The last one told her that Ollie was coming home on a visit.

"Thursday, that's the day after to-morrow," she said aloud.

Then she read the letter again.
It was a very different letter from those Ollie had written when first he left the woods.

Most of all it was different in that indefinable something by which a man reveals his place in life in the letters he writes, no less than in the words he speaks, or the clothing he wears.

As Sammy rode slowly through the pinery and down the narrow Fall Creek valley, she was thinking of these things, thinking of these things seriously.
The girl had been in a way conscious of the gradual change in Ollie's life, as it had been revealed in his letters, but she had failed to connect the change with her lover.