And she was quite tall and slender, very unlike the Redfields. They were all small and compactly built; but Arethusa had got her height from her father.
Having arrived almost at a state of natural breathing once more, Arethusa rolled over and spread the Letter out before her. She studied her father's bold handwriting with shining eyes, and kissed his signature rapturously.
When she was a baby of about six months or so her father had given her into Miss Eliza's keeping and started for a foreign trip, "of a few months," he had said then. But that was nearly eighteen years ago, and he was still on the other side, with never so much as the most flying visit to the little daughter in America in all that time. Yet the love and loyalty of that little daughter had never wavered from the day Miss Asenath had put his photograph into her tiny hands, and taught her to call it "Father," and to kiss it through the glass.
This love and loyalty were not founded upon memories, for she had none. They were given a father created by her own vivid fancy, aided by the photograph. This was a faded likeness of an unusually handsome man with waving hair of an eccentric length and bold dark eyes smiling straight out of the picture as if he were just about to speak to the Arethusa who worshipped it. He wore a Byronic sort of collar, with a wide tie, and his shoulders were draped in an Italian military cape, effectively thrown back from the one wide frog that clasped it just below the flowing ends of the tie. So he was not like other fathers; not at all like those most commonplace male parents with which Arethusa was acquainted. He was far more like the Hero in one of those sentimental novels she never tired of reading. She could but give him all the most desirable of the attributes of the men-folk who lived in those pages; for they seemed so far superior to any man she knew in the flesh.
Miss Asenath, with her stories of him, had helped unconsciously in the creation of this ideal. Miss Asenath had loved him very dearly,—loved his bright youth as she did all youth. Miss Eliza's bark was always much worse than her bite, and she, although she spoke very slightingly of him at times, had been quite fond of him. So, too, had Miss Letitia. The little daughter had grown up in an atmosphere that fostered her hero-worship.
Arethusa's most carefully cherished Dream, through childhood to the very present time, had been that some day this wonderful father of hers would come home, here to the Farm. She had planned their meeting, to the smallest detail, many and many a time. And he had written that he was coming, over and over again; only to add a little later that "he would not be able to get across this year." But these repeated disappointments had in no wise chilled the glow of his daughter's anticipation.
And now ... he was actually on this side of the Atlantic! No longer the broad ocean rolled between them. If he had not come clear back to the Farm, he had come much nearer to it than he had ever been In Arethusa's recollection of him; and, moreover, he had come with a wife!
Small wonder that Arethusa was excited!
But the Letter.... The Letter would tell her all about it.