“Oh, yes!” breathed the girl, and her brown eyes filled suddenly with great tears.
The tears came to Mrs. Hartwell-Jones’s eyes, too, and she caught Letty to her arms in a long, close embrace.
“You have no mother and I have no little girl!” she whispered brokenly.
That evening Mrs. Hartwell-Jones wrote a very long letter to the lawyer in the city who had always managed her business for her. She glanced often at Letty as she wrote, but the little girl, busy over a puzzling problem in arithmetic, did not even dream of the wonderful ways in which that letter would change her life.
[CHAPTER XIII—THE TULIP’S DREAM]
Christopher’s request that Jo Perkins might have the use of a horse and wagon for the afternoon to take him and Billy Carpenter on a picnic was granted with some hesitation.
“Jane is going to the author-lady’s to have a silly party for her old doll and I don’t want to go,” he said. “Perk’ll look out for Bill and me all right. You’ve often let me go fishing with Perk, grandfather.”
“Yes, but then there was no other boy along to suggest mischief.”
Christopher looked a wee bit guilty, remembering the swimming project.
“We aren’t going to get into mischief,” he exclaimed hastily. “It’s just to be a picnic and do the things boys do; roast potatoes in a fire and—and all sorts of things.”