The mention of letters had brought to Betsey such a sudden recollection that she interrupted.
“There were some letters that night; your cousin brought them, and they were never opened. Perhaps one of them is what your father hoped for. I think they are still lying on the table in his shop.”
She sped away to fetch them with great eagerness and came back with the handful of correspondence, much of it evidently mere advertisements, but with one slim envelope that had possibilities. There was no chance that the stricken man upstairs could read it, so that Miss Miranda, without hesitation, tore the envelope open. Betsey and David watched her face intently as she read.
“It is what he wished for,” she told them when she had finished. “Mr. Garven, the man to whom he wrote, seems to be much interested and even excited about the new machine, for he says that the gas turbine principle is one over which many people have been working, but no one with any success. He says that he will come to see it at any time that my father appoints.” She refolded the letter slowly. “It is rather bitter,” she added, with a trifle of a catch in the voice that had been so brave and steady until now, “rather bitter that this should have come by Donald’s hand and just too late!”
“But it is not too late,” Betsey protested with vehemence. “David can show this man the machine, he has helped your father and knows just how it should run. And I am sure that the news that the invention has been tested and proved a success would help to make Mr. Reynolds well again. Oh, do try it—do try it.”
She was bouncing up and down on the doorstep in her enthusiasm over the plan. To her great delight David supported the idea heartily.
“There is no reason why any one who knows about such things should not see in a moment that the machine is a success,” he declared. “And it would surely do all of us good to find that your cousin was wrong.”
“It might be so,” Miss Miranda agreed slowly. Elizabeth and David could actually hear the rising hope in her voice. “We can at least try. Oh, if it could only mean that things could right themselves at last!”
A telegram was dispatched by David that very night and an anxious period of waiting was spent thereafter at the white cottage.
“He is to come on Monday afternoon, that’s the day before our examinations begin,” Betsey told David when the final message from Mr. Garven had been received. She was so openly excited and impatient that it seemed impossible to endure quietly the slow passing of four days.