Her fingers on her lips, and her eyes on the letter, Tess wept softly. Oh, how she loved him, too, her husband.
"I won't stay away very long, my dearest," the letter continued. "I'm coming back to you and shall never leave you again. I'm sending you some money which I want you to use, and I'll send more very soon. This will make you comfortable for a little while."
Tess picked up the bill and looked at it once more. Then she put it down again and went on reading the letter.
"I shall always love you better than any one else in the world, Tessibel ... when I return we shall be together most of the time. I shall, I hope, get over my fear of Ebenezer Waldstricker. I'm studying in my mind a way to make it possible for us to have a home together, of which no one shall know. Believe that I love you ... always and always, my darling. Your Frederick."
Tess lifted her head with a long-drawn sigh. But there was something more to read, a line or two tacked on the end of the letter.
"P. S. My darling, I want you to burn this! I fear some one might get hold of it. F."
After reading over and over the letter, until she had almost learned it by heart, she went back to the shanty, to do as Frederick had bidden her. Kissing the pages again and again and weeping softly so as not to disturb Andy, Tess burned the letter.
That night when Daddy Skinner was sleeping, his laboring breath heard plainly through the shanty, a red-brown head bent over the kitchen table. Around the flickering light fluttered the summer moths, and once in a while one of Tessibel's beloved night things dashed in at the window, took a zig-zag course about the lamp, and flew out again into the shadowy weeping willows. A long, sobbing sigh from the girl brought the dwarf's eager face to the hole in the ceiling.
"Air ye sick, brat?" he whispered.
Tess lifted her eyes from the table.
"Nope, Andy, I were thinkin', that's all," she answered, low-toned.
And perhaps fifteen minutes later, when she had written a name on several envelopes and had torn them up in seeming disapproval, Andy ventured again.
"Ye act awful sad, brat dear. Can't ye tell me about it?"
Tessibel rose to her feet, the gleam of the night light radiating upon the red-brown of her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat before she could speak.
"I air a little sad, Andy dear," she murmured.
"What were ye doin', honey?" asked the dwarf.