Chapter 13

Gloomy Forebodings.

"Oh, please, do hush, Bess! You chatter so I can't hear myself think," said Lelia to Bess, one afternoon, about two weeks after their early morning visit to the suffering turtles, as the dear innocent was telling Phil some childish nonsense about a great snake Ben had once seen in the swamp, that was as long as a ship's mast and had a mouth big enough to swallow a giant. "We are going home to-morrow, and I don't see how you can laugh and tell such horrid stories when _that's_ to happen to us so soon."

And she sighed dismally and looked out at the sea as if she never expected to behold it again.

"But I am not going home," replied Phil. "I'm going to stay with Mr. Herdic, and he has promised to take Thad and me to Key West and the sponging-grounds before we return home, or before Thad does, for _I_ never expect to return to Oakdale."

"Then only Uncle Aldis and Aunt Marion and Bess and I have got to go home?" she replied.

"That's all," said Phil, cheerfully.

"Well, I think you might be sorry, or pretend that you are, anyway, if only for look's sake," tartly rejoined Lelia, with another wandering glance at the sea.

"Oh, I am sorry!" said Phil, with honest quickness; "but still I'd rather stay here than go back to Oakdale, where nobody likes me, and I'd never amount to a hill of beans."

"But _I_ liked you when you were at Oakdale," gravely reminded Lelia.

And the tone in which she said it smote Phil to the heart.

"So did I," calmly avowed Bess. "I did really, Phil."

"No, you didn't!" sharply contradicted Lelia. "You never liked anybody but yourself and your dear, lovely Rosy!"

"I say I did!" stoutly declared Bess. "I liked Phil before I was born."

And she nodded her little head complacently, as if this last were a clincher that no one--not even Lelia--could have the hardihood to doubt.

Phil burst out laughing, and Lelia flung down the book she was reading, or trying lo read, when Bess began her marvelous "snake-story," and stared at her cousin in speechless disgust.

"I never did see such behaviors as those," said Bess, with awful gravity and a marked consideration for the English language not common to her.

"Such behaviors as those!" repeated Lelia, with peppery sarcasm. "My goodness, Bess, how finely you talk, and how truthful you are this afternoon!"

"You shan't scorn at me," sturdily retorted Bess. "I will cry if you do, and then Phil will take my part, and won't like you one bit."

"As if I cared for your crying, or your being 'scorned at,' or Phil's not liking me!"

And Lelia sailed out of the room, crossed the piazza and ran down the japonica-bordered path to the garden.

Seating herself under a crape-myrtle tree, its pink blossoms glowing amid the deep, glossy green of its leaves, like the blush of the sunset on an April cloud, she rested her chin in the palm of her hand, and looked, half-thoughtfully, half-defiantly, at the ground.

So Phil was not going to return to Oakdale; he did not care for any of his old friends; and this was gratitude. Yet what had he to be grateful for? The debt was all on her side, and the affection, too, for that matter; and the one, she thought, ought to balance the other.

"Lelia!"

Phil had contrived to elude Bess' fox-like vigilance, and when she was busy with her tea-set, followed Lelia into the garden, to try and find out what it was that had so mightily offended his old playmate.

"Well?" she said, shortly.

"I've something to give you," Phil began, in a business-like tone--"not to give you, exactly, but to return to you."

And he put in her hand the identical little white envelope she had given him at Oakdale the evening before their departure for Florida.

It was worn and soiled, and all its former freshness gone; but it contained five crisp ten-dollar notes, every penny of Phil's small earnings since he had been in Mr. Herdic's employ, and "squared accounts between them," as he said, with a satisfied smile.

Lelia was in one of her grand, womanly moods, and seemed to put her childhood and childhood's tempers and jealousies away from her as one might an outgrown garment.

She looked as she did the day she had urged her uncle to befriend Oakdale's "bad boy," and her hand closed over the envelope in a slow, proud way, as if she hated, yet strangely valued, the few poor bank-notes it held, hoarded, she knew, with so much self-denial and miserly care, that "accounts might be squared between them," and Phil no longer her debtor.

"It's all there," he said, after an awkward pause, seeing that she did not seem inclined to take any further notice of it.

"Of course it is. Don't I know that?"

"But you have not counted it."

"No; but haven't you _said_ it was all there, and isn't that enough?"

Phil unconsciously drew himself up, and a glad light shone in his eyes. He was proud of her confidence in his word, and prouder still to feel himself not altogether unworthy of her good opinion.

"The time we have been here, and all the queer things that have happened to us since we left Oakdale, seems like a dream," he said, presently--"a strange, exciting dream."

"Does it?" She looked up at him in undisguised surprise. "It does not seem so to me; it is all real--as real as my life, as the sea, as the earth--but that is because I am a girl, I suppose, and girls are not so forgetful as boys are, so I've heard people say."

You would never have thought her a child to look at her as she spoke. Her eyes were so earnest, her voice so grave, her manner so composed and considering.

Her fun and prattle with Bess, her little quarrels and tart replies, her generous, happy, winning, self-willed ways, were as if they had never been, and in their place came resignation, reserve, pride and a little--only a little--regret and sorrow.

"I have something for you," she said, after another awkward pause--"something that will help you to remember me when I am gone."

"Then I shall not need it," said Phil, quickly.

"Oh, yes, you will! You confess already that Florida, and all that's happened to us since we've been here, seems like a dream--so how can I hope to be remembered unless I leave some reminder of my naughty little self with you? I asked Uncle Walter to get it made for me when we were last at Jacksonville, and he did, and here it is, and it's yours to keep always, if you care for it, Phil."

She took from her pocket, carefully wrapped in pink tissue paper, a purple velvet box, opened it and took from it a beautiful blue-and-gold enameled locket, set round with pearls, and as perfect in every respect as the jeweler's art could make it.

"It has my picture in it. I thought you might like to have it, though it's not much, and I am nobody in particular."

"Nobody? Why, you are everybody to me, Lelia," he said, taking the locket with a kind of reverent hesitancy and opening it with as much care as if he feared it might fall to pieces in his grasp or vanish entirely, like the enchanted ring in the fairy tale.

The lovely little face it portrayed was Lelia's own, and when he had looked at it for fully five minutes, with eyes expressive of the most unbounded delight, he shut the glittering cases, replaced the locket in its little velvet box, and said, very earnestly:

"The money I borrowed, and it's now paid; but the picture is mine. _Your_ gift, Lelia, and yours alone?"

"Yes, I thought of it. My gift alone, and I'm glad if it pleases you."

"Well, it does--lots, and I shall keep it as long as I live."

"And this money," turning the envelope over in her hand, and regarding it curiously "what shall I do with it, Phil?"

"Oh, that's for you to say!"

"So it is; and it's for me to say, also, that it is getting late, and I want to see the sun 'set in the sea,' as Bess calls it, this last evening of our stay at Cedar Keys. And there's Bess now, little plague that she is!" turning to meet the flying figure that came tearing down the garden path, with hair streaming in the wind, and sash untied and trailing on the ground in dreadful disarray.

Phil walked off, whistling, with the locket in his hand; and the last of the many childish confidences that had taken place between Lelia and her playfellow, preserver and hero was at an end.