Steve's face colored a little.
"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or—or clothes, either. I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of those visits, after I had tramped in overland. The house was closed both times I came. And then I did write once—that was from San Domingo—the third year after I left college. I was so lonesome down there that I had to write, I think. But there—wasn't any reply, so I sort of thought perhaps——"
He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough. Caleb faced about abruptly, his face sternly accusing.
"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want——" and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head. "We didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished. "If we only had we—we would have been less lonely waiting, too."
Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.
"I should have known that," he faltered. "I should have known that there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going, for the mails to be infallible. But I wasn't just sure——"
Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.
"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft, almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him which he has neglected to mention."
She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed with less difficulty than he had during her absence. For a second or so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had tucked away in his own iron box. Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long and long at his mother's picture. When he finally raised his head again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.
"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he murmured. "I can only tell you that I didn't know—I didn't understand——"