She had spent a long afternoon with Mrs. Jones, at a farm about half a mile from the depot, who had a sick baby and a swarm of toddlers of various ages—six of them altogether, and the eldest not ten years old.
Nell had taken them all, saving the ailing baby, to the field where Mr. Jones was ploughing up potatoes; and the whole tribe had been picking up the potatoes, even small hands accomplishing a fair amount of work when there was some one present who could turn it into play.
But the stooping, and the effort to keep the little ones amused, had brought on the buzzing in Nell’s head in quite an aggravated form, and she was feeling very miserable indeed as she trailed along the dusty road, carrying a heavy basket of late plums in her left hand, which Mrs. Jones had sent as a present to Mrs. Nichols.
It was growing dusk by the time Nell reached Bratley, for which she felt thankful, as her face was drawn into puckers of weariness and discomfort.
Entering by the back door, she put the plums on the kitchen table, meaning to slip off to her own room to get a little rested before any one noticed her entrance; but in this she was disappointed.
“Is that you, Nell dear?” asked Mrs. Nichols from the sitting-room; and there was an indefinable something in her tone which made the listener thrill and quiver with expectation, while half her weariness dropped from her as if by magic.
“Yes; I have come. Do you want me?” she asked, presenting herself at the door of the inner room where Mrs. Nichols sat knitting by a fire of sticks, although the evening was unusually warm for late September.
“There is a letter for you from Camp’s Gulch, sent by special messenger; it came an hour ago. I would have sent for you, only I was expecting you home every minute,” replied Mrs. Nichols.
“As important as that, is it?” said Nell, coming forward into the firelight. “What is it about? A round-robin from the Peters family, asking me to come and take up my abode in the old freight-wagon, I expect. But I’m not going. I mean to send in my resignation to-morrow, for I’ve swarms of bees let loose in my ear again, and it is just horrible.”
“Poor child! But I expect you have done too much to-day, and that is why your head is bad. No, the letter is not from the Peters lot; it is from the Syndicate. There it is on the table. I was told to take care of it, so I’ve just sat and stared at the thing ever since it came.”