Then he sat down to write a letter to the other father and through the father to Her. She had said that she would read these letters herself. Her hands would hold the paper; her eyes would scan the script; her lips would utter the words. If the waiting father were able to do nothing more, Barnes thanked him for this priceless privilege of thus indirectly furnishing him the means for talking a bit each day with Her.
The letters were necessarily vague and rambling. Barnes spoke mysteriously of business, of men seen and others to be seen, of the necessity of waiting here for word from one who he hoped in the end would relieve him of all his mining ventures.
“I await a reply, which should reach me any day now,” he wrote. “When it arrives, I’ll come back. Give my love to Aunt Philomela and to Eleanor.”
It was two days later that he received an answer in Eleanor’s own handwriting. At sight of the envelope he felt for a moment as though all his wildest dreams had come true—as though he were to find within all that he hungered to hear from her. But it turned out to be nothing but a quiet gossipy letter about Aunt Philomela and of course chiefly about her father. He was improving daily, and Dr. Merriweather was now quite sure he was to recover his sight. He spent all his waking hours in talking of his boy.
“Oh,” she concluded, “Joe must come home now. Not even you could save Daddy from the blow which would follow should the boy refuse. I am waiting every minute for a telegram from him. With a heart full of gratitude to you, I remain, sincerely yours, Eleanor Van Patten.”
That day Barnes sat in the park from lunch to sunset with his mother. Both he and she agreed that the only significant feature of the letter was that it contained no mention of Carl.
So a restless week passed, the most important incident of which, outside his daily letter from Eleanor, was the fact that Barnes, Sr., received an offer for the Acme and in his usual impetuous fashion closed with it in twenty-four hours. He came home that momentous day at three instead of five, and save for the time when Barnes, Sr., received her promise to be his wife, he never received a finer reward than that which greeted his announcement to her of this decision.
“And so, you old prodigal,” choked Barnes, as he grasped his father’s hand, “you’ve come home, too.”
“Prodigal?” stammered his father, though with tears in his eyes.
“Think of all the years you’ve wasted in riotous earning,” exclaimed the son. “You can thank old Van Patten for your conversion. You two men have got to meet. He wasted five years in riotous pride. But he’s come home, too, now. We’re all home except Joe, and—well, I’m back in the old home any way.”