CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAST ROOM

A man was sitting leaning forward over a table with his back to the three windows, his face toward the door. His arms were spread out on the table, his hands clasped. He leaned there waiting for something. It was Kate for whom he had been waiting, for he had heard every movement of hers almost since her first light step on the porch.

Kate stood now, smiling at him across the room. Her sudden smile following upon her amazed “Oh! Oh!” surprised him almost as much as his being there at all surprised her. He was prepared for her being startled, angry, accusing, anything except charmed. On the tip of his tongue there waited a reassuring word. That was why he had not risen when she entered; he wanted to avoid any movement that might frighten her. But all his careful precaution was wasted. Kate was not frightened. She was charmed, purely and simply charmed.

“Why, you are the boy,” she exclaimed, “the boy in the dragony, flowery picture frame!”

But even as she spoke she realized that although it was the boy indeed, it was the boy grown older. The crisp curly hair was clipped very short and was almost entirely gray. And there were deep lines about his eyes and nose and mouth. The light in the face had grown, too, that peculiar light betokening gaiety of the spirit and sympathy. Yes, it was truly the boy, only the boy _more so_, in spite of lines and gray hair.

“The dragony, flowery picture frame?” he repeated after her in the voice of the stranger in the garden.

He had spoken. He was real. Not just another one of her fancies.

“Yes, in the top drawer of Mother’s desk. That boy. Only excuse me, I thought I was talking to a dream. Are you real?”

The man laughed, a very jolly laugh, and nodded.

“Did Mother know you would be here? Is that why she insisted that I come into the orchard house the first minute I could?”

He shook his head. “No, she couldn’t know I would be here.”

He stood up then. But as he moved Kate noticed that he took special care to stand between the windows where he could not be seen by any one who might be in the orchard.

“You have made a mistake,” he said. “I don’t think I can be the person you think. My picture wouldn’t be in your mother’s desk.”

But Kate nodded, perfectly sure of her facts.

“Oh, yes, you are. Mother’s always had you. You’ve been our talisman for years, both of ours. And that’s funny, for neither of us knew about the other’s feeling until just before I came away.”

His face had reddened. “Her talisman?” he asked, incredulously.

“Just as much hers as mine. It was very funny. But it’s even funnier—of course I don’t mean funny, I mean strange—that I’ve found you here.”

“But don’t you know who I am?” the man asked.

“Only that you’re the talisman. I don’t know your name.”

“Exactly. Your mother didn’t want you even to know his name. Well, time justified her. It fulfilled all their prophecies. He was a nobody first and a convict afterward. No wonder she didn’t tell you his name.”

Kate looked at him steadily, trying to take it in, to connect it up. He went on:

“Your mother didn’t tell you his name because it is the same as hers. She is too ashamed. I am Nick Frazier. Now you know.”

The words sounded bitter, but the man’s manner belied them. He said it all with a friendly smile, seeming more concerned that Kate should get things straight and not be too shocked than airing personal bitterness. But Kate protested.

“No, no. She did you some wrong once. That is why she couldn’t talk about you to me. But she did say that she knew it would come right sometime. She wouldn’t talk about it. So I mustn’t. But you know it isn’t at all as you say. She isn’t ashamed of you at all.”

After a minute’s thought she added, “If you’re that boy, and you are, then she didn’t know anything about—about——”

“That I am a thief?”

“Yes. Jack Denton told me that this morning. Well, I’m sure she didn’t know that. And now I remember she said she had no idea why you and Aunt Katherine had quarrelled. She was puzzled by that in the letter asking me to come. She didn’t even know Elsie was living here. She didn’t know anything about you at all.”

“Listen, Kate.” Nick spoke rapidly. “Tell your mother when you go back all that Jack Denton told you. But tell her, too, that it isn’t so black, not quite so black as it sounds. And tell her that all the King of the Fairies taught those two kids in the orchard I have learned since I went to prison. For I wrote ‘The King of the Fairies.’ I wrote it in prison, thinking everything over. Tell her I shall never again accept another penny from any one or let any one help me. What I took from your aunt I’m paying back to-day with the royalties on the book. Will you remember to tell her that?”

Kate nodded. Yes, certainly she would remember. But her whole mind was taken up with delight that he, the boy in the dragony, flowery picture frame, was the author of their precious book. That was what mattered most, in this minute, to her.

He saw that she was not impressed with the fact of his having been a convict. That he was her talisman come alive, and the author of “The King of the Fairies,” both at once, was tremendous enough to wipe out all the rest.

“Elsie’s father wrote ‘The King of the Fairies,’ that book! And she never told me!”

