Keefe wants to come down here this winter, but I’m not going to let him. There is no reason why he should come to this one place out of all the places in the world. Let him go up to Sunset Gap to his own wonderful little sister, Mary Cecily Rowantree. He says he needs inspiration, but if anyone can give it to him, she can. You see, if he came here, he would be terribly interrupting, and I cannot and will not be interrupted. I’m going to earn the living for the family, though, as I said at the beginning, I don’t know how.
Carin, I go out and sit down beside my dear little mama’s grave and think and think. I tell her how good these people were to her, how good they have been to me ever since that terrible day when I was left alone, and I beg her if she is indeed a spirit now, who can see and understand the things that are hidden from us earth-bound ones, that she will put something into my heart to tell me what to do.
I am ready, Carin, to prove myself. Here I am with my strong body, with my heart full to bursting with gratitude and love, with my waiting hands and brain. But I need direction. You couldn’t give me that, could you, dear yellow-headed one?
Yes, I wish you might have come home this summer. It would have helped. Barbara Summers was away, too. She went home to see her people for the first time since she was married. You remember her people didn’t approve of her marriage. She had a very happy time, and all is well between her and them at last. Of Annie Laurie I see little. She is too busy. But we signal each other, she from her roof, I from the “Outlook.”
Good-bye, dear. If I write you too much, forgive me. I need to write. It comforts me. You understand all I say—all I do not say, too.
“Little Windows,” Mount Hebron, N. C., October 20th.
Yes, the letter is from Azalea, though she is in a place that neither you nor she ever heard of before.
Are you wondering what they are, or what it is?
It is the name of a cottage on the top of Mount Hebron. You have seen Hebron, looking like a cloud, from the top of our own Mount Tennyson.
The cottage belongs to Mr. and Mrs. David Knox, and, Oh, Carin, they—
In my last letter I told you how wretched Father McBirney was feeling. Well, he grew worse and worse, till at last he did not know a moment when he was free from pain. Jim and I tried to keep things going, but it was hard. We began to grow anxious about money and the bare necessaries. Then I said: