“I want to know,” said Ephraim.  “I am glad to hear it.  Glad you went up, Cynthy—­you done right to go.

“I’d have gone with you, if you’d only told me.  I’ll git a chance to go up Sunday.”

There was an air of repressed excitement about the veteran which did not escape Cynthia.  He held two letters in his hand, and, being a postmaster, he knew the handwriting on both.  One had come from that place in New Jersey, and drew no comment.  But the other!  That one had been postmarked at the capital, and as he had sat at his counter at the post-office waiting for closing time he bad turned it over and over with many ejaculations and futile guesses.  Past master of dissimulation that he was, he had made up his mind—­if he should find Cynthia at home—­to lay the letters indifferently on the table and walk into his bedroom.  This campaign he now proceeded to carry out.

Cynthia smiled again when he was gone, and shook her head and picked up the letters:  Bob’s was uppermost and she read that first, without a thought of the other one.  And she smiled as she read for Bob had had a promotion.  He was not yet at the head of the locomotive works, he hastened to add, for fear that Cynthia might think that Mr. Broke had resigned the presidency in his favor; and Cynthia never failed to laugh at these little facetious asides.  He was now earning the princely sum of ninety dollars a month—­not enough to marry on, alas!  On Saturday nights he and Percy Broke scrubbed as much as possible of the grime from their hands and faces and went to spend Sunday at Elberon, the Broke place on the Hudson; from whence Miss Sally Broke, if she happened to be at home, always sent Cynthia her love.  As Cynthia is still a heroine, I shall not describe how she felt about Sally Broke’s love.  There was plenty of Bob’s own in the letter.  Cynthia would got have blamed him if he bad fallen in love with Miss Broke.  It seemed to her little short of miraculous that, amidst such surroundings, he could be true to her.

After a period which was no briefer than that usually occupied by Bob’s letters, Cynthia took the other one from her lap, and stared at it in much perplexity before she tore it open.  We have seen its contents over Mr. Worthington’s shoulder, and our hearts will not stop beating—­as Cynthia’s did.  She read it twice before the full meaning of it came to her, and after that she could not well mistake it,—­the language being so admirable in every way.  She sat very still for a long while, and presently she heard Ephraim go out.  But Cynthia did not move.  Mr. Worthington relented and Bob recalled!  The vista of happiness suddenly opened up, widened and widened until it was too bright for Cynthia’s vision, and she would compel her mind to dwell on another prospect,—­that of the father and son reconciled.  Although her temples throbbed, she tried to analyze the letter.  It implied that Mr. Worthington had allowed Bob to remain away on a sort of probation; it implied that it had been dictated by a strong paternal love mingled with a strong paternal justice.  And then there was the appeal to her:  “You will look with indulgence upon any acts of mine which sprang from a natural solicitation for the welfare and happiness of my only child.”  A terrible insight is theirs to whom it is given to love as Cynthia loved.