“Hundreds,” said Jeannie. “I am sane again. I was looking at things awry, and I have been put right.”
“Who put you right?” asked Aunt Em.
“Why, Mr. Collingwood!” said Jeannie. “He was here this afternoon.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Miss Fortescue.
Jeannie looked at her with frank surprise.
“That never occurred to me,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, you couldn’t have known. He came just after lunch, and we talked together for about half an hour.”
Again a ribbon of instantaneous flame was dangled from the sky, and the thunder replied with a short, unechoed clap. Miss Fortescue’s chair was a little behind Jeannie’s, and as the girl leaned eagerly forward at the lightning she saw the bright, wholesome colour flood her face and arms. And when she turned to her, the transcendent brilliance in her face was a thing to wonder at.
“Yes, even that,” said Jeannie, employing the figure of speech known as hiatus. “Oh, Aunt Em! And to think that you never knew all I have known so well this afternoon.”
There was something infinitely simple and noble in the girl’s gesture of happiness, and Miss Fortescue’s eyes were suddenly dim.
“Jeannie, you mean it?” she cried.