But she did not show her appreciation of the room. She simply glanced about it, as Elsie seemed to expect her to, and then muttering a crusty “good-night” crossed the hall to her own room.
Bertha was waiting for her there. Evidently Aunt Katherine had instructed her that Kate would retire early. The opal lamp by the bed was shedding its delicate radiance through the room, the bed was turned down, Kate’s dressing gown and nightgown were spread across its foot, and her bedroom slippers stood near at hand. Her bag had long since been unpacked and put away. The “King of the Fairies” and the mystery story—Sam and Lee’s gift—lay on the bed table under the lamp.
Kate was very glad of her own cool, clear little room. She liked it better than all that colour and ease across the hall. And in any case she would never be able to share that other room with Elsie. She determined not to go into it at all—no, not even to look over the books!
“Miss Elsie is in the sitting-room,” she told Bertha. “She said to tell you that when you were ready she would go to bed. I don’t need any help, truly.”
“Sha’n’t I even brush your hair, Miss Kate? That is so restful.”
“You’ve unpacked for me. Thank you very much. My short hair doesn’t need much brushing.”
So, reluctantly, for Miss Frazier had requested her to attend to both girls equally, Bertha took her dismissal. In a minute Kate heard voices on the other side of Elsie’s door. Then Elsie opened the door and looked in through the bathroom.
“Aunt Katherine says we’re to leave these doors open,” she informed Kate, calmly. “That is so you won’t be lonely.”
Kate nodded an “all right.” But to herself she said, “I’d be a heap less lonely if you’d close the door and I’d never see your face again.”
She undressed well out of sight of Elsie’s room. When she was in nightgown, dressing robe, and slippers, she sat down on the three-legged ivory stool, before the hinged mirrors, brush in hand. She was surprised by the expression of her own face as it looked back at her grimly out of the glass. All its humour, its charm, was gone. She was just a rather plain young girl. And as she looked at this disenchanted reflection it suddenly went misty and blurred. She saw tears rising in its eyes.
With an angry hand she dashed them away and stuck out her tongue at the blurred face in the mirror. Then came her own laugh, the eyes crinkling to slits, the mouth freed from its set lines and lifting wings in a smile.
“Idiot,” she whispered. “To cry about her! She’s a stuck-up little pig, but you needn’t become a grouchy glum just for that. Be yourself in spite of her.”
But as she went toward the windows to push them a little farther back, for the night was a warm and beautiful one, she turned her head and looked through the open doors into Elsie’s room. Elsie was sitting before her own dressing table, a replica of Kate’s. She was in an exquisitely soft-looking pink dressing gown edged about the neck and the long flowing sleeves with swansdown. Bertha stood behind her, brushing her curls with long, even strokes. The eyes of the two girls met in Elsie’s glass. Flashingly, Kate was glad she had made up a face and got it over with; otherwise she would certainly have made up just the same face now, at Elsie, before thinking.
The pairs of eyes held each other in the glass for an instant. It must have been something deceiving in the twin lights glowing at either side of Elsie’s mirror, or in the glass itself, Kate decided afterward, but for that instant it seemed that a comrade had looked questioningly out of the mirror at her! But the hidden comrade, if such it was, vanished even before Kate had time to turn away.
What a delicious bed Aunt Katherine had given her! She delighted in its scented linen and light covers. She punched the fluffy pillows up into a bolster, slipped out of her dressing gown and in between the smooth, lavender-scented sheets. Sitting there against the pillows she took “The King of the Fairies” on to her knee. She couldn’t sleep quite yet, she knew. Why, at home she seldom went to bed before her mother, and now it was not yet nine. The very sight, even the feeling of this book in her hands filled her with a happy stir deep in the far wells of imagination. She opened it casually. Any place would do since she already knew it practically by heart. The very sight of the smooth, clearly printed pages with their wide margins freed her. She was ready for space now and clear, disentangled adventurings into light.
Although the book was titled “The King of the Fairies” it was not at all a fairy story for children. Kate had only just reached the age when it could be cared about. It began with a girl and a boy quarrelling on a fence in a meadow. It was a real quarrel, a horrid quarrel with hot and sharp and bitter words. But it is interrupted by a tramp happening by. He asks them a direction and they stop their recriminations for the time to point him his way scornfully. Accepting their directions he still tarries a while to ask them if they themselves don’t want some pointing. Then the story, the marvellous story begins. He points to an elder bush and asks them what it is. They tell him glibly. Then he gets on to the fence between them and with his eyes level with theirs asks them to look again. Everything is changed for the girl and boy in that instant. They begin seeing as the tramp sees. They are in Paradise or Fairyland: the author himself makes no clear distinction. But the elder bush is now much more than an elder bush. And the meadow is full of a life the girl and boy had never suspected. There are other beings moving in it, fairy beings, perhaps. Not only is the invisible made visible to the girl and boy seeing as the tramp sees, but the, until then at least, partly visible—the brook, the trees, the very stones and the elder bush—are seen to have more life than could be suspected. And all colours are changed, too. The boy and girl are seeing things in a new spectrum.
