When Brightie has delivered up Hazel's envelope, with its scrawled direction, she retires into her own room, next door, and shuts herself in. She is filled with an unwonted excitement, for she holds a second letter in her hand, and it is her own. The rarest thing it is for her to have a letter, and the post-mark is "Firdorf," the very same beautiful country place for which she had pined; there she and Janie, her only sister, had lived together, and Janie had died there. The hands, aged with work and deprivation more than with time, shake as they break the seal, the aged eyes grow dim again and again as they read.
It is fully three parts of an hour before Brightie has got through the letter—not that the words are many or hard to understand; but rather that the hindrances are many. The glasses of the large spectacles grow so misty from time to time that they require polishing. Then, too, Miss Bright's mind exhibits foolish tendencies, refusing to grasp the meaning of the words, and causing her to explain that she must be dreaming; and still further she is carried back in mind to days long since vanished, and scenes long unvisited, and these detain her long. But at last she rouses herself—has at length fairly accepted the astonishing good news her letter contains, and, with it open in her hand, hastens off to communicate the same to her young friend.
Hazel's door is locked, and Miss Bright has to wait a moment before it is unfastened. Hazel has been crying, and the tears must have been both plentiful and bitter, for unmistakable traces exist, in spite of hurried efforts to efface them. For once, though, Brightie is thoroughly self-engrossed, and fails to notice even Hazel's face.
"I have such wonderful news, my dear!" she exclaims, the moment she is admitted into the room.
Hazel expresses her interest, and, with her loving smile and tender way, ensconces her friend in the one attempt at an easy chair her room possesses, and then kneels beside her to listen.
"Well, my dear, you have heard me speak of my sister's house at Firdorf?"
"Of course! Often. Where you used to live, and the flowers were so lovely."
"Yes! and where the sweet white jasmine used to blossom, filling the air with its delicious fragrance when we sat in the summer evenings beneath the trellis work, in front of the dear old home."
As she speaks of the jasmine, old Miss Bright's hand is laid caressingly on Hazel's hair, and her eyes—happily not too keen without her glasses, or they would detect the tear marks—rest with softened look, full of tender memories, on the girl's sympathetic, upturned face.
"There were always we three there—I, and my sister and her boy. You have heard how the home was broken up, how Tom ran away, and how we lost our money, and how Janie's spirit broke down under it, till at length she gave up praying for Tom's return, and drooped and died?"