CHAPTER II.SHIRLEY EMBARKS UPON NEW ADVENTURES.

“OfcourseI don’t care, Mother! Why shouldn’t you and Dad go off and have the time of your lives? It is simplygreat! Hurrah for the Trustees and Faculty! It istimethat Dad had his ‘sabbatical year,’ or whatever you call it. With all that he has done for this university!”

“And all that he expects to do, childie.”

“Certainly. The museum will be full of all those mummies and things that you will dig up over there.”

Shirley’s mother smiled. “It would be better for you to learn more definitely, daughter, just what your classical father is going to do over there. I can assure you that we are not going to bring home any mummies. I wanted to make sure, little girl, that your heart had no soreness about this. You understand why it is not best to take you now. When you go abroad, as I hope you may some day, you will want a more general trip first. We have had that. And it is best not to interrupt your education now. I confess to being a little torn between desire to gowith your father, to see your cousin in England, with the fine opportunity for myself as well, and the regret about leaving you behind.”

“Seriously, Mother,” said Shirley, more earnestly than she had spoken before, “it looks like a fine adventure to me. Of course, I’m not going to pretend that I will not miss you. But you could give it up and come home if anything serious should be the matter, and after all, we might look at it this way. I am going West for the summer, a big chance for me. ThenI’mgoing to do what I’ve longed to do, attend a girls’ school for a year. See?I’mleavingyoufor a year!”

“Bless you, child,—I might know that you would take it that way. What a comfort you have always been to me! Just see to it that you are careful not to do risky things, and I shall throw off responsibility. Keep a diary, Shirley. I’m going to keep one, too, to bring you daily pictures of what we shall be doing. Then there will be letters, of course.”

“I will write the letters, Mother, but I’m not so sure about the diary. You know my failing. I like to have the fun, but it takes so long to write about it, and you know that the fun makes better notes than the serious things. My diary will be something like this: ‘January first. Snowing. Missed breakfast. Classes all day. Theme assigned. Chose‘Why Go To College?’ Have to dress for dinner. Hungry. Expect letter from Mother tomorrow.’”

“Even an outline like that, Shirley will be better than nothing. I should like to look over it to see what my girl has really been doing.”

“I promise to have good lessons, Mother, not just fun, and I imagine that they are pretty strict. Probably they will have to be. But that is a long way off. I shall have nothingbutfun this summer, I hope. Here comes Dad. Is this the distinguished professor of Epigraphy, Paleography and Archaeology, to say nothing of—well, all the rest—who is going to dig up Greece and Rome and Egypt this year?”

“And is this the saucy, beautiful and only daughter of the said professor?” queried a light-stepping, fine looking man who entered his own living-room, letting the screen bang behind him.

Shirley ran to meet him, hugging him rather impetuously, while he rumpled her hair and imprinted a kiss upon her forehead. “Well, girls,” said he, “the last old grad has gone, I believe: the last meeting of the trustees is over. I shook hands with the president in his office and he wished me a happy and profitable year.” With a comical side step, the dignified professor reached for the other girl, his wife, and drew her to him with the arm that was not around Shirley.

“My reports of grades are long since in and I’ve answered the university bell for classes for the last time till year after next. Can you wonder that I am a little crazy?”

This mild way of figuratively throwing up his hat amused Shirley, but she was as careful of her father’s dignity as he; so she slipped out from his arm and said, “Here comes a student up the walk, Father. Come on, Mother. Dad has probably flunked him in something. Never mind, Daddy, you will soon be away. I’m packing, too, and I need Mother anyhow. ‘In pace requiescat,’” Shirley added, waving her hand toward the unseeing student who was knocking on the screen, just as Shirley and her smiling mother left the room.

Just what point Shirley had in mind in applying the Latin expression to the supposedly unhappy student, she did not explain, but it was probably the only Latin phrase that occurred to her at the time. Whatever was the lad’s errand, the professor made short work of him and as the student began to whistle as soon as he reached the street some responsibility must have been lifted.

It was a little hard for Shirley that her father and mother should leave before she could, but it could not be helped, and if Shirley had a lump in her throat, no sign of it showed in her bright face asshe blithely waved a last goodbye to Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt, whose faces she could see through the Pullman window as the train began to move. But she turned away rather soberly and the young man with her without a word took her arm to lead her back to the car which stood waiting.

