Not that she loved Dr. Angus!  But she did not choose to be under an obligation to him.  What girl would in the circumstances?

II.

All this time the letter from home lay overlooked on the pillow.  If it could have spoken it would have reproached the daughter for her absorption in its companion, but it bided its time.  Presently Margaret turned with a start, saw it, felt a remorseful stab, and tore it open, without the aid of a hair-pin.

This is what the home letter had to say.  It was from Margaret’s father, and as he seldom wrote to her, leaving, as many men do, the bulk of correspondence with absent members of the family to be the care of his wife and children, she felt a premonitory thrill.

The Lees were a very affectionate and devoted household, clannish to a degree, and undemonstrative, as mountaineers often are.  The deep well of their love did not foam and ripple like a brook, but the water was always there, to draw upon at will.  “The shallows murmur, but the deeps are dumb.”  It was so in the house of Duncan Lee.

“MY DEAR DAUGHTER MARGARET” (the letter began),—­“I hope these lines will find you well, and your examination crowned with success.  We have thought and talked of you much lately, and wished we could be with you to see you when you are graduated.  Mother would have been so glad to go, but it is my sad duty to inform you that she is not well.  Do not be anxious, Margaret.  There is no immediate danger, but your dear mother has been more or less ailing ever since last March, and she does not get better.  We fear there will have to be a surgical operation—­perhaps more than one.  She may have to live, as people sometimes do, for years with a knife always over her head.  We want you to come home, Margaret, as soon as you can.  I enclose a check for all expenses, and I will see that you are met at the railway terminus, so you need not take the long stage-ride all by yourself.  But I am afraid I have not broken it to you gently, my dear, as mother said I must.  Forgive me; I am just breaking my heart in these days, and I need you as much almost as your mother does.

“Your loving father, “DUNCAN LEE.”

A vision rose before Margaret, as with tear-blurred eyes she folded her father’s letter and replaced it in its cover.  She brushed the tears away and looked at the date.  Four days ago the letter had been posted.  Her home, an old homestead in a valley that nestled deep and sweet in the heart of the grand mountain range, guarding it on every side, rose before her.  She saw her father, grizzled, stooping-shouldered, care-worn, old-fashioned in dress, precise in manner, a gentleman of the old school, a man who had never had much money, but who had sent his five sons and his one daughter to college, giving them, what the Lees prized most in life, a liberal education.  She saw her mother, thin, fair, tall, with the golden hair that would fade but would never turn gray, the blue child-like eyes, the wistful mouth.