"The song says, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,'" quoted Rob mischievously.
"Maybe it does if you're old friends, and have lots to remembah togethah, but it seems to me that absence builds up a sawt of wall between people sometimes, especially if you've known each othah only a little while, and at a time when you're both growing up and changing all the time. Do you know," she added musingly, dropping the letter into her lap and leaning forward to gaze into the fire, "I believe if Phil and I had been togethah daily I'd have grown awfully fond of him. When we were out on the desert in Arizona, I was only fou'teen that spring, he was my ideal of all that was lovely and romantic, and I believe if it hadn't been for those talks Papa Jack and I used to have about Hildegarde and her weaving, I'd have done like foolish Hertha, cut my web for him then and there. I did imagine for awhile that he was a prince, and the one written for me in the sta'hs."
"And now?" asked Rob, in a low tone, as if afraid of interrupting the confession she was making more to the fire and herself than to him.
"Now," she answered, "when he came back to be best man at Eugenia's wedding I still liked him awfully well, but I could see that my ideals had changed and that they didn't fit him any moah 'as the falcon's feathahs fit the falcon.' Still I don't know, maybe if we had been thrown togethah a great deal from the time I first met him, it might have been different, but as I say, absence made a sawt of wall between us and we seem to be growing farthah and farthah apart."
"And now you're sure he's not the one the stars have destined for you?"
"Perfectly suah," she answered with a laugh, then leaning back in the chimney corner again, opened the third letter. The envelope slipped to the floor as she read, and stooping over to return it, he saw quite unintentionally that it bore a South American stamp. She was reading so intently that she did not notice when he laid it in her lap, but as soon as she finished she tossed it into the fire without a word. Her face flushed and her eyes had an angry light in them. As she caught his grave look, she shrugged her shoulders with a careless little laugh, to hide the awkward pause, and then said lightly:
"I think Mammy Eastah's fortune will come true. There won't be any prince in my tea-cup."
"Why?"