"Why did Papa Jack write that?" she repeated.
"Because he saw your last letter to Joyce, and was so pleased with the improvement you have made," answered Mrs. Sherman. "He has given you a good text for your writing-desk."
"I'll paste it in the top," said Lloyd. "Then I can't lose it." "'There is no surer way,'" she repeated to herself as she carried the box back to her room, "'to bridge the space between ... with the cheer and sympathy and good-will.'"
There flashed across her mind the thought of some one who needed cheer and sympathy far more than Joyce did, and who would welcome a friendly letter from her with its foreign stamp, as eagerly as if it were some real treasure. Jessie Nolan was the girl she thought of, an invalid with a crippled spine, to whom the dull days in her wheeled chair by the window seemed endless, and who had so little to brighten her monotonous life.
"I'll write her a note this minute," thought Lloyd, with a warm glow in her heart. "I'll describe some of the sights we have seen, and send her that fo' leafed clovah that I found at the château yestahday, undah a window of the great hall where Anne of Brittany was married ovah fo' hundred yeahs ago. I don't suppose Jessie gets a lettah once a yeah."
When that note was written, Lloyd thought of Mom Beck and the pride that would shine in the face of her old black nurse if she should receive a letter from Europe, and how proudly it would be carried around and displayed to all the coloured people in the Valley. So with the kindly impulse of her father's text still upon her, she dashed off a note to her, telling her of some of her visits to the palaces of bygone kings and queens.
Eugenia came in as she finished, but before she closed her desk she jotted two names on a slip of paper. Mrs. Waters's was one. She was a little old Englishwoman, who did fine laundry work in the Valley, and who was always talking about the 'awthorne' edges in her old English home.
"I'll write to her from London," Lloyd thought. "If we should get a sight of any of the royal family, how tickled she would be to hear it."
The other name was Janet McDonald. She was a sad, sweet-faced young teacher whom Miss Allison always called her "Scotch lassie Jane." "I don't suppose she'd care to get a letter from a little girl like me," thought Lloyd, "but I know she'd love to have a piece of heather from the hills near her home. I'll send her a piece when we get up in Scotland."
The letter that Eugenia sent to Joyce was only a short outline of her plans. She knew that the other girls had sent long accounts of their trip through Touraine, so hers was much shorter than usual.