.

She found it hard to believe that this was the same man she had let in
the front door a scant half hour ago, as she watched his new alert figure
cross the room to the phone. He sat on the desk, swinging his long legs
and whistling while he waited for the operator to get his number just as
she had seen him do so many times before.

“Hello, this is Lewis Somerville speaking. Why, is that you, Tillie?” By
the interruption and the animated buzz-buzz that began in the receiver
immediately, he knew that it was indeed Tillie Wingo. He knew by
experience that it was useless to try to stem the overpowering flow of
Tillie’s conversation, so he wisely waited till she stopped a moment to
get her breath before he asked to speak to Bill. The buzzing suddenly
commenced again and an expression of amused despair spread across Lewis’
face. Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he said to Douglas, “Come
here, for the love of Allah, and see if you can make this woman shut up
long enough for me to get it over that it is Bill I want to speak to.
Tillie is a darling but she is such a rattler,” and Lewis withdrew in
favor of Douglas.

Laughing at Lewis’ hopeless face, Douglas took the phone and said,
“Tillie, I dare you to stop talking a minute, just a little minute, I
only want to whisper a few sweet nothings to your Bill and then I’ll
talk—I mean listen—to you for hours.”

Lewis gathered from the fact that the buzz-buzz changed to deep rumble in
the receiver that Tillie had at last consented to release the phone in
favor of Bill.

Douglas told him briefly that Lewis and she wanted to speak to him on his
way home from Tillie’s. She sounded so mysterious that it aroused Bill’s
curiosity and she had hardly resumed her seat when he bounded into the
room.

“What’s up?” he demanded, still pumping Douglas’ hand up and down.

“Nothing but this: while you have been idling at Tillie’s, Douglas and I
have been planning your future for you! Tomorrow morning you and I are
going down town and see a lawyer and have him draw up a contract for the
Tinsley-Somerville Motor Sales Corporation!”