“They seem pleased.”
“Blue Bonnet’s out in the garden,” Uncle Joe suggested.
Blue Bonnet was gathering nasturtiums when her uncle called to her from the gate at the upper end of the garden. He had two letters in his hand, and, as she reached him, he held them out. “They came to-night,” he explained. “They are in answer to one I wrote a short time ago.”
Blue Bonnet took them wonderingly, and, sitting on the ground, the great bunch of gay-colored nasturtiums beside her, she opened one of them. As it happened, it was the one from her Aunt Lucinda—a short letter, perfectly kind and sincere, but very formal. On the whole, a rather depressing letter, in spite of the answer it brought to her great desire.
Blue Bonnet refolded it rather soberly. “I wish,” she said, studying the firm, upright handwriting, “that I hadn’t read this one first. Grandmother’s must be different.”
It certainly was. A letter overflowing with the joy the writer felt over the prospect of Blue Bonnet’s coming. Through its magic the girl was carried far away from the little garden, from all the old familiar scenes. Dimly remembered stories her mother used to tell her of the big white house standing amidst its tall trees came back to her, and the vague hopes and dreams that had been filling her thoughts for weeks past began to take definite form.
And she was going there—back to her mother’s old home. She was to have the very room that had been her mother’s,—Grandmother had said so. It seemed too good to be true. She was glad, now, she had kept this letter to the last. And she would be going soon;—that thought, with its accompanying one of hurry and preparation, brought her back to the present.
Picking up the letters, she ran up to the house. On the back steps she found Uncle Joe.
“Seems like you was in a hurry,” he said.
Blue Bonnet laughed, looking at him with shining eyes. “I’m going East!”