“There is a lovely father staying at the Gray Inn. He is Peggy Burrell’s. He is a naval officer, too. It makes me feel like an orfan when I see him going down the street holding her hand. He asked me to tell him all about where you are and what you are doing, because you cured him once on a hospital ship, and I was ashamed to tell him that I didn’t know because Barby has not had a letter from you for over four months. Please don’t let on to her that I wrote this. She doesn’t know that I was under the bed when Cousin Mehitable was talking about you, and saying that everybody thinks it is queer you never come home. If you can do only one of the things I asked, please do the first one. Yours truly, Georgina Huntingdon.”
Having blotted the letter, Georgina read it over carefully, finding two words that did not look quite right, although she did not know what was the matter with them. So she called softly out of the window again to Belle:
“How do you spell diseases?”
Belle told her but added the question, “Why do you ask a word like that? Whose diseases can you be writing about?”
Georgina drew in her head without answering. She could not seek help in that quarter again, especially for such a word as “orfan.” After studying over it a moment she remembered there was a poem in “Songs for the Little Ones at Home,” called “The Orphan Nosegay Girl.”
A trip downstairs for the tattered volume gave her the word she wanted, and soon the misspelled one was scratched out and rewritten. There were now three unsightly blots on the letter and she hovered over them a moment, her pride demanding that she should make a clean, fair copy. But it seemed such an endless task to rewrite it from beginning to end, that she finally decided to send it as it stood.
Addressed, stamped and sealed, it was ready at last and she dropped it into the mail-box. Then she had a moment of panic. It was actually started on its way to Hong-Kong and nothing in her power could stop it or bring it back. She wondered if she hadn’t done exactly the wrong thing, and made a bad matter worse.
Chapter XXVI
Peggy Joins the Rainbow-Makers
Only one more thing happened before Barby’s return that is worth recording. Georgina went to spend the way at the Gray Inn. Captain Burrell, himself, came to ask her. Peggy had to be put back into her brace again he said. He was afraid it had been taken off too soon. She was very uncomfortable and unhappy on account of it. They would be leaving in the morning, much earlier than they had intended, because it was necessary for her physician to see her at once, and quite probable that she would have to go back to the sanitarium for a while. She didn’t want to leave Provincetown, because she did not want to go away from Georgina.