She threw herself forward on her arms and gave way utterly, crying in great, heart-breaking, breathless sobs for her Daddy Tom, for her home, for her hills.
At five o’clock Sister Rose, coming to see that the music rooms were aired for the evening use, found Ruth an inert, shapeless little bundle of broken nerves lying across the piano.
She took the girl to her room and sent for the sister infirmarian.
But Ruth was not sick. She begged them only to leave her alone.
The sisters, thinking that it was the fit of homesickness that every new pupil in a boarding school is liable to, sent some of the other girls in during the evening, to cheer Ruth out of it. But she drove them away. She was not cross nor pettish. But her soul was sick for the sweeping freedom of her hills and for people who could understand her.
She rose and dragged her little couch over to the window, where she could look out and up to the friendly stars, the same ones that peeped down upon her in the hills.
She did not know the names that they had in books, but she had framed little pet names for 41 them all out of her baby fancies and the names had clung to them all the years.
She recognised them, although they did not stand in the places where they belonged when she looked at them from the hills.
Out among them somewhere was Heaven. Daddy Tom was there, and her mother whom she had never seen.
Suddenly, out of the night, from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses directly into the spirit and the heart.