Kate sat on the edge of the table and bombarded him with questions. He answered them all. There were places that had puzzled even her mother in the book. He clarified them for Kate now. “My new book is _clearer_,” he said. “I am learning better how to say what I want to say.”

“Your new book! There is another!”

“Yes, it will be published this fall.” He told her about that. She was enthralled. She clasped her hands and listened, the corners of her mouth tilting up like wings.

Then it was her turn to talk. Nick was the sort of person who draws you out. In all her life Kate had never experienced such sympathy in a human being. That was Nick’s rare gift. She told him the story of her life, quite literally, at least, from the year she was seven, beginning with the day of her sharpest memory when she and her mother saw the fairy by the spring. It was very much on her mind now because of that experience at Madame Pearl’s and she told it all to Nick in detail. “How can it be explained?” she asked. “How could Elsie be just exactly that fairy?”

“That’s a hard question,” he agreed. “But if there’s anything in what these fourth dimensional experts are saying—then it might be explained reasonably enough, even mathematically. You know they say time _is_ the fourth dimension. Well, in that instant in the woods, they might say, you got somehow into a four-dimension world.”

But Kate did not understand. Nick came from his station between the windows and sat on the edge of the table beside her, forgetting the hypothetical somebody in the orchard, and went into the subject more deeply. Kate followed his reasoning for a time, almost as though she were beginning to grasp something of the meaning of it all, when, bang! She slipped back to her first position of ignorance. She didn’t understand a bit.

Nick laughed. “It’s exactly the same with me,” he confessed. “I get a little farther than you do now in grasping it perhaps, and then ‘bang!’ just as you say, I lose the steps by which I got there. However, we can know that science itself is working toward some such explanation for that fairy by the spring of yours and its like.”

“And so you don’t believe in fairies at all? I was really only looking into the future, at Elsie as she would be years away, in that mirror of Madame Pearl’s?”

“Nonsense. Just because we have reason to believe that what you saw wasn’t a fairy—since it was Elsie and couldn’t be—proves no case against the existence of fairies. Does it? Yes, I believe in fairies right enough, but that’s a matter of faith with me rather than reasonable conviction.”

It was all very fascinating. Nick led Kate’s mind a race, and she felt as though she were “expanding.” She called it “expanding” when telling her mother of it later. Why, Nick did to you exactly what his book did, pushed roofs skyward and walls horizon-ward. And all the while he was so jolly. He laughed and made you laugh often, laughter with a special quality of joy in it.

But suddenly, right in the midst of everything, he looked at his watch. “Do you know, it’s after five,” he said, “and I——”

Kate interrupted what he was about to say. “After five! Why, Mother may be here already! I forgot about time! How could I!”

“Your mother? Here!”

“Yes, I telegraphed her to come.”

Kate had quite forgotten her anxieties about Elsie, and how much she had imagined her in need of Katherine’s sympathy and help. Now everything came back with a rush. “I must run.”

But Nick caught at her hand before she could run. “Kate!” he said, excitedly. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Then he became calm, but still held Kate back by the hand. He spoke very earnestly.

“Bring her out here. Your aunt isn’t at home. No one need know. I must see her. Will you bring her? Tell her it may be our very last chance to meet ever. Tell her that and _make_ her come.”

Kate looked into the face so suddenly become passionately earnest and said in surprise, “But of course she will want to come.”

But as she sped through the orchard it occurred to her that she had solved nothing, got nowhere, or almost nowhere, in the mystery. What was Nick doing in the orchard house? Was he a fugitive from the law? Somehow, though she had begun to wonder again, she was not a bit bothered. Nick was Nick. Who wanted more?

Katherine had arrived in a taxi from the station a few minutes earlier and presented herself anxiously at Miss Frazier’s door. She had no trepidations about meeting her aunt now, no thought of their standing quarrel. Her whole mind was taken up with her daughter. To say that she was worried would be to describe her state of mind weakly. She was very nearly frantic. She had read and reread Kate’s telegram on an average of once every five minutes since its arrival, and in spite of all this study was no nearer guessing at the nature of the “mix-up” than she had been after the first reading.

Isadora was not one of the servants who had known and loved Katherine, and so it is not surprising that when she opened the door and saw her standing there with her suitcase she took her for an agent. Katherine did not enlighten Isadora as to her identity, for she wanted to see Kate first of all, and for the present Kate only. She made this very plain, and then walked past Isadora and into the drawing-room with such an air that in spite of the old black velvet tam and general lack of style in the caller’s clothes, Isadora accorded her all due respect and went in search of Kate.

But Kate was not to be found in the house. Would the caller wait? Yes? Very well. Isadora withdrew with several curious backward glances.

