But week after week passed without bringing the promised visit.  Instead, Anne received kind but brief and worried notes from Miss Drayton, enclosing the weekly pocket money.  Now and then, there was a picture post-card from Mrs. Patterson, with a loving message to Anne or two or three lines to Honey-Sweet.  The invalid was not improving.  In fact, she was growing worse.  So the days wore on till February.

One crisp frosty morning found Mrs. Patterson lying on a couch beside her window.  In the foreground was a park-like expanse with trees showing their graceful branching in exquisite tracery against the clear blue sky.  Beyond lay Paris, its red and gray roofs showing among the bare trees, with domes, spires, and gilded crosses cresting the irregular line.

“The view here is beautiful, is it not?” said Miss Drayton.

Mrs. Patterson did not move her eyes from the horizon line.  “I was thinking of home,” she said.  “How beautiful it is there these February mornings!  Our noble rows of elms and oaks and maples!  Up the avenue, the domes of the Capitol and the Library are shining against the gray or gold or rosy sky.  And there is the monument pointing heavenward.  Oh, the broad streets, the merry, busy throngs of our own people!  I should like to see it all again.  Sarah, let us go home.  I want—­to be there—­my last days.”

Miss Drayton’s eyes filled with tears, but she kept her voice steady:  “It shall be as you wish, sister.  We will go home,” she said.

Leaving Pat and Anne at school, they made the home-going voyage, and Mrs. Patterson spent her last weeks in her beloved homeland.

CHAPTER XII

After her sister’s death, Miss Drayton went with a cousin for a quiet summer in the Adirondacks.  Before leaving, she had meant to talk to her brother-in-law about Anne, to tell him of her sister’s wish to keep the child, and to say that she herself would take charge of the little orphan.  But she was so tired!  Life seemed very empty and yet she shrank from any new responsibility.  So day after day passed, and she went away without saying a word about Anne.  After all, it would be time enough, she thought, when the children were brought back to America.

In his great new loneliness, Mr. Patterson’s heart turned more than ever to his son; and he put aside business engagements and went, by the swiftest boat and the fastest train, to join Pat in Paris and bring him home.

Father and son met with a formal but hearty handshake.

“Howdy, dad.”

“Hello, son.  How’s your health?”

The French man-servant, looking on at this greeting, shrugged his shoulders.  “My son and I would have given the kiss and the embrace,” he commented to himself.  “But they—­how very American!”