"A foolish thought, and you cannot put the two together."
"No?"
"No!" said Nanty decisively.
CHAPTER XXI
JANE FAIRBROTHER'S IMPENDING VISIT
"All's right with the world." The long-looked-for letter from Miss Fairbrother has arrived, and she is coming to stay with us. I read out the good news to Dimbie exultantly and most happily:—
"'LITTLE OLD PUPIL,—Shall I be glad to come to you? Why my pulses quicken at the very thought, and my heart sings when I contemplate the quiet joy of sitting in an English garden—a little green garden under an apple tree with Marguerite Westover. Kipling says: "O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont!" But I cry, "O the heat, O the heat, O the hellish, burning heat!" and I conjure up before my sun-tired eyes a vision of wondrous golden cornfields, ripening blackberries, leaves turning to crimson and russet, dewy, hazy mornings and over all the soft, mellow September sunshine—for it will be September, that sweetest of English months, when I arrive.
"'Everything I have to say to you must wait till I am at One Tree Cottage. Of your accident and suffering I cannot write, but you will know—knowing me a little—what I feel for you. But take heart. Twelve months will not pass quickly at your age. Time tarries only for the young it would seem, when for the old—who would have it linger—it flies all too quickly. But the months will pass. Think, Marguerite, if it had been for life!' (This I did not read to Dimbie, I feared my voice, for it still breaks.) 'As it is, you will get stronger each month. And then a day will come when I shall take you for your first walk, if I am anywhere near you, through the stately pine trees you loved so much as a child. Do you still love them? But, ah, I forgot—Mr. Dimbie will be there to take you. There will always be a husband now, tiresome man! Forgive me, but I want to step back to the dear old days when I had my little pupil all to myself.
"Till the fifteenth of September good-bye. I shall, on reaching London, travel straight to Pine Tree Valley. It is so good of you to ask me, and much gooder of your husband.