He met her at the door and he did not have to stoop to kiss her. “What is it, dear?” he said quickly, for deep in her eyes, which looked level with his, he saw trouble.
She handed him a letter and walked to the window—looking out at the gathering storm. The letter was from her home away down in the Kentucky hills—from the Mission teacher in Happy Valley.
There was an epidemic of typhoid down there. It was spreading through the school and through the hills. They were without nurses or doctors, and they needed help.
“Too bad, too bad,” he murmured, and he turned anxiously.
“I must go,” she said, with a catch in her breath. “One cabin is built above another all the way up the creeks down there. The springs are by the stream. High water floods all of them, and the infection goes with the tide. And the poor things don't know—they don't know. Oh, I must go!”
For a moment he was silent, and then he got up and put his arms about her. He was smiling.
“Then, I'll go with you.” She wheeled quickly.
“No, no, no! You can't leave your work, and—remember!”
He did remember how useless it had been to argue with her, and he knew it was useless now. Moreover, if she was going at all, it was like her to go at once—like her to go up-stairs at once to her packing and leave him in the darkened study alone.
They had been married two years. He had seen her first entering his own classroom, and straightway that Latin line took permanent quarters in his brain, so that he was almost startled when he learned her Olympic name. It was not long before he found himself irresistibly drawn to her big, serious eyes that never wandered in a moment's inattention, found himself expounding directly to her—a fact already discovered by every girl in the classroom except Juno herself; and she never did discover, for no one was intimate enough to tell her seriously, and there was that about her that forbade the telling in badinage. With all secrecy, and shyly almost, he set about to learn what he could about her, and that was little indeed.