Late in the afternoon her messenger returned, bringing a note from Dr. Shaw and a letter from the post office.
Roma opened the note before glancing at the letter.
It was but a line from the rector, saying that he had a marriage ceremony to perform in the parish church at ten o’clock, but would start for Goblin Hall immediately after its conclusion.
The letter was from Mr. Merritt, and also very short; merely saying that he wrote in great haste to catch the first mail, to warn her in time that Hanson had turned up that morning, and might get her address and give her trouble. “But if he should, my dear, just turn him over to the law and telegraph for me,” added the old lawyer.
“This must have come in the mail on the same train that brought him, and reached Goeberlin about eleven. Truly, he lost no time between the train and my door,” Roma said to herself.
It then occurred to her to send Puck back to Goeberlin with a telegram to Mr. Merritt, summoning him to her aid. But upon reflection she decided to wait until after she should have talked with Dr. Shaw. Early in the evening she sent the little black child home to its mother, and sent Owlet off to bed, and soon after laid her own head on her sleepless pillow.
Very early the next morning she arose, dressed, and went out to get a breath of the fine, fresh spring air.
She found Owlet, who always rose with the birds and the chickens, already up and dressed, and sitting on the steps of the porch, with her pup at her feet, and with her tiny workbasket beside her, filled with scraps of brilliant satin and velvet and spools of bright sewing silk, busy at work on the square of a crazy quilt. Owlet never dressed dolls, never played with or possessed one. She was a little crank on the subject of shams of all sorts, and dolls she considered shams. She was also a utilitarian, “pure and simple.” She loved to do all useful work. The crazy quilt took her fancy wonderfully. She highly approved of it, for she said:
“It uses up all the tiny little scrappy scraps that you could not do anything else with, and you don’t have to waste the least mite in cutting, but make the scraps fit just as they are. Oh, it is the best thing ever thought of, and why they should call it a crazy quilt the Lord only knows, when it is the most sensible sort of a quilt.”
So here she sat this morning, busy with her square, fitting “jags and tags and other bright fags” into a bewildering confusion of patchwork.