College closed. Mermaid went home. She found Keturah Hand in “poor health,” but a diagnosis of any specific complaint seemed difficult.

“Old age and remorse, my girl,” her aunt assured her. “Thinking of all the things I’ve done I might better not have done, or have done differently.”

“Why, any one can do that,” Mermaid answered. “I looked for you to develop some interesting ailment, Aunt Keturah, something new and original that I might exercise my knowledge upon. I am now certified to be competent to analyze you. I know all the diets. If there is anything you’d like particularly to eat, don’t eat it.”

“You remind me of John Pogginson of Patchogue,” protested Mrs. Hand. “An up-to-date doctor put him on a diet some time ago. But instead of telling John what he couldn’t eat he gave him a list of all the things he could eat. There were eighty-seven of them;[178] and in the eighty-seven were things John Pogginson had never heard of. He had a wonderful time. But his wife almost died of indigestion. She said it wasn’t what she ate, but seeing the things John could eat, that made her ill.”

The two women sat down that night for what Keturah called “a long talk.” Mrs. Hand wanted first to discuss Mermaid’s plans; but Mermaid said she hadn’t any.

“Thanks to you,” she told her aunt, “I’ve been able to get what I wanted; but I confess I don’t know yet what I want to do with it. I want to go to work, of course, and I hope I can get into experimental work of some kind. Perhaps at the Rockefeller Institute, perhaps elsewhere. Chemicals won’t cure all the ills flesh is heir to, but they will cure a lot more than we know about. I don’t care about a career, that is, I don’t care about making a world-startling discovery or getting particularly rich or especially famous. I do care about getting a reasonable amount of happiness and satisfaction out of life; and that means being busy at something congenial to you. And going ahead a little in one direction or another.”

“I hope you’ll marry,” said Mrs. Hand, abruptly.

“I hope so, too,” assented Mermaid. “If I can be so fortunate as to find the right man, or if some man can be fortunate enough to find me the right woman, or—well, both. We’ve both got to find each other, I suppose.”

[179]“Children,” said Mrs. Hand, with condensation.

“The more the merrier.” Mermaid did not speak lightly. Some deepening of her voice took all the flippancy from the words.

“You’ll have money, my money,” pursued Keturah Hand. “Eventually; it goes to John first. He’s a good brother to me and he’s been a good father to you, as good as he could have been to his own flesh and blood. You know the story?” she asked, with harsh suddenness.

“Dad has told me,” Mermaid replied, quietly. “It is so many years ago that he has no thought but that his wife and his own daughter are dead.”

“I have something to answer for in that connection,” her aunt said, and in spite of the harshness with which she spoke, her voice trembled. “I made Mary Smiley, that was Mary Rogers, very unhappy. I thought her unfit to be John’s wife. I—I rubbed it into her that she was unfit. Little, silly, childish, frivolous creature. How much I am to blame for her running away with her baby I don’t know—never shall, I suppose, until the time comes to answer for it.”

“Whatever you said to her, the facts remain,” the girl commented. “Actions not only speak louder than words, they talk the universal language. She ran away.”

“I think John felt that,” said Keturah. “He has a strict sense of justice and she wronged it. It was the child. That cut him to the heart, and no wonder.[180] After five years you were washed ashore. I’ve always believed in miracles since that day.”

Mermaid nodded.

“When you study science, Aunt,” she said, confidingly, “you come to believe in miracles as a matter of course. That is, unless you have one of these impossible minds that thinks a thing more wonderful than the explanation. It’s the............