Adele was frightened. It had not occurred to her that the matter would take on a serious aspect, and she feared to say that she had made the exchange in fun. So she reached over and took the photograph from Bee with a hand that trembled slightly.
"Why! It's my picture," she cried with a little hysterical giggle. "What a mistake! I remember now they both came home together, and lay on the desk in the library. They must have gotten mixed some way. It would have been easy to change them."
"Why, so it would," agreed her mother with a relieved expression. "I remember they were on the desk together. Bee must have picked up yours, Adele, by mistake."
And Adele said not a word about its being her fault. She had no fear of Bee's telling either. Her cousin had a boy's sense of honor about such things, and unless she herself owned up, the matter would rest between them. So she made no further comment on the subject, and the older people, deeming the affair of no great importance since it was known that a mistake had been made, resumed conversation.
Bee sat silent, her heart swelling almost to bursting. The words of her father's letter rang in her brain: "It is partly your letters that have wrought this change ... and partly your picture, which completed what the letters had begun. I cannot resist its winsomeness."
It was Adele's picture which had brought him home. He would not have come had she sent her own. He had thought the beautiful girl was his daughter, and he was disappointed because she was not. He wanted Adele. Adele!
The dinner, on the whole not a successful meal, was over at last. The older people were deep in conversation; the traveller narrating his experiences, the others questioning and exclaiming. Bee had pictured just such a scene, but always in fancy she sat close to her father's side with her hand in his, or else his arm was thrown caressingly around her. The reality was so different that it was more than she could bear. Seeing that she was unobserved, she rose and stole quietly out of the house.
The light breeze, breathing of the sweetness of honeysuckles and roses, touched the tops of the walnut trees and dipped down to stir the cool grass beneath them. Into the darkness of the grove went the unhappy girl. When she had reached a place where she was out of sight and sound of the house she threw herself down, and gave way to a passion of tears.
"It's not fair," she sobbed in angry resentment. "She has her father, and her mother too; and now she has to take mine. Oh, I can't bear it! I can't bear it!"