There in Longmeadow, Jacqueline, helpless and little, hadn’t known how to trace Caroline and the Gildersleeves. But the postmaster had their new address all the time! If Jacqueline had thought to ask him, no doubt he would have told it to her, but he would have told every one that she had asked him, for he was the greatest old gossip in all the village. No, she wouldn’t have dared to ask him, because he was such a gossip, even if she had known that he had the address.
The William Gildersleeves, The Sheiling, Monk’s Bay, Mass. That was the address, written in a crabbed hand on a page in the postmaster’s notebook, and to The Sheiling, Cousin Marcia’s cottage at Monk’s Bay, came every now and then the letters that he forwarded.
One day there was a letter for Jacqueline Gildersleeve.
Cousin Penelope handed it to Caroline, when she came up from the beach to tea. Caroline was bare-legged, in her sandals, with her brown pongee knickerbockers, beneath her pongee smock, a little dampened at the edges where she had been wading, not wisely but too well. Under her broad-brimmed straw hat with its tawny orange ribbons that matched the orange stitching of her smock her face was glowing and her eyes were wells of tranquil joy.
“Here’s a letter from your aunt,” said Cousin Penelope, in a vexed tone. “I really believe it’s the first letter she has written you in all these weeks.”
Aunt Eunice, in her basket chair by the open casement, shook her head never so slightly.
“They’ve sent her a great many post-cards, Penelope,” she said, like one who makes an effort to be just. “When you’re traveling all the time from place to place, it isn’t always easy to write regular letters, and besides you must remember that mail often goes astray.”
“I—I didn’t ask for letters,” Caroline broke out, in a trembling voice. “Oh, dear! You read it for me, Aunt Eunice, please!”
She had worn Jacqueline’s clothes, and borne Jacqueline’s name, and taken Jacqueline’s place, but there was something in her that she couldn’t overcome—something that Mother and Father both had trained—that cried out at the mere thought of opening a sealed letter addressed to some one else.
But Aunt Eunice had apparently the same feeling.