“It would seem so,” Barbara replied. “I did know that Patty had left school because her widowed mother had married a minister to some outlandish foreign country, but, though the child was very fond of me, I never thought much about her, partly, because she was younger, and also, because I had you and Betsy Clossen for pals and two intimate friends are as many as I care for, but last week I had a letter from her postmarked London asking me if I had received the truly lovely Chinese kimona that she had sent for my birthday and giving me for the first time, a return address. Of course, I wrote her at once to express my appreciation, but I was heart broken. I cried for hours and hours that night, for I had been so sure that my dear lost brother was keeping in touch with me and somehow, even that little had been a comfort to me. Now, I am convinced that Peyton must be dead. He was so loving and tender-hearted even when he was a little fellow; he wouldn’t let month after month pass if he were alive without assuring me that he still cares for me and that all is well with him.”
“Poor Babs,” Virg said as she reached out, with real sympathy, and placed a comforting hand over the petite one of their friend. “I know how my heart would ache if Malcolm were lost, but don’t give up hope, dear. Such strange things happen in this world.”
“I am going to keep on hoping,” Barbara assured them. Then she added, “I have no way of knowing, of course, but I do believe that the object of my father’s visit to the West is to try to find Peyton. You see, when the epidemic broke out in school, we packed and left that very day, all of us who had not been exposed, and when I reached home father was not expecting me. I quietly entered the house and stood in the open library door. There he was, pacing up and down, an expression of grave anxiety on his face. I knew at once that he was greatly troubled about something, and for the first time since mother died there was a rush of tenderness in my heart for him. He looked so gray and sad and so all alone.
“Father!” I cried as I ran to him. He didn’t seem surprised, someway; he just reached out his arms and held me close.
“‘Little daughter,’ he said, ‘I needed you and you came to me; just as your mother came once, when I needed her—but—she couldn’t stay. If only that other Barbara had lived, all this would not have happened.’”
Then he bent his head down against mine and a hot tear fell on my cheek.
“‘Daddy,’ I said; I hadn’t called him that since I was very little. ‘Daddy, have you been so lonely? why didn’t you send for me sooner?’
“His reply was, ‘I am going West on a very important mission tomorrow, little daughter, so don’t unpack your trunk. I’ll take you with me and you may visit your friends in Arizona.’
“He didn’t tell me what his mission was, but I do know that he bought a ticket for some small town in Texas. He said that he would communicate with me in about a week. Oh, girls,” Babs added with a sob in her voice, “I wish I’d been more loving to my father. I ought to have known that his seeming sternness covered a most lonely heart with mother gone, and his only son wayward, or so daddy supposed.”
Margaret was thinking rapidly. “A town in Texas. Tom had been wrongly accused somewhere down there. Could Tom be Peyton after all and had the father received some word that had led him to believe that he would find his boy?”