Shirley swallowed, winked a moment, then lifted smiling eyes, dark, with curling lashes, to her tall, slim companion. “I’m all right, Dick. There’s just that funny, all-gone feeling, you know.”

“Yep,” returned Richard Lytton. “I’ve had it. Remember when I went to military school? When I stood on the platform in my new uniform, just a mere kid, you know, and saw the train disappear with my father on board, going home without me,—O boy!”

“You were such a little chap, weren’t you? But you seemed terribly old to me, and I remember how impressed I was when you came home at the Holidays wearing that uniform.”

“Little idiot that I was!” laughed Dick, drawing Shirley out of the way of a truck loaded with trunks. “More students going out on the next train,” said Dick, glancing at the truck. “There’s that freshman trying to catch your eye, Shirley.”

Shirley looked in the direction of Dick’s nod and smiled at a plump youth who was looking at her withinterest. She waked up to her immediate surroundings a little with her bow to the boy who was in one of her father’s classes and whom she had met several times at her own home. She could not know how very much interested the freshman was or why he said to himself, “That’s only her cousin.”

The small station of the college town was busier than usual with the departure of students. As Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt had made their plans to depart at the earliest moment possible, their leaving was coincident with that of many others, though trustees had largely gone before.

“If you begin to smite them, now, Shirley,” said Dick, “what it will be when you actually get into college, I shudder to think.”

“Nonsense,” said Shirley. “Perhaps I can stay two years at the other school. They have a junior college, you know.”

“Your father wouldn’t stand for that, Shirley. He wants you here for your University work.”

“I know.”

But they had reached the car in which two ladies were sitting. One was elderly, the other about the age of Shirley’s mother. “Well, here’s the orphan, Mother,” said Dick cheerfully, handing Shirley into the front seat and going around to the other door to climb into the driver’s seat himself.

“I would not remind her in that heartless way, Dick,” said his mother whose smile was as cheerful as Dick’s and whose kind eyes looked sympathetically at Shirley.

“I don’t mind, Cousin Molly. Thank fortune, I’m not really an orphan, and I’m going to do just what my revered Dad said to do, keep my mind on the adventures before me. Do you think that wecanget off, ourselves, day after tomorrow, Auntie?”

Shirley addressed the older lady in this remark.

“You will be obliged to do so, my dear. You forget that your tickets are purchased and all the arrangements made. We may as well do the last of your shopping now, if Dick will drive us around. I knew that your mother could not manage all of it at the last, with all the interruptions that she had in the professor’s affairs.”

“Now, Auntie! don’t blame it on poor Dad.”

“He could not help it, my dear. But I have not lived next door to you in vain, my child, these pleasant years, and your mother trusts my judgment. I have the list.”

“Oh, you have planned it with her, then,” said Shirley. “Things have been rather mixed up today, but she said to ask you about everything. I’malmost packed, but I surely will be glad to have your help.”

Miss Dudley was Shirley’s great aunt, her mother’s aunt. She lived in an apartment of her own near the Harcourt home and managed to hold the position of general adviser to her niece without any of the disagreeable features which an interfering nature might have introduced. But Miss Dudley had her own pursuits and a wide circle of friends. No one knew her age, but if the Harcourts were in the early forties, Miss Dudley, well preserved, still attractive, with her only lightly wrinkled brow, her wide-awake brown eyes and air of independence, must be in the sixties. She and Shirley had always been good friends. Her tasteful rooms, her books, her curios, which the child Shirley was trained not to touch without permission, had always been a source of pleasure to the professor’s daughter. Many a time some one of Miss Dudley’s friends would come in to call and note the pretty, fair-haired child with her dark eyes, reading some book, perhaps, and curled up in a corner of Miss Dudley’s davenport.

The Lyttons were distant cousins, related upon the Harcourt side. It was with them that Shirley expected to make the western trip. As they, too, had many errands and much to do before the start,Dick deposited Miss Dudley and Shirley in the center of town at their first shopping point and made arrangements to meet them at a later hour, to take them home again. Shirley quite forgot to be lonesome in the exigencies of the moment, the importance of not forgetting any detail and the selection of the last purchases.

