Albert looked at him. This WAS a hard promise to make. In their talks beneath the rainbows, whenever he and Madeline had referred to the future and its doubts, they had always pushed those doubts aside with vague hints of an elopement. If the unreasonableness of parents and grandparents should crowd them too far, they had always as a last resort, the solution of their problem by way of a runaway marriage. And now Captain Zelotes was asking him to give up this last resort.
The captain, watching him keenly, divined what was in his grandson's mind.
“Think it over, Al,” he said kindly. “Don't answer me now, but think it over, and to-morrow mornin' tell me how you feel about it.” He hesitated a moment and then added: “You know your grandmother and I, we--well, we have maybe cause to be a little mite prejudiced against this elopin' business.”
So Albert thought, and the next morning, as the pair were walking together to the office, he spoke his thought. Captain Zelotes had not mentioned the subject.
“Grandfather,” said Albert, with some embarrassment, “I'm going to give you that promise.”
His grandfather, who had been striding along, his heavy brows drawn together and his glance fixed upon the frozen ground beneath his feet, looked up.
“You asked me last night to promise you something, you know. . . . You asked me to think it over. I have, and I'm going to promise you that--Madeline and I won't marry without first telling you.”
Captain Zelotes stopped in his stride; then he walked on again.
“Thank you, Al,” he said quietly. “I hoped you'd see it that way.”
“Yes--yes, I--I do. I don't want to bring any more--trouble of that kind to you and Grandmother. . . . It seems to me that you--that you have had too much already.”
The captain's tone was almost gruff and that was his only reference to the subject of the promise; but somehow Albert felt that at that moment he and his grandfather were closer together, were nearer to a mutual understanding and mutual appreciation than they had ever been before.
To promise, however, is one thing, to fulfill the obligation another. As the days passed Albert found his promise concerning letter-writing very, very hard to keep. When, each evening he sat down at the table in his room to pour out his soul upon paper it was a most unsatisfactory outpouring. The constantly enforced recollection that whatever he wrote would be subject to the chilling glance of the eye of Fosdick mater was of itself a check upon the flow. To write a love letter to Madeline had hitherto been a joy, a rapture, to fill pages and pages a delight. Now, somehow, these pages were hard to fill. Omitting the very things you were dying to say, the precious, the intimate things--what was there left? He and she had, at their meetings and in their former correspondence, invented many delightful little pet names for each other. Now those names were taboo; or, at any rate, they might as well be. The thought of Mrs. Fosdick's sniff of indignant disgust at finding her daughter referred to as some one's ownest little rosebud withered that bud before it reached the paper.