She shuddered as the roll bounced from her knees but in another moment her sick eyes flamed with new life, for half-revealed by the folding of the sheets was an unmistakable picture of the boy she still loved.
Her trembling fingers gouged at the wrapper. Why was his picture on the front page? Was he in trouble? Hurt? Or—married?
Sally, crouching on the floor of her room, spread the crackling sheets of The Capital City Press, her eyes devouring the two-column picture of David Nash. Two lines of type above the photograph leaped out at her:
“Honor graduate of A. & M. inherits grandfather’s farm.”
He hadn’t been injured or killed in an accident, he wasn’t married! In a frenzy of relief and gratitude to the God she had just been accusing of deserting her, Sally Barr, who had been Sally Ford, bent her head until her lips rested on the lips of the photograph. And it was rather a pity that Arthur Van Horne, “connoisseur of kissing,” was not there to see the passionate fervor of the kisses which the girl whom he had dismissed contemptuously was raining upon an unresponsive newspaper picture.
When at last she was calmer she read the short item through. It was the last paragraph that brought her to her feet, her slight body electric with sudden determination:
“Young Nash is living alone in the fine old farmhouse, and apparently is as capable in the kitchen as on the seat of a cultivator. He says his whole heart is in scientific farming, and that his only sweetheart is ‘Sally,’ a blue-ribbon heifer which he is grooming to break the world’s butter-fat production record.”
“David! Darling David!” she was laughing and crying at the same time. “He hasn’t changed! He hasn’t forgotten that we’re half-married!”
Jerking open a drawer of her dressing table she caught sight of her face in the mirror, and her eyes widened with delighted surprise. Gone was the pinched, white, shame-stricken face, and in its place was beauty such as she had never dreamed she possessed. She turned away from the mirror, tremulous and abashed, for what she had to do would not be easy. Her eyes tried to avoid the exquisite photograph of her mother that stood in its blue leather frame on the dressing table, but at last she snatched it up and carried it against her breast as she ran to her desk.
She felt that she was talking to Enid as she wrote, pleading for understanding and forgiveness from those dreaming, misty, cornflower-blue eyes: