“I suppose so!” grumbled the doctor only half satisfied, “but girls are so dreadfully blind.”
“I think you’d like him,” she hazarded, her cheeks growing pinker, “that is, you would if there is anybody,” she corrected herself laughing. “But you see, it’s a secret yet and maybe always will be. I’m not sure that he knows, and I’m not quite sure I know myself——”
“Oh, I see!” said the doctor watching her sweet face with a tender jealousy in his eyes. “Well, I suppose I’ll help you to go, but I’ll shoot him, remember, if he doesn’t turn out to be all right. It would take a mighty superior person to be good enough for you, little girl.”
“That’s just what he is,” said Ruth sweetly, and then rising and stooping over him she dropped a kiss on the wavy silver lock of hair that hung over the doctor’s forehead.
“Thank you, Daddy-Doctor! I knew you would,” she said happily. “And please don’t be too long about it. I’m in a great hurry.”
The doctor promised, of course. No one could resist Ruth when she was like that, and in due time certain forces were set in operation to the end that she might have her desire.
Meanwhile, as she waited, Ruth filled her days with thoughts of others, not forgetting Cameron’s mother for whom she was always preparing some little surprise, a dainty gift, some fruit or flowers, a book that she thought might comfort and while away her loneliness, a restful ride at the early evening, all the little things that a thoughtful daughter might do for a mother. And Cameron’s mother wrote him long letters about it all which would have delighted his heart during those dreary days if they could only have reached him then.
Ruth’s letters to Cameron were full of the things she was doing, full of her sweet wise thoughts that seemed to be growing wiser every day. She had taken pictures of her Italian friends and introduced him to them one by one. She had filled every page with little word pictures of her daily life. It seemed a pity that he could not have had them just when he needed them most. It would have filled her with dismay if she could have known the long wandering journey that was before those letters before they would finally reach him; she might have been discouraged from writing them.
Little Mrs. Beck was suddenly sent for one Sunday morning to attend her sister who was very ill, and she hastily called Ruth over the telephone and begged her to take her place at the Sunday school. Ruth promised to secure some one to teach the lesson, but found to her dismay that no one was willing to go at such short notice. And so, with trembling heart she knelt for a hasty petition that God would guide her and show her how to lead these simple people in the worship of the day.
As she stood before them trying to make plain in the broken, mixed Italian and English, the story of the blind man, which was the lesson for the day, there came over her a sense of her great responsibility. She knew that these people trusted her and that what she told them they would believe, and her heart lifted itself in a sharp cry for help, for light, to give to them. She felt an appalling lack of knowledge and experience herself. Where had she been all these young years of her life, and what had she been doing that she had not learned the way of life so that she might put it before them?