“Maybe,” said Patience, but more gently; “my little blossom,” she added softly.  “P’raps it was greedy to want to keep her to ourselves always.”

Thomas had dropped into a chair by the door.  “I’ve got to write, and I can’t,” he said solemnly, looking up with a half comic, half wistful look in his blue eyes.  “My hands is shaking, and my wits is shaking, and—­and—­but I must, of course, and I am going to Norton to-night to post it, so as the child can get it in the morning.”

“No—­excuse me—­you are not,” said Miss Grace, shaking her head at him, laughing, but decisive.  “I have my bicycle.  I can go there and back in next to no time.  With shaking wits and hands you are not fit!  Besides, what would Mrs. Dawson do all the evening without you?  No, Mr. Dawson, you write the letter and I will do the rest.”

She put paper and pens and ink before him on a little table out in the porch, and she and Patience kept very quiet so that they might not interrupt him; but it was no good, he could not write, he really was too much excited and overcome.  So at last Miss Grace wrote a little letter for him, one that brought satisfaction to both of them.  It expressed their amazement, their joy and excitement, and sent their dearest love, and some little news of them.  “Your granny is stronger and more active than she has been for a long time,” she wrote, “and perhaps your coming will make her quite well and able to get about again.”  She felt she ought to prepare Jessie for some of the change she would see.

“There, that is the business part, as you might call it,” she said, placing the letter in an envelope, “but I am sure she will worry if there isn’t a word from you, Mr. Dawson.  Can you write just a tiny message to slip in with mine?—­just to say how glad you are.”

“Glad!” cried Thomas; “glad is a poor kind of word for what I feel!” He had recovered a little, and was as gay as a schoolboy just getting ready for the holidays.  He pulled a piece of paper towards him, and squaring his elbows, he wrote in large round hand: 

“Come home quick to granp, and I’ll be there to meet you—­
same as before.” 
“Your loving grandfather,”
“T.  Dawson.”

“I haven’t wrote a letter before for nigh ’pon twenty years, I b’lieve,” he gasped, mopping his brow and stretching his arms with relief, “and now ’tisn’t much of a one.  I’m out of practice, but the little maid’ll understand,” and he chuckled happily as he handed it to Miss Grace.  “Yes, she’ll understand.”

Jessie did understand.  When the two letters reached her she danced about the house with glad excitement, then flew to Miss Patch to tell her all about them, and about that first meeting with granp at Springbrook station.

Miss Patch listened and sympathized, and rejoiced, too, and in her calm, sweet old face she showed none of the pain which was filling her own poor heart.  She was losing every one she cared for, not finding them.  All the little daily habits, and pleasures, and friendlinesses, the trifles that made her life, were being taken from her.  In a few days more she would be a stranger among strangers, with no one interested enough to care what became of her, and nothing but her room and her flowers would remain the same.  And even for how long that much would be left her she could not know.