“Mother! Look here! The diamonds!” she cried, laying them one by one on her mother’s lap.
They were all there and unharmed except as they were a little dim for want of cleaning.
“Who could have found them and sent them?” Fanny kept saying.
Roy felt sure he knew, but said nothing, while Mrs. Prescott suggested that the person who found them intended at first to keep them,—then, failing to dispose of them, decided to send them to New York.
“Yes, but how did he know where I lived, or that I was to be married to-day?” Fanny asked.
Roy tided over that difficulty by saying, “Easy enough, your mother advertised for them to be sent here if they were found, and the man or woman, whoever it is, happened to forward them in the nick of time. Providential dispensation, don’t you see?”
He was decking Fanny with the jewels as he talked, and she accepted his theory as she accepted everything from him.
“I shall write to father this very day that I have them. He will be so glad, and Tom, too. I dare say the poor fellow has hunted over every foot of ground between that place and Clark’s several times.”
Roy’s shoulders always gave a little shrug when Fanny talked in this strain, and he now left her while she wrote a few hurried lines to her father telling him her diamonds had come and asking if he had any idea who sent them.
“I am so happy,” she wrote, “for in a few hours I shall be Roy’s wife. I wish you could be here, and Inez. Oh, if she were only alive she would be my maid of honor and eclipse me with her beauty. Dear Inez. It makes me cry every time I think of her up among the mountains with the snow piled over her grave, and I so happy here with Roy. Think of me to-night and bless me, dear father. Mother is to give me away, but I shall fancy it is you. Good bye. Your loving daughter, Fanny Hilton, soon to be Fanny Mason.”