"I've had two letters—the first one came three weeks ago from her brother. I didn't want to spoil your good time, telling sad things, so I kept it to myself—Laura Ann, that woman mothered me!"
Laura Ann stood still. "Do you mean Mrs. Camp? Is she—dead?" But the other did not seem to hear. She ran on in a low, troubled voice.
"She bathed my ankle, and said 'My dear,' and waited on me, when she'd never set eyes on me in her life before. How did she know but that I was an—an impostor? And she let us have her dear little house to live in—"
"Yes, yes—oh, yes, she let me live in it!" Laura Ann interposed. "You ought to have told us she was dead."
"She isn't dead. She's fallen downstairs and broken her hip. The doctor says it's so bad she won't ever walk again without crutches, her brother wrote. He said he wanted her to stay and live with him, but she wouldn't listen to it. She wanted to come home as soon as she possibly could. So she's coming—he's coming with her, to 'start' her."
T.O. fingered a letter in her hand in a nervous, undecided way, as if she were half inclined to read it to the other girl. It was not Emmeline Camp's brother's letter. It had come ten days ago, and she herself knew it by heart. How many, many times she had read it! She had cried over the wistful cry in it, and over Amelia's death—for the letter said that Amelia was dead.
"My dear," it said, "I've lost Amelia—you'd think she would have stood by her mother in her trouble, wouldn't you? But she hasn't been near me since. It seems queer—perhaps after people break their hips they can't 'feel' anything else but their hips! Perhaps it breaks their imaginations. Anyway, Amelia's dead, my dear. Sometimes I think mebbe I'd ought to be, too—a lone little woman like me, without a chick or a child. Old women with children can afford to tumble downstairs, but not my kind of old women. John is real good. He wants me to stay here, but I can't—I can't, I can't, my dear! I've got to be where I can limp out to the old pump and the gate and the orchard, on my crutches—I've got to see the old hills I was born in, and Old '61 marching past the house, and the old neighbors—I've got to die at home, my dear. So John can't keep me. I wish I was going to find you there. I keep thinking how beautiful it would be. You'd be out to the gate waiting, the way people's daughters wait for them. And mebbe you'd have the kettle all hot and we'd have a cup of tea together just as if I was the mother and you was—Amelia! All the way home I should be thinking about your being there. It's queer, isn't it, you went limping in that gate first, and now it's me? A good many things are queer, and some are kind of desolate. I've decided, my dear, that daughters have to be the kind that are born, to stay by a body in trouble. They have to be made of flesh and blood, my dear—and Amelia wasn't!
"I've written this a little to a time, laying on my back. Mebbe you won't ever read it. Mebbe I won't ever see you again, but you will remember, my dear, that I've loved you ever since I took off your stocking and saw your poor, sprained ankle. If the Lord would perform a miracle for me, I'd ask for it to be the bringing of Amelia to life and finding her you."
T.O. did not show the letter to Laura Ann. She put it in her pocket again, and they walked home slowly, talking of Mrs. Camp's sad accident. At the supper table it was voted that they all write a joint letter of sympathy to her, and express, at the same time, their united and separate thanks for her kindness to them in lending them her home.
Loraine wrote the letter, Laura Ann copied it, they all signed it. Into cold pen-and-ink words they tried to diffuse warmth and gratitude and sympathy, but the result was not very satisfying, as such results rarely are. Still, it was all they could do. Billy and Laura Ann went off to mail it.