But a ’messenger’!—­when she that was lost is found, when a man’s wife comes back to him from the dead!  Phoebe sat voiceless, the telegram on her lap, a kind of scorn trembling on her lip.

Then her eye caught the word ‘welcome,’ and it struck home.  She began to sob, her angry pride melting.  And suddenly the door of her room opened, and there on the threshold stood Carrie—­Carrie, who had been crying, too—­with wide, startled eyes and flushed cheeks.  She looked at her mother, then flew to her, while Phoebe instinctively covered the telegram with her hand.

’Oh, mother! mother!—­how could you?  And I laughed at him—­I did—­I did!’ she cried, wringing her hands.  ’And he looked so tired!  And on the way home Amelie mimicked him—­and his voice—­and his queer ways; and I laughed.  Oh, what a beast I was!  Oh, mother, and I told you his name, and you never—­never—­said a word!’

The child flung herself on the floor, her feet tucked under her, her hands clasped round her knees, swaying backwards and forwards in a tempest of excited feeling, hardly knowing what she said.

Phoebe looked at her, bewildered; then she removed her hand, and Carrie saw the telegram.  She threw herself on it, read the address, gulping, then the words: 

‘A messenger!’ She understood that no more than her mother.  It meant a letter, perhaps?  But she fastened on ‘immediately’—­’welcome.’

And presently—­all in a moment—­she leapt to her feet, and began to dance and spring about the room.  And as Phoebe watched her, startled and open-mouthed, wondering if this was all the reproach that Carrie was ever going to make her, the flushed and joyous creature came and flung her arms round Phoebe’s neck, so that the fair hair and the brown were all in a confusion together, and the child’s cheek was on her mother’s.

’Mummy!—­and I was only five, and you weren’t so very old—­only seven years older than I am now—­and you thought father was tired of you—­and you went off to Canada right away.  My!—­it was plucky of you—­I will say that for you.  And if you hadn’t gone, I should never have seen George.  But—­oh, mummy, mummy!’—­this between laughing and crying—­’I do guess you were just a little fool!  I guess you were!’

Miss Anna sat downstairs listening to the murmur of those hurrying voices above her in Phoebe’s room.  She was darning a tablecloth, with the Manchester paper beside her; and she sat peculiarly erect, a little stern and pinched,—­breathing protest.

It was extraordinary how Carrie had taken it.  These were your Canadian ways, she supposed.  No horror of anything—­no shyness.  Looking a thing straight in the face, at a moment’s notice—­with a kind of humorous common sense—­refusing altogether to cry over spilt milk, even such spilt milk as this—­in a hurry, simply, to clear it up!  A mere metaphorical refusal to cry, this—­for, after all, there had been tears.  But the immediate