As soon as Isadora was out of the way Katherine went through the French doors on to the terrace. She paced back and forth, looking toward the orchard house. Was Kate there? Had she forgotten the time? The maid Isadora had appeared calm and collected enough. There certainly was a sense of peace in the house. The “mix-up” perhaps was not such a desperate one, after all. Katherine couldn’t wait here, though, doing nothing—not after all those hours of waiting on the train. She walked across the terrace and down into the garden toward the orchard house. She met Kate just at the edge of the trees.

Kate returned her mother’s embrace and kiss almost absently. Then Katherine held her off and looked at her. “You look all right,” she said, breathlessly. “Kate, tell me nothing dreadful has happened. Tell me you _are_ all right. Quick!”

“Yes, yes. Oh, Mother, don’t look like that! I am perfectly all right. It’s about _Elsie_. But even that’s all right now. Mother, her father is here. Nick is in the orchard house. He wants to see you. He says it may be the last time you ever see each other. He wants you to come right now.”

But if Kate’s words reassured Katherine about Kate’s safety, they flung her into a new anxiety. “Nick? The last time? Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Only come.” Kate pulled at her mother’s hand.

Nick had come down the stairs and was waiting in the hall. When Katherine followed Kate dazedly in, and she and Nick stood facing each other, he exclaimed involuntarily; to him it was as though the girl of eighteen he had known years ago had come back. In the black velvet tam, raindrops sparkling in her hair that waved so softly at her ears and brow, raindrops drenching her eyelashes, her face vivid with emotion, her hands outstretched to him—why, she was as young and fresh as Kate herself, more beautiful even than he had remembered her.

“I must talk with you.” He was very intense and at the same time shy.

“Yes, of course. Of course we must talk.” Katherine’s tone implied, “Why not? Why shouldn’t we?”

“In the parlour, then. I’ll put up a window. No, I can’t do that. Someone in the house might see.”

“But why shouldn’t someone see? I don’t understand.”

“There’s air enough from the door now. Smell the syringa!”

Katherine was standing in the window, her back to them. Kate knew it was to hide strange tears. “The smell of the syringa did that,” she thought, with her quick understanding where her mother was concerned. “Smells are funny that way.”

Nick spoke to Kate then, with gentle imperativeness.

“Elsie will be coming out here in a minute. Yes, we are running away, if you like. Go to her and tell her to wait. Tell her we will go surely to-night, but she is to wait until your mother comes in. You keep her, Kate—stay with her—_until your mother comes in_.”

“I don’t think I could. She will be furious with me. She wouldn’t do what I said.”

“I’ll write her a note. She will understand that I want it.”

He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scrawled a sentence, holding the paper against the wall. Katherine had taken off her coat and was now sitting in the deep chair in the window. Her tears had vanished, if there really had been tears, and her eyes were clear as happiness itself.

But Kate was anxious as she hurried with the note to Elsie. If Elsie had hated her before for interfering now she would hate her all the more.

She was sitting on the window seat in her room, dressed in the green silk suit and brown straw hat, a bright green raincoat thrown over a chair back near, and the suitcase of last night at her feet. Had she seen Kate come from the orchard house and return there with her mother? It was obvious that she had, for the face she turned to Kate was wild and strained.

“What have you been doing now?” she asked as Kate came into the room. “Who was that girl you took into the orchard house?”

“That wasn’t a girl. It was my mother.”

“Your mother! Why?”

“Your father wanted to talk to her. He sent you this.”

Elsie took the note and her face lost some of its wildness as she read. When she looked up she was puzzled but almost serene.

“It’s all right. We’re going away just the same,” she said. “Nothing can stop us now. I’m only to wait until your mother comes in.”

Kate nodded. If it was her father Elsie was running away with, she, Kate, had no more responsibility. She didn’t see how it was fair to Aunt Katherine or in any way right for them to do it that way, but she had no doubt that somehow it could be explained. Once understood, there would be no question of its rightness. So she put all that aside.

She said, “Oh, Elsie, why didn’t you tell me your father wrote ‘The King of the Fairies’? Your very own father!”

“So you know now? He told you? Well, now you know, then, that I didn’t lie. There _was_ something of fairy in the orchard house; Father had finished his new book there. It’s all fairies.”

“And you are going away now, for good? Before Aunt Katherine comes back?”

“If you will let me.” Needless to say this was spoken sarcastically.

“But of course. Now that I’ve seen your father! No harm can come to you now, not when you’ve got our talisman, alive, real, to look after you.”

Elsie looked at Kate, puzzled. “What do you mean? Your talisman? You do say the queerest things!”

Then Kate told her about the boy in the silvery, dragony, flowery picture frame. When she had finished, it was a new Elsie that faced her.

“And your mother, too, felt like that?”

“Yes, Mother, too. Why not?”

“Why—because——”