"Ah Sing! Ah Sing! Get me to bed!" he groaned.
Frightened at the expression of his face the child ran to call Nurse and her father's man, Ah Sing. Nurse kept her out of her father's chamber all that day, but she begged for her letter and Nurse gave it to her. She carried it in her hand that day and the next, at night keeping it under her pillow.
Before many days the strange uncle came and he led her in to her father and let her kiss his hand, and afterward he read Aunt Prue's soiled letter to her and told her that she and Nurse were going to Aunt Prue's home next week.
"Won't you go, too?" she asked, clinging to him as no one had ever clung to him before.
"No, I must stay here all winter—I shall come to you some time."
She sobbed herself to sleep in his arms, with the letter held fast in her hand; he laid her on her bed, pressing his lips to her warm, wet face, and then went down and out on the beach, pacing up and down until the dawn was in the sky.
XVI.
MAPLE STREET.
"Work for some good, be it ever so slowly."—Mrs. Osgood.
The long room with its dark carpet and dark walls was in twilight, in twilight and in firelight, for without the rain was falling steadily, and in the old house fires were needed early in the season. In the time of which little Jeroma had heard, there had been a fire on the hearth in the front parlor, but to-night, when that old time was among the legends, the fire glowed in a large grate; in the back parlor the heat came up through the register. Miss Prudence had a way of designating the long apartment as two rooms, for there was an arch in the centre, and there were two mantels and two fireplaces. Prue's father would have said to-night that the old room was unchanged—nothing had been taken out and nothing new brought in since that last night that he had seen the old man pacing up and down, and the old man's daughter whirling around on the piano stool, as full of hope and trust and enthusiasm as ever a girl could be.