"Yes. They have heard. The Prairie Bird ran ashore on some rocks that stove a hole in her, and then was blown out to sea again. Only a few were saved, two or three of the sailors. But that isn't the worst news to face. It is going all over now. Poor Ruth! If she might never know! For—how can I tell it? My own brother, too!"
I stepped out. I suppose I must have looked like a ghost. Norman stretched out his arms, but I tottered to father.
"I know," I said, trying to steady my voice that seemed blown about by the stress of emotion. "Dan told me that day. They loved each other and went away together."
"And were found dead, locked in each other's arms."
I fell over into father's chair. That was the last I knew for a long while.
CHAPTER XIX
HOW NORMAN CAME HOME
Those years abroad had been very precious years to me in spite of the great disappointment of not returning home at the promised time. I found Mr. Le Moyne a charming gentleman, and was not made in any degree a servant, but treated like a relative. I knew afterward that he took a great fancy to me from what Mr. Harris said, and, as he told me, "he liked my face." I kept accounts for him, wrote letters, read aloud, studied and wrote to the Little Girl and my mother as often as I could. She was such an innocent little girl, and so sweet, so altogether different from the girls I had come in contact with.
When we went to Washington, where Mr. Le Moyne was entrusted with a very delicate mission that was not to be put into writing, he decided to go abroad at once, as his eyes were causing him great uneasiness. We would not need to remain more than a year, he thought. But months passed, he was improving so much that the oculist thought he ought not break with the treatment. It was one thing and another. He came to depend so wholly upon me. And I never had the courage to tell him I had left a little girl in Chicago that I desired sometime to make my wife.
I used to say things in letters that I hoped she would take up, that might pique her curiosity, but they did not rouse her. If I wrote to her, and she had no especial love for me, that would end it. And how hard it would be to have a long engagement. I was a little afraid of my brother Ben, who had somehow stepped into my place, yet it seemed mean to grudge him any happiness if he could win her. Then Mr. Le Moyne's health began to break and his eyesight fail, with some new complication. He asked me never to leave him while he lived. I could not deny him. So I trusted my Little Girl to God. If she was for me it would all come right in time. I was having a rich, full life and developing in many directions. I did have a great deal of the finest enjoyment.
But when I heard that Dan had married my darling Ruth I was as one struck dumb with amazement. He was a big, strong, burly fellow, full of life and jollity, and not over-refined. But then I reflected Chicago was not Paris, or London, or Rome, or Florence. It was a hard blow to me. I had no duty left but to devote myself to my benefactor. No father and son could have lived in finer accord, or had tastes more in unison. I was glad that I could comfort him in his misfortune.