“A letter from your father, Glory,” she announced beaming with pleasure. “And the postmark’s Honolulu. So he must have landed there.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to get a letter,” Gloria could not help admitting. “You don’t mind, auntie, if I read it all alone first?”
“Certainly not, my dear. It’s a lot better that way. You just run up to your room. I’ve made it up—”
“Oh, thanks. But why did you bother?”
“I was fixing Hazel’s things back and it didn’t take a minute,” declared the aunt, affably.
At the door of her room Gloria exclaimed: “Oh, how lovely!” The cause of her delight was a bouquet of cosmos and she saw a little card stuck where she could not have avoided seeing it.
“Oh,” she actually squealed. “From my own home, from Barbend, and from Tommy! Now wasn’t that perfectly lovely of him?”
She pressed her face into the bed of blooms and breathed the air they brought with them. Tommy had not known she was really staying at Sandford unless, indeed, the news had somehow spread.
She kissed a big red cosmos and then turned to her father’s letter. It seemed almost too precious to read. She held it close to her heart, breathed deeply, and if one had not known how totally unaffected Gloria Doane actually was, she might have been suspected of acting. After almost reverent deliberation she read the foreign marked missive. The first concern was naturally for herself. How she was enjoying school? She gasped a little and passed that question. Then her dad wanted to know if she was really very well and gaining in weight and not getting any taller?
“Don’t you dare grow any bigger,” he cautioned. “I can’t have my girl growing up to be too big for me to handle.”