“So Jack Falcon, dear filial soul, is bald and whiskered,” Rosamond murmured. “I might have known it.”
Mrs. Lee, examining the manuscripts, in a search for some special article or paragraph, did not hear her.
“Some of the boys were interested, and some I thought were a trifle indifferent; but Jack wrote that he would come home to help arrange and edit the scattered notes into coherent form. He said he was willing to give a year to the task, if need be. And—think of it—he was ever so far away in southern Europe at the time! Somewhere in those excitable Balkans.”
“The poor old thing was probably scared to death in the Balkans and grasped at the opportunity to get to a quiet spot,” went through Rosamond’s mind, but she said, aloud: “He has a good, loyal heart, evidently, and deserves that I bake him a cake.”
“Indeed he does. Though he was a dreadful cake-thief as a boy. I had to wrap my cakes in a towel and hide them in my bonnet box. He would go barefoot on long tramps through the valley and then come into the house, after we had retired, and eat up everything. The dear boy!”
“He wouldn’t have done it a second time with my cakes! The idea of crawling in through windows at midnight hunting for food! I’d ‘dear boy’ him!”
Mrs. Lee laughed.
“Oh, dear, how I am rambling on! It is the excitement, and not knowing what to tell you first. But I fear that authentic news of Jack Falcon could never be grouped in orderly fashion, for he himself was a very disorderly, lawless person. But so lovable!”
In chattering breathlessly, as she was, her slender fingers had been searching rather inefficiently among the leaflets; but now it appeared that she had found what she wanted.
“Here’s his letter, pinned to this little prose poem about Roseborough.”