Carol considered herself well schooled in the art of emotional restraint, but when she finished reading those blessed words--which to her ears, so hungry for the voices of home, sounded like an extract from the beatitudes--she put her head on the back of David's hand and gulped audibly. And she admitted that she must certainly have cried, save for the restraining influence of the knowledge that crying made her nose red.
In the meantime, back in Iowa, the Starrs in their separate households, were running riot. Never was there to be such a wonderful visit for anybody in the world. Jerry and Prudence bundled up their family, and got into a Harmer Six and drove down to Mount Mark, where they ensconced themselves in the family home and announced their intention of staying until Connie had gone. As soon as Fairy heard that, she hastened home too, full of the glad tiding that she had found a boy she wanted to adopt at last. Lark and Jim neglected the farm shamefully, and all the women of the neighborhood were busy making endless little odds and ends of dainty clothing for Carol, who had lived ready-made during the three years of their domicile in the shadowland of sunshine.
A hurried letter was despatched to David's doctor, asking endless questions, pledging him to secrecy, and urging him to wire an answer C. O. D. Little Julia was instructed as to her mother's charms and her father's virtues far beyond the point of her comprehension. And Jerry spent long hours with Connie in the car, explaining its mechanism, and making her a really proficient driver, although she had been very skilful behind the wheel before. Also, he wrote long letters to his dealer in Denver, giving him such a host of minute instructions that the bewildered agent thought the "old gent in Des Moines had gone daft."
Carol wrote every day, pitifully, jubilantly, begging Connie to hurry and get started, admonishing her to take a complete line of snapshots of every separate Starr, to count each additional gray hair in darling father's head, and to locate every separate dimple in Julia's fat little body. And every letter was answered by every one of the family, who interrupted themselves to urge everybody else not to give anything away, and to be careful what they said. And they all cried over Julia, and over Carol's letters, and even cried over the beautiful assortment of clothes they had accumulated for Carol, using Lark as a sewing model.