Sitting motionless on the piano stool, she waited in dread while Mrs. Triplett hurried to the door before the boy could ring, signed for the message and silently bore it upstairs. The very fact that she went up with it herself, instead of calling to Barby that a message had come, gave Georgina the impression that it contained bad news.
“A _cablegram_ for me?” she heard Barby ask. Then there was a moment’s silence in which she knew the message was being opened and read. Then there was a murmur as if she were reading it aloud to Tippy and then--an excited whirlwind of a Barby flying down the stairs, her eyes like happy stars, her arms outstretched to gather Georgina into them, and her voice half laugh, half sob, singing:
“Oh, he’s coming home to me
Baby mine!”
Never before had Georgina seen her so radiant, so excited, so overflowingly happy that she gave vent to her feelings as a little schoolgirl might have done. Seizing Georgina in her arms she waltzed her around the room until she was dizzy. Coming to a pause at the piano stool she seated herself and played, “The Year of Jubilee Has Come,” in deep, crashing chords and trickly little runs and trills, till the old tune was transformed into a paen of jubilation.
Then she took the message from her belt, where she had tucked it and re-read it to assure herself of its reality.
“Starting home immediately. Stay three months, dragon captured.”
“That must mean that his quest has been fairly successful,” she said. “If he’s found the cause of the disease it’ll be only a matter of time till he finds how to kill it.”
Then she looked up, puzzled.
“How strange for him to call it the _dragon_. How could he know we’d understand, and that we’ve been calling it that?”
Georgina’s time had come for confession.