"I've had a long talk with the bairnie, Jean. I'm willing to trust her away from me. You'll do better for her than I can."
"It will be a trial to your mother and myself to let you go," he said to Flea on Christmas day, in telling her of Aunt Jean's wish to take her and Dee home with her. "We will bear it for the sake of the good you'll get."
What the trial was to himself nobody comprehended. All through the quiet winter that shut down upon the river-lands early in January the most momentous events to the father's heart were the weekly arrival of the letters from his daughter. They were long and, to him, wonderful. He was kept in touch with her home life, her school, her reading, her sight-seeing, her growth in knowledge and her burning thirst for more knowledge. She sent him books now and then; his sister provided him with two weekly papers and a monthly magazine, but the short days and long evenings wore away tediously.
The months seemed like as many years in looking back upon them on a certain June morning, when he and Flea set out for a ride on horseback. She had been at home but eighteen hours, and he had still to persuade himself from time to time that he was not dreaming.
He looked her over pridefully as they rode off from the house.
"You are more like yourself this morning, lassie. Last night you were paler and quieter than seemed just natural. I suppose you were tired after the journey."
Flea blushed and averted her face. "I feel beautifully rested out to-day," she said. Honest as ever, she could not say more without revealing what would have pained his loyal heart.
I have made no secret of her faults, and I do not excuse what her father was never allowed to guess. Her homecoming had been a dismay as well as a disappointment to her. Nothing had come to pass as she had expected and planned, except the look on her father's face when he had espied her on the deck of the boat, waving her hand to him on the wharf, and the long, silent hug she received as she sprang into his arms. She had never heard the word "disillusion," or she would have known better what the next few hours meant. Mr. Grigsby had come to the landing in a blue-bodied "carryall." A plank laid across the front served him for a seat. Two splint-bottomed chairs were set for the children, leaving room behind them for their trunks. It was not heroineic, but it was natural that, seeing her late fellow-passengers eying the equipage from the boat, Flea grew hot with embarrassment, and wished that her father had thought of borrowing a better-looking vehicle from Greenfield.
The road over which they jolted was rutty and straggling, the fences ungainly. Nothing was trimmed and well-kept to eyes used, for five months, to spick-and-span Philadelphia. Her own home was sadly unlike her recollection of it. It had been newly whitewashed in honor of her coming, but she had forgotten that there never were shutters at the windows. They stared at her like eyes without lids and lashes. The calico half-curtains were "poor-white-folksy," the furniture was scanty and common. Her mother wore a purple calico. She was "partial to purple calico"; it kept its color, did not show dirt, and looked so clean when it was clean. She did not bethink herself, or she had never known, that purple is, of all colors, most trying to women of no particular complexion. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her temples, and done at the back of her head in a knot that would not come undone of itself in a week. On her head was a cap of rusty black cotton lace. Bea had bedecked her fair self in a light blue lawn, short-sleeved, and low upon the shoulders. A double string of wax beads was about her neck, and a single string upon each wrist. Her yellow hair was braided and tucked up. Bea was fifteen, and quite the young lady now. About her head was a narrow band of black velvet, fastened above her forehead with a breast-pin containing a green glass stone. Bea thought it was an emerald. Flea knew that it was not, yet felt horribly ashamed that she could notice all these things and that they dampened her spirits.
They had a "big supper," to which Dee's boyish appetite did abundant justice. Flea berated and despised herself for seeing that the coffee-pot was tin and was the boiler in which the coffee had been made, and that the handles of the two-tined forks were of bone; that her mother poured her coffee into her saucer to cool before drinking it, and that everything—fried chicken, ham, fish, preserves, cake, pudding, pie, frozen custard, and waffles—was put on the table at once.