* * * * * * * *
Late that night the doors between the girls’ rooms blew shut in the wind that was clearing the air of storm and rain. Never mind about the doors, though; the spirit of Miss Frazier’s rule rather than the letter was being kept to-night. For Kate and Elsie were curled up within whispering distance of each other on Kate’s bed. Both were in dressing gowns; they were supposed to have been asleep for an hour past.
“I’ve never been abroad, or even anywhere out of New England,” Kate was whispering. “You went with Aunt Katherine last summer. Will it be so wonderful as I expect?”
“We were only in England. And it will be a million times more wonderful than then, for we shall be together. Why, two weeks from now, sooner, we ought to be in Switzerland.”
“And two weeks ago we had never heard of each other,” Kate added.
“And one day ago,” Elsie took it up, “if you had told me that I would spend the rest of the summer away from my father, travelling in Europe with you and Aunt Katherine, I would have said you were crazy.”
“Oh, Elsie,” Kate asked quickly, “I haven’t said anything, but is that awfully hard for you, leaving them in Ashland, while we go so far away?”
“Not any more awful for me to leave my father than for you to leave your mother, I guess. Anyway, when they like the plan so much, we’d be funny daughters not to be pleased, too.”
“You say ‘My father, your mother’—Oh, Elsie, do you realize in just a day or two it will be ‘our father and our mother’?”
Elsie nodded. “Yes, Kate,” she said. “You have given me a mother and I have given you a father, and now we are a family. I feel, do you know, as though my heart might burst!”