Once more Beatrice turned to the paper and began:
“My dear mother: I expect you think I am never going to send you a letter—”
She read through to the end, thinking that it sounded affectionate but contained little news beyond the fact that the writer was going to China.
“He gives an address to send an answer,” she observed as she folded the letter and handed it back. “What did you write to him?”
To her surprise she saw big tears stand suddenly in Christina’s eyes.
“Ah, Thorvik would not let me, and I couldn’t write myself,” she said. “And my Olaf is such an American, he cannot read my language. That is perhaps why he has not written again and has not come home.”
Then, seeing Beatrice’s puzzled look, she explained more fully, although it was difficult to make plain her foreign notion that women are subject to the men in their houses.
“Thorvik is my brother, once a good Finn like myself, but now—oh, so different. He was to come to America some years ago, but the war broke out over here and he went, instead into the Russian army. Now that there is peace he has come to us, but how that time had changed him! He is full of wild talk of revolution, and tyrants and destroying every thing. He and Olaf never agreed. It was what made my boy unhappy at home, and, though I did what I could, Olaf went away from us at last.”
Beatrice leaned forward in her saddle with sudden interest.
“Do you live in a little cottage half-way up the hill above Ely? That man I saw there when I rode by—is that your brother?”
“And if you could write to your son,” the girl pursued, “what would you say?”
“I would say, ‘Come home,’” cried Christina. “Over and over I would say, ‘Come home. If it is only for a week or a day between voyages,’ I would say, ‘come still, no matter what happened before you went away.’”
Beatrice felt in the pocket of her riding skirt. There were a note-book and pencil there, she felt sure, for she had made a list of supplies to be bought in the village before she set out on her ride.
“Do you want me to put down the address and write to your son for you?” she offered.
“Oh, if you would!” cried Christina. “And you would never tell Thorvik?”
“There is no danger of that,” Beatrice assured her. “And I think somehow that your boy will come back.”