Caps and Capers A Story of Boarding-School Life

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

WHICH SHALL IT BE?

“And now that I have them, how am I to decide? That is the question?”

The speaker was a fine-looking man about thirty-five years of age, seated before a large writing-table in a handsomely appointed library. It was littered with catalogues, pamphlets, letters and papers sent from dozens of schools, and from the quantity of them one would fancy that every school in the country was represented. This was the result of an advertisement in the “Times” for a school in which young children are received, carefully trained, thoroughly taught, and which can furnish unquestionable references regarding its social standing and other qualifications.

It was a handsome, but seriously perplexed, face which bent over the letters, and more than once the shapely hand was raised to the puckered forehead and the fingers thrust impatiently through the golden brown hair, setting it on end and causing its owner to look more distracted than ever.

“Poor, wee lassie, you little realize what a problem you are to me. Would to God the one best qualified to solve it could have been spared to you,” and the handsome head fell forward upon the hands, as tears of bitter anguish flooded the brown eyes.

Can anything be more pathetic than a strong man’s tears? And Clayton Reeve’s were wrung from an almost despairing heart.

For ten years his life had been a dream of happiness. At twenty-five he had married a beautiful, talented girl, who made his home as nearly perfect as a home can be made, and when, three years later, a little daughter, her mother’s living image, came to live with them, he felt that he had no more to ask for. Seven years slipped away, as only years of perfect happiness can slip, and then came the end. The beautiful wife and mother went to sleep forever, leaving the dear husband and lovely little daughter alone. For six months Mr. Reeve strove to fill the mother’s place, but until she was taken from him he had never realized how perfectly and completely his almost idolized wife had filled his home, conducting all so quietly and gracefully that even those nearest and dearest never suspected how much thought she had given to their comfort until her firm, yet gentle, rule was missed.

Happily, Toinette was too young to fully appreciate her loss, and although she grieved in her childish way for the sweet, smiling mother who had so loved her, it was a child’s blessed evanescent grief, which could find consolation in her pets and dollies, and—blessed boon—forget.

But Clayton Reeve never forgot, not for one moment; and though the six months had in a measure softened his grief, his sense of loss and loneliness increased each day, until at last he could no longer endure the sight of the home which they together had planned and beautified.

Unfortunately, neither he nor his wife had near relatives. She had been an only child whose parents had died shortly after her marriage, and such distant relatives as remained to him were far away in England, his native land....