Jewel Weed

								

because they were loved and not to fill a bare space on the wall; there
were books and books and books, many of them with the worn covers of
old friends. Here, clasped in the arms of another old friend of a chair,
half-sat, half-lay his mother, and near her lounged Ellery Norris, the
friend whose delicate mingling of love and admiration was as fragrant
wine to Dick, who believed in himself because others had always believed
in him. The dying twilight, laden with rose-spiciness and with the first
shrill notes of the warm night, came in through high narrow windows.
Everywhere was the sweet repose that comes after sweet activity, and the
center of it was the fragile woman who lay back in her chair, caressing
with light hand the head of the young man who sat upon the rug and
leaned against her knee.
Norris was looking at Mrs. Percival with a kind of wondering admiration
which the son saw with a touch of pity. Poor old Norris! It must have
been tough to grow up without a home. As for this fragrant type of
femininity, young Percival took it for granted--at least in the women
that belong to a man; and the other women hardly count.
Everything made Dick feel very tender toward his past, very well
satisfied with his present, very secure about his future. All would be
good. That was the natural order of the universe. He had always found it
easy to do things and to be a good deal of a personage.
He stared up silently at the space above the mantel where hung a
portrait that gazed back at him, with features pale in the fading light.
Singularly alike were the boyish face that looked up and the boyish face
that looked down, though the painted Percival, a little idealistic about
the eyes, wholly firm about the mouth, appeared the more determined of
the two. Perhaps this came from the shoulder-straps, the blue uniform,
and the military squareness of the shoulders.
"Yes, you are like him, Dick." Mrs. Percival spoke to his thoughts. The
boy looked up startled.
"Am I?" he asked. "I wish I might be. I wish I might be half so much of
a man."
"And I hope you will be more--no, not that. He was my all. I can hardly
wish you to be more, but I hope you will do more. At least you don't
have a drag on you from the beginning, as he had. Has Dick told you the
story, Ellery?" She turned with a gentle smile toward the other man.
"You see I can't help calling you Ellery. Dick's letters have made you
partly mine already. We are not strangers at all."
Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the
slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.
"You don't know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine," he
said. "I never knew my mother."
"You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a
fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know
how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg,