Half-an-hour later she was dressed ready for her expedition. As she passed the office on her way out, they were sorting the morning mail. She waited for her letters. There was only one, but it was from home.
Racing back to her room, she tore it open with an eagerness born, unconsciously to herself, of the nostalgia that had seized upon her three-quarters of an hour before.
There were two large, closely-written sheets in the letter—one from her father and one from her mother. Each told their own news.
She read her father’s first; every item interested her, though as she read she seemed to feel that there was all through it an underlying strain of longing for her return.
“Dear old poppa!” she murmured as she neared the finish of the epistle.
Suddenly her eyes took in the two lines of postscript jammed close into the bottom edge of the first sheet. Her heart seemed to stand still as she read:—
“Pastor is considered sick. Doctor can’t make his case out.”
“Pastor sick!” She gasped the words aloud; then, turning swiftly to her mother’s letter, she cried: “Momma will tell more than this!”
Her eyes raced over the written lines. Her mother said a little more than her father had done about the sickness of their friend and pastor; not much, though, in actual words, but to the disturbed heart of the young girl there seemed to her much deeper meaning.