Meanwhile, upon the Pullman, Dr. Harcourt was saying to a rather sober wife, “I need a more cheerful companion, Eleanor.” Somewhat whimsically he looked into the now smiling eyes, very like Shirley’s. “I, too, feel as if the plunge had taken my breath a little, but if we let ourselves get homesick or worried at the start, what will become of us?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I felt like a girl again, planning my trousseau and honeymoon,—but saying goodbye to Shirley has made me think of my responsibilities, I suppose.”

“Stop it, then, my dear. This is our second honeymoon. Think of the fun that we are going to have. Remember what we decided. It is true that things calamitous might happen, but how foolish to guide one’s life by them.”

“I remember, learned professor,” said Mrs. Harcourt, responding to the pressure of the hand that reached down to take hers. “We decided that it is entirely wise to accomplish something in this oldworld, not held back by our fears, and that this year will be an opportunity to Shirley as well as to ourselves. We’ve made fine plans for her and as usual we pray ‘deliver us from evil.’ Really, Will, I’m a happy woman and I trust in you and Providence just as much as ever. You don’t blame me that I find leaving Shirley behind a little wrench, do you?”

“Not a bit of it. But I think that it will do you both good. What did I do with that Baedeker? The last report of our archæalogical expedition is in it. I put it between the pages and I hope that I’ve not left it at home!”

“I have it in my bag, Will. I’ll find it for you in a jiffy.”

Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt were embarking upon the steamer bound for the English coast at about the same time that Mr. and Mrs. Lytton, their son Dick and cousin, Shirley Harcourt left the college town for their adventures in the West.

“Don’t do anything a Dudley wouldn’t do,” brightly said Shirley’s great-aunt as she embraced her for the last time. “Take good care of my only niece, Dick, if you go off on any of those wild trails. I hope that you will be armed for bandits.”

“Why, Auntie,—who would think that of you? These aren’t the old days in the West.”

“Twentieth century bandits are the worst kind, child. Remember, Dick.”

“Trust me, Cousin Anne. When you see us again we shall have climbed the Rockies in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and California, so to speak. Shirley, do they have the Rocky Mountains in California?”

“Don’t ask embarrassing questions, Dick. We’ll look it up on the map, for we’ll have plenty of time for that on the train. I’m going to study geography and a lot beside this trip, Aunt Anne. Please take good care of your dear self. I wish that you were going too.”

“I couldn’t stand it, Shirley, not all that you are going to do. Take her away, Dick, before I change my mind about letting her go at all!”

This time it was not to the Lytton car but to a taxi that Dick escorted his cousin, a taxi which ticked away in front of the Harcourt home. Aunt Anne would lock the place finally. Shirley whisked inside, taking her seat beside Mrs. Lytton and giving a sigh of relief as she sank into it.

“Tired, child?” inquired Mrs. Lytton.

“Not so much tired as glad that the last thing is done and that we are really off. Are we?”

“I judge that we are. I am glad, too. There was so much to do at our house and I had to see thatDick and your cousin Steve left no essential article behind.”

Both Mr. Lytton and Dick protested at this aspersion upon their ability to look after themselves, but it was all in a joking way and Shirley sat still and tense with the excitement of beginning such a big trip, the longest that she had ever taken. At the station there was a group of girls who had come to see Shirley off. Several of Dick’s friends, too, had made it a point to be there just before the train came in.

“The worst of it is that it is going to be so long before we see you again,” said one high school friend of Shirley’s. “It seems a shame for you not to graduate with the class!”

“Yes, it does; but I’ll go into college with you anyhow, and it would be pretty hard to be here all year without Father and Mother.”

“I don’t blame you, Shirley,” said another girl. “If I had your chance I’d take it in a minute. Write us all about it, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes, Shirley,” cried the first girl. “We’ll want something about you for our little bulletin, and if you will tell me about your trip I’ll use it for a theme!”

But the train whistled. Goodbyes were at last over, the goodbye that had seemed to Shirley tostretch out endlessly ever since her father and mother started away. From the window Shirley waved and blew kisses, at last sinking back on the cushioned seat to find herself beside “old Dick,” who picked up a magazine to use as a fan.

“Come to, Shirley,” said he. “You stood all that like a Trojan. Imagine me if the boys had treated me to all that embracing.”

“They slapped you on the back, Dick, asIshould not like to be slapped. I think I prefer the girls’ way.”

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