CHAPTER XXIV.
KINDNESS REWARDED
Merry, Geraldine and Doris went alone the next day to the home of Myra Comely. Danny O’Neil drove them there, then waited in the cutter until they came out.
Myra opened the door slightly, saying that perhaps they would better not come in, but Geraldine declared that she never caught anything, and as Merry and Doris had no fears, they entered the neat little living-room and sat down, while Doris gave the message from her mother.
Tears sprang to the girl’s eyes. “How very kind of your mother to offer to send us her own private nurse,” she said with sincere appreciation. “Dr. Carson was with us all night, and he says that the crisis is now over and that Mother will not have pneumonia, but that she is worn out and will need absolute rest for a long time. The doctor said that she ought to go where the winters are milder.” Myra was wiping her eyes, trying, as the girls could see, to keep from breaking down. Doris went to her and put an arm across her shoulders. With tender sympathy she said: “Myra, you’re just worn out with these three days and nights of watching and anxiety. I wish you would let me telephone Mother to send our dear old nurse; then I would like to take you home with me for a rest.” But the girl was shaking her head. “O, no, no! I couldn’t leave Mother. She still has spells of wandering in her mind. She thinks she is a girl again on her father’s ranch in Arizona——”
She got no farther, for three girls exclaimed in excited chorus: “Was your mother Myra Cornwall? Has she a brother Caleb in Arizona?”
The girl dropped her handkerchief and stared in unbelieving amazement. “How in the world did you know my mother’s maiden name?” she gasped. “Mother has told no one. Not that she was ashamed of it, but—but—you see, she married against her parents’ wishes and she knew they would never want to see or hear from her again. Her brother Caleb disliked my—my father, more even than her parents did, and so she never wrote, not even after my father died and we were so poor.” Then with mouth trembling and eyes tear-brimmed, the girl asked: “Won’t you tell me what you know about it?”
And so Doris told about the clipping they had found in the Dorchester paper, and how they had called on all the Myras they could find. “But your mother was born in New York state,” Merry recalled. “That is why we decided that she could not be the one.”
Myra nodded. “Yes, that is where Mother was born, but her parents went West when she was five, and she lived on a ranch in that beautiful desert country until she was sent East to school.”
Suddenly she sprang up, a glad light in her face. “Mother is awake! I hear her calling me. I must go and tell her the wonderful news.” Then impulsively she held out a hand to Doris as she said: “How can we thank you. Now, as soon as Mother is well, I can take her to the home she has so yearned to see, knowing that her brother Caleb wants her, really wants her.”
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