Patsy hooked back the flap and forced the semblance of a welcome into her greeting.
“It was simply ripping!” chorused the Dempsy Carters, each gripping a hand.
Janet Payne looked down upon her with adoring eyes. “It was the best, the very best I’ve ever seen you or any one else play it. For the first time Rosalind seemed a real girl.”
But it was the voice of Gregory Jessup that carried above the others: “Have you heard, Miss O’Connell? Burgeman died last night, and Billy was with him. He’s come home.”
“Faith! then there’s some virtue in signs, after all.”
A hush fell on the group. Patsy suddenly put out her hand. “I’m glad for you—I’m glad for him; and I hope it ended right. Did you see him?”
“For a few minutes. There wasn’t time to say much; but he looked like a man who had won out. He said he and the old man had had a good talk together for the first time in their lives—said it had given him a father whose memory could never shame him or make him bitter. I wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t have him on your mind any longer.”
She smiled retrospectively. “Thank you; but I heaved him off nearly twenty-four hours ago.”
Left to herself again, she finished her packing; then tying under her chin a silly little poke-bonnet of white chiffon and corn-flowers, still somewhat crushed from its long imprisonment in a trunk, she went back for a last glimpse of the Forest and her Greenwood tree.
The place was deserted except for the teamsters who had come for the tents and the property trunks. A flash of white against the green of the tree caught her eye; for an instant she thought it one of Orlando’s poetic effusions, overlooked in the play and since forgotten. Idly curious, she pulled it down and read it—once, twice, three times: