she might become his wife, I should still be admitted to share her joys and sorrows, and his too, for I felt—to use an expressive Scotch word—that she was thirled to me.
VI.
Mr. Bird did not come back so soon as was expected, for, instead of coming home with the expedition, he left it on its return, and joined an exploring party in America; but he wrote to his daughter as he had opportunity, and she wrote regularly to him. Both sets of letters were as open to me as to her: his were the letters of a man with strong home feelings, possessed by a wander-craze and the enthusiasm of a naturalist. In the letter announcing at last his return he said, "If I were once more at home I'd settle for good and all. In watching the flora and fauna of other countries I have missed the happiness of watching the development of my own particular flower, but we shall have time to make up for that, I hope. Are you neat-handed and quick at the 'uptak,' as my mother used to say? because I have about a shipload of specimens, which to arrange and classify and write about will take both of us some years to come. Tell Miss Cowan I owe her a deep debt of gratitude, and I am also grateful to Jo Hamilton for showing you attention. I'll telegraph when I touch the shore, so that I may not give you an undue surprise. Shall we know each other, I wonder? I study your carte a good while every day."
"What will your father say, Madge," I asked, "when he knows how very attentive Jo has been to you?"
"I don't know. I think he'll be pleased."
"That you are to be stolen from him immediately?"
At last the telegram did come: Mr. Bird was to arrive on the 24th of December, the very day that four years ago his daughter had made her way into my house in the gloaming.
I made business out of doors that day, as I wished the father and daughter to meet for the first time alone. When I returned Madge came and seized me. "Come," she said, "I want to show you papa."
"How do you do, Miss Cowan?" he cried, as if he had known me from infancy, and from that moment I felt quite as if he had. He could make himself at home anywhere, and when Jo Hamilton arrived to dinner and we sat down together, it seemed as if we had all grown intimate at once and without an effort. Mr. Bird had been accustomed to all kinds of society, and his stories and information were, or appeared to be, without end. In the course of the evening he said, quite abruptly, "Madge has been telling me, Jo, that you and she intend getting married."
"Yes," said Jo.
"Well, it's a disappointment to me; but I am glad of it, and I hardly deserve to have her."
"Papa!"
"It's true. I might have stayed at home and looked after you, and then perhaps I would have had you to wait on me."
"But I can wait on you both. Jo will be out all day, you will be a good deal in, and I could help you quite well."
"All true, but I know a man likes to have his wife to himself, and he is right; besides, Jo must live in the town and I must live in the country. Even the country here has a stifling effect after the polar seas and the Rocky Mountains. You have no idea how diminutive everything looks, and how subdued and civilized."
"If you were not very far away we could live with you, and Jo could go to town every day."
"Well, that might do."
They stayed a week, and then left, all three, for Eastwick, and I was once more alone; but Madge wrote to me every day, told me her marriage was to be in June, that Jo had got a delightful house in Eastwick, and that her father was in terms for a very beautiful place, half an hour from Eastwick by the train. "We think," she wrote," "that he'll live with us in winter, and we shall live with him in summer."
I missed her amazingly, but at this
