My dear Teddy,—If you haven't entirely forsaken us, can't you come over and spend the afternoon and dine here? We both of us miss your calls, Will especially, since he hasn't been so well; and we can't think why you have turned the cold shoulder to us. I wanted to send for you, yesterday; but Will wouldn't let me, for fear you had something else to do. To-day, I haven't told him, so he won't be disappointed.
Come if you can, dear, and stay to dinner with us. Will is so blue that he needs you to brighten him up, now he is on his back again.
Sincerely,
Jessie Farrington.
This was the note which Patrick had brought over, that morning, and which Theodora now sat twisting in her fingers, while she anxiously wondered what it all meant. She had not heard that Billy was worse, and it was a week since she had seen him, for she still lacked courage to show him her shorn head. She dreaded his teasing; most of all she dreaded the questions he must inevitably ask. Her own family was bad enough; she felt that she could not face him, if once he knew the secret of her missing locks.
Never was a hasty, hot-tempered act more thoroughly punished than this. There had been little need for the doctor or his wife to add a word. Theodora's sorrow and shame were intense; intense, too, was her power of self-abasement. For a week, she spent most of the time in her own room, as if she feared to meet the eyes of her family; and, in this self-imposed isolation, it chanced that she had heard no mention of the Farringtons.
It had taken repeated calls to bring Theodora down to breakfast, the morning after her outbreak. In all her after-life, she never forgot the exclamations of horror and surprise which greeted her when she appeared, half-defiant, half-sulky, and altogether shamefaced. For a few moments, there was a babel of comment; then Mrs. McAlister rose and took her hand.
"Theodora, dear," she said gently; "come into my room, and tell me all about it."
The door closed behind them, and for two hours they were alone together. What passed between them, no one else ever knew. When the long talk was ended, and Theodora, clinging to her new mother just as she had been wont to cling to her own mother, years ago, had sobbed till she could sob no more, Mrs. McAlister left her and went to her husband.
"She's punished enough, Jack," she said to him. "There wasn't much need for me to say anything; but I think perhaps this has given me my opportunity. I've come closer to the child than I ever dared to hope, and, with Heaven's help, I mean to stay there."
Her husband bent over her.