And she was right. Mr. Metcalf was standing in the small reception room and he caught his little daughter in his arms and held her close for a moment without speaking.
He said in a choking voice: “My dream is fulfilled. You play the harp, Muriel, as my sister did.”
Then he told her that he had long planned to visit her at the school and had timed that visit so that he might be present at the recital without her knowing it.
“I think I must have known it, somehow,” the happy little girl said, “for I was playing only for you.”
And Nan Barrington, who had done so much to help Muriel, felt that the winning of the love of her little “enemy” was far more to be desired than the winning of the medal of gold.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A JOYOUS INVITATION.
A month had passed and the orchard back of the school was a bower of pink and white blooms, while oriole, robin and meadow lark made the fragrant sunlit air joyous with song.
Gypsy Nan stood at the open window of their room gazing out over the treetops to the highway, and how she yearned for her pony Binnie. She longed to gallop away, away—where, she cared little. Then she thought of the happy ride she and Robert Widdemere had taken three years before, and, sitting down on the window seat, with her chin resting on one hand, she fell to musing of those other days. Again she was a little girl, clad in a cherry red dress and seated in the boughs of the far-away pepper tree which stood on the edge of the Barrington estate in San Seritos. She recalled the sad, pale invalid boy in the wheeled chair, and she smiled as she remembered his surprise when a cluster of pepper berries had dropped on his listlessly folded hands. What splendid friends those two became the weeks that followed, and then there had been that last morning on the mountain top when he had promised that he would always be her friend, come what might. Little had they dreamed that years would pass, and that neither would know what had become of the other.
How she would like to see Robert Widdemere. He would be taller and broader, with a dignity of carriage which he surely would have acquired after three years’ training in a military academy. How good looking he had been that long ago Thanksgiving morning when he had worn the gypsy costume!
At this point Nan’s revery was interrupted by Phyllis, who fairly danced into the room. She held an open letter and she gaily exclaimed: