he is to let you know that all is well with your innocent if imprudent parents. Of course, your mother could go home if she would, but you know her well enough to know she won’t. In fact, there is some talk of making her go home, and she says if they start any such thing she is going to swear she can draw[79] any map of Turkey that ever was known to man, and can do it with her eyes shut and her hands tied behind her. [78] [79] We both of us wish you were safe in Kentucky with your friends. We spend many nights talking of you and reproaching ourselves that we have left you so much to yourself. I don’t see how we could help it in a way, but maybe I should have given up engineering and taken up preaching or been a tailor or something. Then I might have made a settled habitation for all of us. Your mumsy is writing you a long letter, too, so I must stop. She is quite disappointed not to use her clever scheme for getting the letter to you, and rather resents the lady at the Legation. Yours, Bobby. Yours, Bobby. [80] [80] CHAPTER VI. AT THE TRICOTS’. It took one month and three days for Judy to get the above letter, but her mind was set somewhat at rest long before that time by the Ambassador himself, who had learned through his confrère in Berlin that Mr. and Mrs. Kean were safe and at large, although not allowed to leave Berlin. The daughter was so accustomed to her parents being in dangerous places that she did not feel so concerned about them as an ordinary girl would have felt for ordinary parents. Ever since she could remember, they had been camping in out-of-the-way places and making hair-breadth escapes from mountain wild cats and native uprisings and what not. She could not believe the Germans, whom she had always thought of as[81] rather bovine, could turn into raging lions so completely. [81] “Bobby will light on his feet!” she kept saying to herself until it became almost like a prayer. “No one could hurt Mamma. She will be protected just as children will be!” And then came terrible, exaggerated accounts of the murder in cold blood of little children, and then the grim truth of the destruction of Louvain and Rheims, and anything seemed
Prev.
Back
Top