“Perhaps you did not hear that Ann was married,” she wrote; “but I miss her so, all the time, that I feel as if everybody must know it. She’s married a widower with two little children,—a nice, quiet, pleasant sort of a man,—but we all told Ann she only took him because she fell in love with the children! And she does seem as happy as a queen, and, for that matter, so does he; but it provokes me to think how little we set by her, considering what she was worth, till after we’d lost her.”
It was a week or two after this letter was received, that Mr. Leslie made his discovery. He found the farmhouse, the “very identical” farmhouse, for which he was longing, and he found it when he was not looking for it, as he was riding a horse which a friend had lent him.
The gate of the long lane which led up to the house was only half a mile from the railway station, and only eight miles from the town where the Leslies lived, and two dear old Quaker people, who “liked children,” lived there all alone, save for their few servants.
“No, they had never taken boarders,” Friend Mercy said, “and she was afraid the children—her married boys and girls—might not quite like it.”
But Mr. Leslie, at her hospitable invitation, dismounted, and tied his horse and sat down on the “settee,” under the lilac bushes, and drank buttermilk and ate gingerbread, and I am afraid he talked a good deal, and the result of it all was, that, just as he was going away, Friend Mercy said,—
“Well, thee bring thy wife and little ones to-morrow afternoon, Friend Leslie, and have a sociable cup of tea with us. I will talk with Isaac in the meantime, and with thy wife when she comes, and—we’ll see.”
Mr. Leslie had no desire to break his children’s hearts, so, although it was hard work not to, he did not tell them all that Friend Mercy and he had said to each other, for fear she should not “see her way clear” to take them; so he only told of his pleasant call, and of this magnificent invitation to a real country tea, in the “inner circle”; and they were so nearly wild over that, that it was a very good thing he stopped there!
Friend Mercy had suggested the four o’clock train, which would give the children time for “a good run” before the six o’clock tea. So, while Tiny and Johnny played in the hay, and sailed boats on the brook, the older people talked; and the result was, that the Leslies were to be permitted to come and board in the “inner circle,” until the end of September.
