Mr. Carey’s condition, after a week, was more hopeful. Save for a slight thickness of speech, he was able to talk normally, and the doctors promised that he would be getting about with a cane in three months’ time. He was, his daughter told her friends, the vast tribe of Careys and Tenafees and their ilk who “claimed kin,” simply angelic in his patience and gentleness, and he showed a touching and pitiful gratitude to his young henchman, Luke Manders. The superintendent had confessed that he had been putting his own salary back into the business ever since the revelation of old Ben Birdsall’s duplicity, and the Altonia’s trembling on the brink of ruin: the mill owed him considerably more than a thousand dollars. “You must keep account, boy,” his employer said brokenly. “You shall have every penny back, and interest--yes, sir, by the eternal. Eight per cent! Just let me get in action again--oh, _damn_ this fool leg--and we’ll work it out! We’ll get her afloat again!” There was no possible doubt of it, Manders assured him, and he was not to worry about his back pay; his expenses were small, and he had saved a good deal. Any time at all would do; he was in no hurry; Mr. Carey was to forget that, and hurry up and get well again. Miss Ada would have been amazed beyond measure at the gentleness, the respect, the veneration of the young savage; it made Nancy Carey’s hazel gaze grow liquid and tender. The weeks went on in a dull procession; Mr. Carey improved slowly, Gloriana-Virginia grew slowly worse; Luke Manders made himself slowly more and more necessary to his employer; Glen Darrow began slowly to accumulate a small and austere trousseau. It was a heavy and languid spring, humid and enervating. Gloriana-Virginia seemed visibly to shrink and shrivel, but she lived so completely in her fairy tales that she was quite literally absent from the body and present with the witches and the princess and the ogres. “Glen,” she whispered once at eleven o’clock on a stifling forenoon, wiping the sweat out of her eyes with a backward motion of her sallow hand, “ef yo’all was to stand on that Wishin’ Cyarpet, wishin’ so hard yo’ jes’ pintly bend yo’ wishbone, whar’d yo’ wish to be _at_?” The doctor’s daughter smiled and opened her lips to reply lightly and in kind, but the pupils of her eyes dilated swiftly and darkly at a sudden thought. “Glory,” she caught the child’s thin shoulders in a hard young grip, “Glory, I’d wish to be where I could see what our Peter Parker of Pasadena is doing this moment!” CHAPTER XII _Mrs. Eugenia Parker, President of the Federated Women’s Clubs, bitterly shares Black Orlo’s opinion that her son does not amount to much, in which Peter himself cordially concurs._ GLEN DARROW’S bitter wish could hardly have been granted with propriety at that very instant, for the reason that young Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena was in bed.