Part 1 (2/2)
When, in acting on this advice, I vetoed Silvia's lukewarm proposition, I was convinced of Huldah's wisdom by seeing the look of relief that flashed into my wife's troubled countenance, and I knew that her suggestion had been but a perfunctory prompting of duty.
Time alone could overcome the effects of her early environment!
CHAPTER II
_Introducing Our Next-door Neighbors_
One morning Silvia and I lingered over our coffee cups discussing our plans for the coming summer, which included visits from my sister Beth and my college chum, Rob Rossiter. We wished to avoid having their arrivals occur simultaneously, however, because Rob was a woman-hater, or thought he was. We decided to have Beth pay her visit first and later take Rob with us on our vacation trip to some place where the fis.h.i.+ng facilities would be to our liking. However, summer vacation time like our plans was yet far, vague and dim.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Uncle Issachar]
While I was putting on my overcoat, Silvia had gone to the window and was looking pensively at the vacant house next to ours.
”I fear,” she said abruptly and irrelevantly, ”that we are destined to receive no part of Uncle Issachar's fortune.”
Uncle Issachar was a wealthy but eccentric relative of my wife. He had made us no wedding gift beyond his best wishes, but he had then informed us that at the birth of each of our prospective sons he should place in the bank to Silvia's account the sum of five thousand dollars. We had never invited him to visit us or made any overtures in the way of communication with him, lest he should think we were cultivating his acquaintance from mercenary motives.
While I was debating whether the lament in Silvia's tone was for the loss of the money or the lack of children, she again spoke; this time in a tone which had lost its languor.
”There is a big moving van in front of the house next door. At last we will have some near neighbors.”
”Are they unloading furniture?” I asked inanely, crossing to the window.
”No; course not,” came cheerfully from Huldah, who had come in to remove the dishes. ”Most likely they are unloading lions and tigers.”
As I have already intimated, Huldah was a privileged servant.
”They are unloading children!” explained Silvia, in a tone implying that Huldah's sarcastic implication would be infinitely more preferable. ”The van seems to be overflowing with them--a perfect crowd. Do you suppose the house is to be used as an orphan asylum?”
”I think not,” I a.s.sured her as I counted the flock. Five children would seem like a crowd to Silvia.
”Boys!” exclaimed Huldah tragically, as she joined us for a survey.
”I'll see that they don't keep the gra.s.s off our lawn.”
Late that afternoon I opened the outer door of the dining-room in response to the rap of strenuously applied knuckles.
A lad of about eleven years with the sardonic face of a satyr and diabolically bright eyes peered into the room.
”We're going to have soup for dinner,” he announced, ”and mother wants to borrow a soup plate for father to eat his out of.”
Silvia stared at him aghast. She seemed to feel something compelling in the boy's personnel, however, and she went to the china closet and brought forth a soup plate which she handed to him without comment.
In silence we watched him run across the lawn, twirling the plate deftly above his head in juggler fas.h.i.+on.
The next day when we sat down to dinner our new young neighbor again appeared on our threshold.
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