"You must write her yourselves. She wanted us to tell you long before."

Fairy picked up the little embroidered dress and kissed it, but her fond eyes were anxious.

So a few weeks later, weeks crowded full of tumult and anxiety, yes, and laughter, too, Prudence and Jerry came to Mount Mark and settled down to quiet life in the parsonage. The girls kissed Prudence very often, leaped quickly to do her errands, and touched her with nervous fingers.

But mostly they sat across the room and regarded her curiously, shyly, quite maternally.

"Carol and Lark Starr," Prudence cried crossly one day, when she intercepted one of these surrept.i.tious glances, "you march right up-stairs and shut yourselves up for thirty minutes. And if you ever sit around and stare at me like a stranger again, I'll spank you both. I'm no outsider. I belong here just as much as ever I did. And I'm still the head of things around here, too!"

The twins obediently marched, and after that Prudence was more like Prudence, and the twins were much more twinnish, so that life was very nearly normal in the old parsonage. Prudence said she couldn't feel quite satisfied because the twins were too old to be punished, but she often scolded them in her gentle teasing way, and the twins enjoyed it more than anything else that happened during those days of quiet.

Then came a night when the four sisters huddled breathlessly in the kitchen, and Aunt Grace and the trained nurse stayed with Prudence behind the closed door of the front room up-stairs. And the doctor went in, too, after he had inflicted a few light-hearted remarks upon the two men in the little library.

After that--silence, an immense hushing silence,--settled down over the parsonage. Jerry and Mr. Starr, alone in the library, where a faint odor of drugs, anesthetics, something that smelled like hospitals lingered, stared away from each other with persistent determination. Now and then Jerry walked across the room, but Mr. Starr stood motionless by the window looking down at the cherry tree beneath him, wondering vaguely how it dared to be so full of snowy blooms!

"Where are the girls?" Jerry asked, picking up a roll of cotton which had been left on the library table, and flinging it from him as though it scorched his fingers.

"I--think I'll go and see," said Mr. Starr, turning heavily.

Jerry hesitated a minute. "I--think I'll go along," he said.

For an instant their eyes met, sympathetically, and did not smile though their lips curved.

Down in the kitchen, meanwhile, Fairy sat somberly beside the table with a pile of darning which she jabbed at viciously with the needle. Lark was perched on the ice chest, but Carol, true to her childish instincts, hunched on the floor with her feet curled beneath her. Connie leaned against the table within reach of Fairy's hand.

"They're awfully slow," she complained once.

n.o.body answered. The deadly silence clutched them.

"Oh, talk," Carol blurted out desperately. "You make me sick! It isn't anything to be so awfully scared about. Everybody does it."

A little mumble greeted this, and then, silence again. Whenever it grew too painful, Carol said reproachfully, "Everybody does it." And no one ever answered.

They looked up expectantly when the men entered. It seemed cozier somehow when they were all together in the little kitchen.

"Is she all right?"

"Sure, she's all right," came the bright response from their father. And then silence.

"Oh, you make me sick," cried Carol. "Everybody does it."

"Carol Starr, if you say 'everybody does it' again I'll send you to bed," snapped Fairy. "Don't we know everybody does it? But Prudence isn't everybody."

"Maybe we'd better have a lunch," suggested their father hopefully, knowing the thought of food often aroused his family when all other means had failed. But his suggestion met with dark reproach.

"Father, if you're hungry, take a piece of bread out into the woodshed,"

begged Connie. "If anybody eats anything before me I shall jump up and down and scream."

Their father smiled faintly and gave it up. After that the silence was unbroken save once when Carol began encouragingly:

"Every--"

"Sure they do," interrupted Fairy uncompromisingly.

And then--the hush.

Long, long after that, when the girls' eyes were heavy, not with want of sleep, but just with unspeakable weariness of spirit,--they heard a step on the stair.

"Come on up, Harmer," the doctor called. And then, "Sure, she's all right. She's fine and dandy,--both of them are."

Jerry was gone in an instant, and Mr. Starr looked after him with inscrutable eyes. "Fathers are--only fathers," he said enigmatically.

"Yes," agreed Carol.

"Yes. In a crisis, the other man goes first."

His daughters turned to him then, tenderly, sympathetically.

"You had your turn, father," Connie consoled him. And felt repaid for the effort when he smiled at her.

"They are both fine, you know," said Carol. "The doctor said so."

"We heard him," Fairy a.s.sured her.

"Yes, I said all the time you were all awfully silly about it. I knew it was all right. Everybody does it."

"Jerry Junior," Lark mused. "He's here.--'Aunt Lark, may I have a cooky?'"

A few minutes later the door was carefully shoved open by means of a cautious foot, and Jerry stood before them, holding in his arms a big bundle of delicately tinted flannel.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, beaming at them, his face flushed, his eyes bright, embarra.s.sed, but thoroughly satisfied. Of course, Prudence was the dearest girl in the world, and he adored her, and--but this was different, this was Fatherhood!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Let me introduce to you my little daughter]

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said again in the tender, half-laughing voice that Prudence loved, "let me introduce to you my little daughter, Fairy Harmer."

"Not--not Fairy!" cried Fairy, Senior, tearfully. "Oh, Jerry, I don't believe it. Not Fairy! You are joking."

"Of course it is Fairy," he said. "Look out, Connie, do you want to break part of my daughter off the first thing? Oh, I see. It was just the flannel, was it? Well, you must be careful of the flannel, for when ladies are the size of this one, you can't tell which is flannel and which is foot. Fairy Harmer! Here, grandpa, what do you think of this?

And Prudence said to send you right up-stairs, and hurry. And the girls must go to bed immediately or they'll be sick to-morrow. Prudence says so."

"Oh, that's enough. That's Prudence all over! You needn't tell us any more. Here, Fairy Harmer, let us look at you. Hold her down, Jerry.

Mercy! Mercy!"

"Isn't she a beauty?" boasted the young father proudly.

"A beauty? A beauty! That!" Carol rubbed her slender fingers over her own velvety cheek. "They talk about the matchless skin of a new-born infant. Thanks. I'd just as lief have my own."

"Oh, she isn't acclimated yet, that's all. Do you think she looks like me?"

"No, Jerry, I don't," said Lark candidly. "I never considered you a dream of loveliness by any means, but in due honesty I must admit that you don't look like that."