He handed her the letter, with its neat, old-fashioned penmanship, its primness a little tremulous from the excitement of the writer at the time she had penned it. Susie read it carefully, and when she had finished she looked up at him with softened, grateful eyes.
"The kindest of gentlewomen--your Aunt Harriet."
"My Aunt Harriet!" Susie said it to herself rapturously.
"She hasn't much in her life now--_she's_ lonely, too--and if you can be spoiled, Susie, you soon will be well on the way--between Aunt Harriet and me." He stroked her hair fondly.
"And I'm to go to school back there and live with her. I can't believe it yet!" Susie declared. "So much has happened in the last twenty-four hours that I don't know what to think about first. More things have happened in this little time than in all my life put together."
"That's the way life seems to be," McArthur said musingly--"a few hours at a tension, and long, dull stretches in between."
"Does she know--does Aunt Harriet know--how _green_ I am?"
"I am sure," he replied reassuringly, "that she isn't expecting a young lady of fashion."
"Oh, I've got clothes," said Susie. "Mother made me a dress that will be just the thing to wear in that--what do you call it?--train. She made it out of two shawls that she bought at the Agency."
McArthur looked startled at the frock of red, green, and black plaids which Susie took from a nail behind the door.
"If that black was yellow, it _would_ look better," Susie admitted. "I've got a new Stetson, too."
"It will take some little time to arrange your affairs out here, and in the meantime I'll write Aunt Harriet to choose a wardrobe for you and send it. It will give her the greatest pleasure."
"The pet badger," she explained. "I named her after a Schoolmarm we had--she looks so solemn and important. I can keep her on a chain, and she needn't eat until we get there," Susie pleaded.
Trying not to smile at the mental picture of himself arriving in the staid college town, with a tawny-skinned child in a red, green, and black frock, a crop-eared cayuse, and a badger on a chain, McArthur ventured it as his opinion that the climate would be detrimental to Daisy May's health.
"You undoubtedly will prefer to spend your summers here, and it will be pleasant to have Croppy and Daisy May home to welcome you."