Then looking up eagerly, hopefully, “Miss Heger, perhaps you forgot to post it. Oh, how I hope that you did!”
But the mountain girl shook her head. “I sent it by Mr. Bently to the eastbound train, which was due about noon. He said that he himself would put it in the mail car.”
“Then there is nothing that I can do!” The proud girl burst into sudden tears. “Father has lost everything but our home in the East, and now, now I have been the cause of his losing the cabin he so loved.” Lifting a tear-stained face to the girl who was watching her, troubled and thoughtful, she implored: “Oh, isn’t there something I can do? If I tell them I will pay it in two weeks, when my birthday money comes, won’t that do as well as now?”
Meg shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is final. They notified your father some time ago.”
Jane nodded hopelessly. “Oh, if only brother were here! But the worry would start him to coughing.”
Again the girl, who scorned tears in others, began to sob helplessly. How vain and foolish she had been to want that necklace, hoping that it would make her appear more beautiful in the eyes of Jean Sawyer.
Meg stood for one moment deep in thought. Then she said: “Miss Abbott, find your papers. Have them ready for me when I return. I’ll try to save your place.”
With that she turned and ran back to her pony, leaped upon it and galloped out of sight up around the bend.
“What does she mean?” Jane sat, almost as one stunned, for a moment, then as the command of the mountain girl recalled itself to her, she arose and went indoors to locate the papers their father had given Dan.
These being fastened with a rubber band into a neat packet, she held closely while she ran out to the brook calling Dan’s name frantically, but there was no response. Soon she heard the musical yodeling which had so filled her heart with wrath a short half hour before. Now it was to her a sound sweeter than any she had ever heard. It brought a faint hope that her father’s cabin might yet be saved. Down the stone steps she went, holding out the papers. Then and for the first time she thought of something: “But the money—I haven’t any to give you.”