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Updated: May 26, 2025
Wandless at the other; and old Mary, abashed and bewildered, looked on with dilated eyes and crossed herself at intervals. John Ware drew a service book from his pocket, and his fingers trembled as he began. For none in the room, not even for Sylvia, had this hour deeper meaning than for the gray soldier.
Wandless, the new baby at the house of the Latin professor, the ill-luck of the Madison Eleven, and like matters that were, and that continue to be, of concern in Buckeye Lane. Rumors of the sale of the cottage had reached Mary, but Sylvia took pains to reassure her. "Oh, you don't go with the house, Mary! Mrs. Owen has a plan for you. You haven't any cause for worry.
Your Virgil sank deep into my consciousness, and I am glad of this chance to render unto Madison the things that are Madison's." His chaffing way reminded her of Dr. Wandless, who often struck a similar note in their encounters. Sylvia was quite at ease now. Her caller's smile encouraged friendliness. He had dropped his fedora hat on a chair, but clung to his bamboo stick.
Ware did not fit into any of her preconceived ideas of the clerical office. Dr. Wandless, the retired president of Madison College, was a minister, and any one would have known it, for the fact was proclaimed by his dress and manner; he might, in the most casual meeting on the campus, have raised his hands in benediction without doing anything at all extraordinary.
Wandless, the president emeritus, addressed her always as "My Lady of the Constellations," and told her solemnly that from much peering through the telescope she had coaxed the stars into her own eyes.
Ware belonged to a strikingly different order, and Sylvia did not understand him. He had been a soldier; and Sylvia could not imagine Dr. Wandless in a cavalry charge. Ware flung the match-stick away and settled himself comfortably into his chair. The others were talking amongst themselves of old times, and Sylvia experienced a sense of ease and security in the minister's company.
As she neared home Sylvia met her friend Dr. Wandless, the former president, who always had his joke with her. "Hail, Lady of the Constellations! You have been looting the library, I see. Hast thou named the stars without a gun?" "That isn't right," protested Sylvia. "You're purposely misquoting. You've only spoiled Emerson's line about the birds."
So, after an early breakfast the next morning, they were off for the station in one of those disreputable, shaky village hacks that Dr. Wandless always called "dark Icarian birds," with their two bags piled on the seat before them. On the few railway journeys Sylvia remembered, she had been carried on half-fare tickets, an ignominy which she recalled with shame.
Her old friend Dr. Wandless sent occasionally, in his kindly humorous fashion, the news of Buckeye Lane and the college; and Mrs. Owen wrote a hurried line now and then, usually to quote one of John Ware's sayings. The minister asked about Sylvia, it seemed.
She had not expected this, nor had Dan; but Dr. Wandless had already stepped forward to give her in marriage, and as she repeated her name after the minister, she felt the warm, reassuring pressure of Dan's hand. And so they went forth together from the little cottage by the campus where they had first met; nor may it have been wholly a fancy of Dr.
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