"He won't really care," she thought, but his own words came back to her plaintively: "There is so little to interest one here,—if you don't mind humouring an invalid's whims."
She couldn't forget the hopeless melancholy of his face, and what Mr. Ellestad had said to her about him: "He's just where Shapur was when the caravan went on without him." And she remembered that in the story Shapur had cursed the day he was born, and laid his head in the dust.
"I'll go," she exclaimed. "Jack can follow as soon as he is ready, and I'll hand the package to him as he passes. I'll be back as soon as I can, Lloyd, and then we'll start right over to Mr. Shaw's. You explain to Jack, please, mamma, and give him the money to pay the postage."
Stopping only long enough to write the address on the wrapper, she hurried down the road, bareheaded, toward the ranch. Lloyd sat down on the front door-step to wait for her return. Opening a book, in which she had become interested, she was soon so deep in the story that she scarcely noticed when Jack rode away, a quarter of an hour later, glancing up for just an instant as she waved her hand mechanically in answer to his call.
The kitchen clock struck half-past two, then three. With the last stroke came a vague consciousness that it was growing late, and that Joyce was long in coming, but the absorbing interest of the story made her immediately forgetful again of her surroundings.
It was nearly four when Mrs. Ware, coming out beside her on the step, stood shading her eyes with her hand to peer down the road.
"I can't imagine what keeps Joyce so long," she said, anxiously. "It will soon be too late for you to go to the Shaws."
But even as she spoke, Joyce came in sight, running as Lloyd had never seen her run before. She had left the dusty road, and was bobbing along on the edge of the desert, where the hard, dry sand, baked into a crust, made travelling easier.
"Oh, you'll never, never guess what kept me!" she called, as she hurried up to the door, eager and breathless. Seizing her mother around the waist, she gave her a great squeeze.
"Oh, I'm so happy! So happy and excited that I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels. I feel like a cyclone caught in a jubilee, or a jubilee caught in a cyclone, I don't know which. There never was such glorious good fortune in the world for anybody!"