“Is it anything in particular you are expecting?” Johnnie asked one day, when she turned so white and shivered, as he returned from the post-office, with letters for all except herself.
“Yes,—no! Oh, I don’t know what I expect,” she answered, and leaning her head on Johnnie’s shoulder, she wept silently, while the boy tried to comfort her, and became from that moment almost as anxious that she should have a letter as she seemed herself.
Regularly each day at mail-time he was at the office, and if there chanced to be a letter for Dora, as there sometimes was, running to her eagerly, but saying always to himself as the weary, disappointed look remained the same:
“The right one has not come.”
No, the right one had not come, and now it was more than seven weeks since the night when Dr. West had been written to.
Bell and Jessie were really going home at last, and their trunks stood in the hall ready for the early morning train. Dora had exhausted every argument for a longer stay, but Bell felt that they must go.
“They would come again in the autumn, perhaps, or Dora should visit them. She would need rest by that time, sure,” Bell said, and Dora shuddered as she thought how she might never know rest or happiness again, save as she found them in the discharge of what she was beginning to believe was her imperative duty.
“Letters! letters!” shouted Johnnie, running up the walk, his hand full of documents, one of which he was closely inspecting. Spelling out the place where it was mailed, he exclaimed, as he entered the room, “That’s from the doctor, for it says ‘San Francisco.’”
Instantly both Jessie and Dora started forward to claim it, the hot blood dyeing the cheeks of the latter, but subsiding instantly, and leaving only a livid hue as Jessie took the letter, saying:
“It is for me.”