Amanda clung to her friend. “I knew it,” she almost sobbed. “That dreadful woman chose you. I knew she was going to by the way she looked at you. Oh, Eva, you’ll be so unhappy there. Why couldn’t she have chosen me?”
Eva released herself from her friend’s embrace and said tenderly, “Why should you suffer for me? You would be just as unhappy at Mrs. Green’s as I should. But don’t cry, Mandy. It may not be so very dreadful after all.” Then she turned and went into the house.
Eva’s face was very pale when Mrs. Friend looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. The matron put her arms about her and held her close, as a mother would, and then she said, “Eva, dear, you don’t know how I dread telling you.”
But the girl smiled bravely as she replied: “I know what it is! Mrs. Friend, you have been so kind to me. No one but my own mother was ever so kind, and I know that if you could have prevented this, you would have done so.”
“I have not given up hope yet, Eva,” the matron replied. “If you will go for a time, I will try in every way to have you recalled as soon as possible. Dear,” she added, looking tenderly at the girl, “are you sure that you have no living relative?”
Eva shook her head sadly. “There is no one,” she said. “Father had only one brother, and mother was the last of her family.”
“What became of your father’s brother, Eva? Did he die, also?” the matron asked.
“Yes, he is dead,” Eva replied. “Uncle Dick went west when he was a mere lad, because he was so eager for adventure, and for several years he wrote to my father from different places. At last he seemed to settle down to one, and he wrote that he was having an interesting life and making money. Then, for a long time, father did not hear, and at last a letter which he had written was returned to him unopened, and on the outside was scrawled, ‘Dick Dearman was killed in an Indian raid, leastwise it is supposed so.’ After that father wrote time and again, but his letters always came back. All this happened before father married my mother.”
“Did you ever hear how your father addressed those letters, Eva?” the matron inquired.
“To Dry Creek, Arizona,” the girl replied. And then she asked, “When am I to go to Mrs. Green’s?”