Gradually Rose sensed the difference in American and foreign ideals, and now it was as if the curtain had lifted, and her own mind was cleared of the confusing doubts and suspicions she had heretofore struggled with.
The soft, sweet air of young summer wafted from the flowery vines, caressed her pretty face as she stared out of the low window into the velvet night, and she was glad, so glad she had sent those roses!
"If only I could have returned that badge!" she pondered; "why did
Tessie run off with it!"
The dark thought immediately cast a shadow over her happiness just at that moment, a vagrant cloud in a sky almost untarnished, deliberately sailed into the moon, and blackened the window through which Rose gazed.
"I guess that means bed!" she decided and promptly slipped between the grateful covers. But not to sleep. The thoughts of Tessie and her insinuating letters were too persistent to be immediately banished. Try as she might, Rose could find no key to the problem of how to reach the girl and reclaim the innocent badge, now serving as a baneful influence in the uncertain career of Tessie Wartliz.
"If only I could talk with her just a few minutes," Rose kept repeating, and that wish became the source of a plan, from which sprung a new resolve.
She must see Tessie!
Fixed in her brain, that resolve actually took root, and even in sleep it seemed to grow, to get stronger with the hours, and to mature with courage silently imparted through tired nature's sweet restorer. Balmy sleep!
Troubled dreams discovered the runaway girl in strange surroundings, now working in a dark gloomy mill, and flashing her black eyes like lighted coals at every word of correction offered by her superiors, again Tessie seemed to be enjoying the soft luxury of some favored home, a wild flower in a garden of hot-house blooms.
But it was all a dream, and Rose knew nothing of Tessie's adventure, beyond the suspicions conveyed in the two sketchy letters sent since the escapade.