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Over the gangplank, into the midst of a waiting crowd, and there was Ephraim with the carriage and the bays; and into the roomy vehicle bundled everybody, glad to be so near the end of that famous journey, and Dorothy quite unable to keep still for two consecutive moments.
"Up, up, up! How high we are going! Straight into the skies it seems!"
cried the girl to Jim Barlow, whom n.o.body who had known him on the truck-farm would have recognized as the same lad, so neat and trim he now appeared.
But he had no words to answer. The wonderful upland country through which their course lay impressed him to silence, and the strength of those everlasting hills entered his ambitious soul--making him believe that to him who dared all high achievements were possible.
"Will--we never--_never_ get there?" almost gasped Dorothy, in the breathless eagerness of these last few moments of separation from her loved ones. But Mrs. Cecil answered:
"Yes, my child. Round this turn of the road and behold! we are arrived!
See, that big place yonder whose gates stand wide open is Deerhurst, my home, to which I hope you will often come. And, look this way--there is Skyrie! The little stone cottage on a rock, half-hidden in vines, empty for years, and now--Who is that upon its threshold? That man in the wheeled chair, risking his neck to hasten your meeting? Who that dainty little woman flying down the path to clasp you in her arms? Ah! Dorothy C.! Father and mother, indeed, they have proved to you and glad am I to restore you to them, safe and sound!"
Happy, happy Dorothy! At last, at last she was in the arms whose care had sheltered her through all her life; and there, for the time being, we must leave her. Of her life at Skyrie, of its haps and mishaps, of the mystery which still surrounded her birth and parentage, another book must tell.
Or how beautiful Mrs. Cecil, gay and satisfied as that veritable fairy G.o.dmother to which Dorothy had likened her, drove briskly home to Deerhurst and its accustomed stateliness, with humble Jim Barlow too grateful for speech, already beginning his new and richer life.
All these things and more belong with Dorothy Chester at Skyrie, and of them you shall hear by and by. Till then we leave her, well content.
THE END
