She had an inspiration. She leaned toward him, eagerly.
“Why, Uncle Foster!” she cried. “I tell you what to do! Write and ask him to visit you, but plan to have him arrive just after I have gone. You will want some one here then, some one to talk to and keep you interested. You won’t be half as lonely and I shall feel ever so much more contented, knowing that you aren’t sole alone—or with no one but Nabby and Varunas. Come; that is a good idea, isn’t it?”
He hesitated; then he nodded once more. “Good as any, I guess,” he admitted. “I don’t know but I’d just as soon be alone as with a young cub I’m supposed to keep a weather eye on and that, nine chances out of ten, I’ll hate the sight of from the minute I lay eyes on him.... But I’ll write and ask him. I’ll write now, to-day.”
She was turning over the sheets of Covell’s letter. Now she uttered an exclamation.
“Here is something else,” she exclaimed. “Something we haven’t read. A postscript, written on the back of this last page. It says: ‘I think you will like the boy, when you meet him. He has a knack of making people like him at first sight. When they are the right people it is a valuable knack.’ There, Uncle Foster, you see! You won’t hate him, you will like him. I am ever so glad he is coming.”
Just then there was a knock at the door leading from the kitchen. Varunas appeared with a yellow envelope in his hand.
“Telegram for you, Cap’n Foster,” he announced. “Seth Canby’s boy just fetched it up. Hope ’tain’t no bad news. Nobody dead or nothin’ like that.”
Townsend took the envelope. “What do you mean by ‘nothing like that’?” he observed. “I never saw anything like being dead except being dead, did you, Varunas?”
Nabby, who had followed her husband into the room, sniffed.
“You never saw him about gettin’ up time of a winter mornin’, then, Cap’n Foster,” she declared. “If he ain’t dead then he’s a turrible good imitation.”