“I do indeed. That’s where I’d want to go. Hark!” the lad lifted a finger and listened. “I think I hear Malcolm calling.”
“Oh yes, he must have awakened.” Virginia was skipping toward the closed door at the opposite end of the long living room. “If he is awake Peyton, I will call you.” Then the door opened and closed again. The lad walked to the window and looked out. How all of the brightness of the room had seemed to vanish when Virginia left it, he was thinking. Then he rebuked himself, for dearly he loved his pretty little “Dresden China” sister. He had heard the girls call her that, because she seemed so breakable and withal so exquisitely pink and blue and gold, with her fluffy sunlit curls, her eyes that were like June skies and her rose-bud complexion which the winds of the desert did not seem to want to tan. He did indeed, love her, but his love for Virginia was different, so very different! But God had planned it that way. Such love indeed was a gift from the Father of them all and was to be treated reverentially, although, who could treat it otherwise? It was with a start that the lad whirled when he heard his name called. Virginia had returned and was standing by the table pouring lemonade into a glass. “Brother has awakened and I have propped him up on two pillows,” she was saying. “Will you take this to him, Peyton, but don’t tell him as yet that we are planning to take him away from his beloved ranch, for, if you do, he will declare that everything will go to pieces if he isn’t here to hold it together. We’ve got to plan a way to make him think, that, for a time, V. M. will be better off, under different management.” Virg’s smile, as she handed the brimming glass to the lad, was so frank and friendly that he wondered, if, after all, it was merely comradeship that she felt for him. Well, he could wait. He had promised never again to mention his love for her until she was eighteen and she was but seventeen now. However hard it might be, he meant to keep that promise. Of one thing he was sure. Even though Virg might not care for him in the big way yet, neither did she love any other lad. When the door had closed behind Peyton, Betsy cried. “Oh good, here comes Slim from the station and he has the Mail Bag.”
CHAPTER XXVII
UNEXPECTED NEWS
“Letters!! Letters! Who wants a letter?” Betsy Clossen had skipped out to the wide veranda to receive the mail bag from the good-looking young cowboy Slim.
“I do!”
“I’ll take three!” Megsy and Babs cried in chorus.
“Oh Barbara, what a piggy-wig you are. Three indeed! Now, just to punish you, it’s Virg who shall have the three and you only one.” Betsy had poured the contents of the bag on the big library table and was looking it over. Margaret and Virginia had returned to their sewing. That latter maid found herself strangely indifferent to whether or no there would be a letter for her. This she could easily understand since, was she not at home with Uncle Tex and Malcolm, and the girls she liked best were right then in the room with her, and Peyton would not need to write her the weekly letter she had received while she had been away at boarding school. Betsy interrupted her thoughts by saying: “I was a prophet! Here are three letters for Miss Virginia Davis. Guess, Virg, if you can, who they may be from?”
That tall slender maiden, being addressed, dropped her sewing in her lap, as she replied, “I’d like to hear from dear Mrs. Martin. Is there a foreign stamp on any of them, Betsy? Our beloved principal must be in Japan, I suppose, about now, on her around the world tour.”
“Nary a foreign stamp. Well, since you can’t guess, I’ll give them to you and when you open them up you will know who they are from.”
“What a brilliant remark!” Barbara teased, but Virg having accepted the letters Betsy had handed her, attracted the attention of them all by exclaiming, “Well, if this isn’t the queerest! I’m just ever so sure that the handwriting on this envelope is Winona’s, but it is postmarked Red Riverton. What can she be doing up there? Ever since she wrote that she was back on the desert with that nice Indian lad, Fleet Foot, I have been hoping that she would come over to see us.”