“I will show this to mother,” she cried, and was in the house in an instant.

La Fleur was in the hall, where for some time she had been quietly standing, looking out upon the moonlight.  From her position, which was not a conspicuous one, at the door of the enclosed stairway, she had been able to keep her eyes upon Ralph and Cicely; and held herself ready, should she hear Mrs. Drane coming down the stairs, to go up and engage her in a consultation in regard to domestic arrangements.  She had known of the arrival of the telegraph boy, had seen what followed, and now listened with rapt delight to Cicely’s almost breathless announcement of the joyful news.

After the girl went upstairs, La Fleur walked away; there was no need for her to stand guard any longer.

“It isn’t only the telegram,” she said to herself, “that makes her face shine and her voice quiver like that.”  Then she went out to congratulate Mr. Haverley on the news from his sister.  But the young man was not there; his soul was too full for the restraints of a house or a roof, and he had gone out, bareheaded, into the moonlight to be alone with his happiness and to try to understand it.

When Mrs. Drane returned to her room, having gone down at her daughter’s request to pay the telegraph messenger, she found her daughter lying on a couch, her face wet with tears.  But in ten minutes Cicely was sitting up and chattering gayly.  The good lady was rejoiced to know that there was no foundation for the evils they had feared, but she could not understand why her daughter, usually a cool-headed little thing and used to self-control, should be so affected by the news.  And in the morning she was positively frightened when Cicely informed her that she had not slept a wink all night.

Mrs. Drane had not seen Ralph’s face when he stretched out his arms toward her daughter.

CHAPTER XXXIX

UNDISTURBED LETTUCE

When Ralph Haverley came in from his long moonlight ramble, he was so happy that he went to bed and slept as sound as rock.  But before he closed his eyes he said to himself,—­

“I will do that to-morrow; the very first thing to-morrow.”

But people do not always do what they intend to do the very first thing in the morning, and this was the case with Ralph.  La Fleur, who knew that a letter was expected, sent Mike early to the post-office, and soon after breakfast Ralph had a letter from Miriam.  It was a long one; it gave a full account of the drowning accident and of some of her own experiences, but it said not one word of the message sent by Miss Panney, to whom Miriam alluded very slightly.  It gave, however, the important information that Mrs. Bannister had been so affected by the dreadful scene on the beach that she declared she could not go into the ocean again, nor even bear the sight of it, and that, therefore, they were all coming home on the morrow.