Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/211

Rh "What are you doing?" he asked, staring at her in surprise.

"Burning my letter."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps because I don't write beautiful ones like my mother."

Her voice trembled, broke, and she burst into wild tears. The door into the room beyond was open, and she ran through the aperture and shut the door behind her.

The colonel stood looking after her, amazed, alarmed, uncomprehending. In the old days he would have followed her. Now he stood listening at the closed door, not daring even to knock. When he heard her sobbing cease he came tiptoeing away as though afraid of re-awakening her drowsing grief. Standing by the table, he looked long and ruefully at the lamp-globe.

"Poor little girl!" he whispered; "she 's homesick, too."

The old man's own homesickness was an incurable malady. As he had said himself, he was too old for transplanting. He could not shake himself down in the new rut. He could not get accustomed to the strange city and its unfamiliar thoroughfares. Its alien aspect seemed to force in upon him the sense of his insignificance and failure. He walked along the streets and no one knew him. There were