Her face flashed into a smile. She flung her arms about him again.
"O will you, pappa John?"
"Course I will. Wait till you see me in a spike-tail coat and a boiled shirt. I'll astonish the city dudes."
Rose laughed a little wildly, and tightened her clasp about his neck.
"You're my dear old pappa John."
She went at once to her desk and wrote a letter to Mary Compton, an old schoolmate who had gone to Chicago and whose guidance to bed and board now seemed valuable.
That night John Dutcher did not go to sleep at once, as he usually did on entering his room. He went to his bureau—the old bureau he had bought for his wife thirty years before. In it he kept his pictures. There were several tin-types of Rose, in awkward, scared poses, and there too was the last picture of his wife which had been taken with Rose as a babe in her arms.
Dutcher sat for a long time looking at it, and the tears ran down his face unheeded, pitiful to see.
When he got up at last he moved stiffly as if he had suddenly grown ten years older, and in his sleep his sister heard him groan and talk. In the morning he said he had a touch of rheumatism, but it would most probably pass off as the sun came out.