"Ah, it is no want of love for my dear native land that makes me impatient to be gone!" she answered half sadly.
"So papa intends, but of course everything in this world is uncertain."
"I shall look anxiously for my European letters, and expect them to be very interesting."
"I'll do my best, Wal," she said languidly, "but I don't feel, just now, as if I could ever write anything worth reading."
"I think I never saw you so blue," he said in a lively, jesting tone. "I must tell you of the fun we fellows have, and if it doesn't make you wish yourself one of us--Well," and he launched out into an animated description of various practical jokes played off by the students upon their professors or on each other.
He succeeded at length in coaxing some of the old brightness into the sweet face, and Mr. and Mrs. Dinsmore, mounting the stairs on their return from their walk, exchanged glances of delighted surprise at the sound of a silvery laugh which had not greeted their ears for days.
Walter received a hearty welcome from both. His visit, though necessarily short, was of real service to Elsie, doing much to rouse her out of herself and her grief; thus beginning the cure which time and change of scene--dulling the keen edge of sorrow and disappointment, and giving pleasant occupation to her thoughts--would at length carry on to completion.
"The shaken tree grows firmer at the roots; So love grows firmer for some blasts of doubt."
It was two years or more since the Oaks had suffered the temporary loss of its master and mistress, yet they had not returned; they still lingered on foreign shores, and Mrs. Murray, who had been left at the head of household affairs, looked in vain for news of their home-coming.
She now and then received a short business letter from Mr. Dinsmore or of directions from Rose; or a longer one from the latter or Elsie, giving entertaining bits of travel, etc.; and occasionally Adelaide would ride over from Roselands and delight the old housekeeper's heart by reading aloud a lively gossipy epistle one or the other had addressed to her.
How charmed and interested were both reader and listener; especially when they came upon one of Rose's graphic accounts of their presentation at court--in London, Paris, Vienna, or St. Petersburg--wherein she gave a minute description of Elsie's dress and appearance, and dwelt with motherly pride and delight upon the admiration everywhere accorded to the beauty and sweetness of the lovely American heiress.