Stumbling sleepily down the stairs just be fore midnight to answer the doorbell that no one else seemed awake to answer, Solvei Kjelland received the insignificant looking envelope into her own hands. Small as it was, heavily overshadowed by special delivery postage, and almost quaveringly directed in a pale, fine writing it might well have suggested to anybody a suppliant for mercy, or at least for pity.
With a first faint twinge of remorse Solvei tore it open to discover no contents whatever—except a railroad ticket to the little mainland town in South Carolina where Mrs. Tome Gallien had established her official address.
Scowlingly for a moment and in dumb perplexity the girl stood shifting from one slippered 118foot to another in a really desperate effort to decipher each word, phrase, comma, asterisk, in the momentous little document be fore her. Then quite suddenly a smile that was by no means mirthful flashed brilliantly across her blue eyes and her gleaming teeth.
"Stinged!" said Solvei Kjelland, and gathering her big gray blanket wrapper a little bit closer around her fled back precipitously to her bed.
With the first faint ray of morning light perhaps she might have waked to an instant's reassuring conviction that the whole ticket episode was a dream if only her subconscious deductions from that episode had not waked first on her lips like a wry taste. "The one things in the world that I did not want—at just this time? That lady is a witchess!" was the phrase that waked on her lips.
It was not until early the following week, however, that she called up the Young Doctor to tell him the news.
"How do you do?" she telephoned. "This is Solvei Kjelland. And I am to say good-by."
"Good-by? Why, what do you mean?" 119questioned the Young Doctor's frankly surprised voice.
"It is that I am going away," said Solvei, "on a little—what it is you would call a trip."
"Oh," said the Young Doctor. "Where?"