Georgina pondered over the explanation a while, then presently said with a sigh, “Goodness me, how easy it is to look at things the wrong way.”
Soon after her voice blended with Barby’s in a return to the long neglected bedtime rite:
“Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.”
Afterward, her troubles all smoothed and explained away, she lay in the dark, comforted and at peace with the world. Once a little black doubt thrust its head up like a snake, to remind her of Melindy’s utterance, “When a man _wants_ to write, he’s gwine to write, busy or no busy.” But even that found an explanation in her thoughts.
Of course, Melindy meant just ordinary men, Not those who had great deeds to do in the world like her father. Probably Saint George himself hadn’t written to his family often, if he had a family. He couldn’t be expected to. He had “other fish to fry,” and it was perfectly right and proper for him to put his mind on the frying of them to the neglect of everything else.
The four months’ long silence was unexplained save for this comforting thought, but Georgina worried about it no longer. Up from below came the sound of keys touched softly as Barby sang an old lullaby. She sang it in a glad, trustful sort of way,
“He is far across the sea,
But he’s coming home to me,
Baby mine!”
Lying there in the dark, Georgina composed another letter to send after her first one, and next morning this is what she wrote, sitting up in the willow tree with a magazine on her knees for a writing table:
“Dearest Father: I am sorry that I wrote that last letter, because everything is different from what I thought it was. I did not know until Barby came home and told me, that you are just as brave as St. George was, clad in bright armor, when he went to rescue the people from the dragon. I hope you get the monster that comes up out of the sea every year after the poor sailors. Barby says we are giving you to our country in this way, as much as if there was war, so now I’m prouder of having a St.-George-and-the-dragon-kind of a father than one like Peggy Burrell’s, even if she does know him well enough to call him ‘Dad-o’-my-heart.’ Even if people don’t understand, and say things about your never coming home to see us, we are going to ‘still bear up and steer right onward,’ because that’s our line to live by. And we hope as hard as we can every day, that you’ll get the mike-robe you are in kwest of. Your loving little daughter, Georgina Huntingdon.”