“Then,” she said, when she had finished, “I shall burn up all the rest of my valentines, and send only this one; for it is what I mean, in earnest, and, as old Aunty Smoke says, ‘Ef it don’t do no good, it can’t do no harm.’”
“To whom shall you send it, dear?” Bertha asked gently, a little subdued by Nelly’s epistolary success.
“I hadn’t made up my mind,” Nelly answered thoughtfully; “they all need it.”
“O, send it to Joe, my cousin Joe,” cried Kitty Greene. “He is staying with us, and _he_ needs it--bad enough. If ever a boy was full of his pranks, Joe is, and if ever a boy tormented a girl’s life out, Joe does mine.”
A color clear and bright as flame glowed on Nelly Hunt’s cheeks. Had she had dark-eyed Joe in her mind all the while? She only answered very quietly,--
“I don’t mind. I had just as lief send it to Joe. That is, I’ll send it to him if you’ll promise, on your sacred honor, never in any way to let him know who wrote it.”
“Oh, I will--true as I live and breathe I’ll never tell him, and never let him guess, if I can help it.”
“And all you girls?” Nelly asked, with the pretty pink glow deepening in her cheeks. “Will you all promise?”
And they all promised; for there was a sort of honest earnestness in Nelly’s nature to which they found it natural to yield.
So the valentine was directed in Nelly’s most neat and proper manner to “Mr. Joe Greene,” and was dropped into the post-office with the rest of the valentines the girls had written that day.
On the fifteenth the six girls were all together at school, comparing notes and exchanging confidences. But Kitty Greene drew Nelly aside, and said, while they walked up and down the hall together, their arms around each other as girls will,--
Nelly’s pretty cheeks glowed and her eyes shone like stars, but she asked no questions. Indeed, they were scarcely necessary, for Kitty was eager enough to tell her story.
“He got it, don’t you think, along with half-a-dozen others, and he read them all before he came to this one. I knew this, you know, by the shape of the envelope. When he came to it I saw him read it all through, and then I saw him go back and read it again. I heard him say to himself,--
“‘That’s an honest letter from some little saint.’