She did not say what, and Bell gazed at her wonderingly, but decided at last to stay a few weeks longer. Nothing could please Jessie better, for she did not particularly like Morrisville, and she did like Beechwood very much. She liked the lake view, the hills, and the people, and she liked the six noisy, frolicsome children, with their good-humored sire, who treated her much as he would have treated a playful, teasing child not his own, but a guest. Many were the gambols she had with Ben and Burt, and little Daisy, who loved her almost as much as they loved Dora, while upon the matter-of-fact Squire she played off many a saucy trick, keeping him constantly on the alert with plots and conspiracies, and so making the time seem comparatively short, while he waited for Dora’s decision. But to Dora there was nothing which brought comfort or diverted her for a moment from the agonizing suspense which grew more and more dreadful as the days went swiftly by, bringing no answer to the letter sent to Dr. West. “Is it anything in particular you are expecting?” Johnnie asked one day, when she turned so white and shivered, as he returned from the post-office, with letters for all except herself. “Yes,—no! Oh, I don’t know what I expect,” she answered, and leaning her head on Johnnie’s shoulder, she wept silently, while the boy tried to comfort her, and became from that moment almost as anxious that she should have a letter as she seemed herself. Regularly each day at mail-time he was at the office, and if there chanced to be a letter for Dora, as there sometimes was, running to her eagerly, but saying always to himself as the weary, disappointed look remained the same: “The right one has not come.” No, the right one had not come, and now it was more than seven weeks since the night when Dr. West had been written to. Bell and Jessie were really going home at last, and their trunks stood in the hall ready for the early morning train. Dora had exhausted every argument for a longer stay, but Bell felt that they must go. “They would come again in the autumn, perhaps, or Dora should visit them. She would need rest by that time, sure,” Bell said, and Dora shuddered as she thought how she might never know rest or happiness again, save as she found them in the discharge of what she was beginning to believe was her imperative duty. “Letters! letters!” shouted Johnnie, running up the walk, his hand full of documents, one of which he was closely inspecting. Spelling out the place where it was mailed, he exclaimed, as he entered the room, “That’s from the doctor, for it says ‘San Francisco.’” Instantly both Jessie and Dora started forward to claim it, the hot blood dyeing the cheeks of the latter, but subsiding instantly, and leaving only a livid hue as Jessie took the letter, saying: “It is for me.”