Finally the three get down from the fence and wander about in this Fairyland that has always been here truly but is only now seen. The book is their day in the meadow. And when you have turned the last page you do not remember it as a book. You remember it as a day in Fairyland or Paradise—or as a day on which you saw things clear. And you never doubt for a minute that the author himself is one who has certainly seen like that. Perhaps he only saw it in a flash, but he did see for himself and with his own eyes.
In the end the boy and girl return to the fence and the tramp departs on the way they had pointed out to him. But as he goes, he turns about when he gets to the elder bush and they realize in that last glance from his eyes that he is the King of the Fairies. Then as he turns again and walks on, as long as he is in their sight, he is simply a common tramp.
But their quarrel has dropped for ever dead between them. A boy and a girl who have actually walked in Fairyland together and seen things clear have nothing to quarrel about, and so long as they both shall live can have nothing to quarrel about again.
And though they had surely seen things clear for a whole day in the meadow—the sun had risen to the meridian and gone down into the west while they wandered—now when they look at each other there is no indication that a minute has passed. The sun is where it was at the height of their quarrel! And so it appears that the tramp’s arrival and stay and departure and their whole day in the meadow was squeezed into perhaps one straight meeting of their eyes as they quarrelled.
But they do not spend themselves in wonder. This boy and girl are Wisdom’s own children, in spite of the momentary silliness that had plunged them head-first into the darkness of an enmity; they accept the gods’ gifts. And for a boy and a girl who have spent a day in Fairyland together, or for that matter only spent a minute there together, the gods’ gift is marriage.
Katherine, when she had finished the book, had said that it was the most perfect love story she had ever read; she wished she were rich enough to give it to all the lovers she knew. And she said, too, that the author must be a very wonderful person, a great man in some field of life. Perhaps that was why he had not signed his name to the work.
As Kate read now, the conversation between Elsie and Bertha in the next room was a humming undertone to her thoughts. She could not have caught their words if she had listened. But she had no inclination to listen. She was moving in a world where quarrels and bitter feelings were an impossibility. She was seeing things through the eyes of the King of the Fairies. She was in the meadows that she knew at home, feeling the larger life there that the King of the Fairies had made known to her. She was standing, tall, in the body of an elm tree, spreading with its leaves to the sun, feeling with its roots into the vibrating ground.
Suddenly a voice came to her. It was a long way she rushed back to find the voice. Bertha was standing beside her bed.
“Shall I turn out your light, Miss Kate? Or do you wish to read?”
Kate did not know that Bertha had come into the room at all. Elsie’s light was out, and if the doors through must be left open, Kate’s light would disturb her. Of course she must put out her light and try to sleep. She was on the verge of saying, “I will put out my own light, thanks,” but the meadow from which she had rushed back had, oddly enough as some might think, put her into more perfect harmony with her own restricted four walls. So she said, “You may put the light out, thank you.” And she did not even smile to herself when Bertha bent over the table and pulled at the little chain that was much nearer Kate’s reach than hers. She accepted the service naturally, since such acceptance was Aunt Katherine’s wish and the purpose of Bertha’s presence here.
“Good-night,” Bertha spoke out of the sudden darkness.
“Good-night,” Kate answered. Then soft footfalls, and she was alone in the room.
But though “The King of the Fairies” had done a good deal for Kate it had not had time to do enough to make her call a “good-night” to Elsie. Suppose Aunt Katherine knew the two girls were going to sleep without a word to each other!
From her bed, now that the room was dark, Kate could see the dim apple orchard under starlight. She rose on her elbow and strained her eyes for the outlines of the little orchard house. She found it by hard looking. How mysterious, how lonely, still how alive out there it stood. And she had heard a door close softly, just as though a door knob had turned as they stood below those open back windows. And why were those windows open? Elsie knew, Kate was sure. The little orchard house harboured some secret of Elsie’s.
But what was that! Kate sat up in bed and bent toward the window, her eyes straining. A light, flickering, was moving down through the house! Kate watched it as it went by several windows, breathless. Soon it disappeared altogether, and a second after Kate thought she heard the front door of the little orchard house softly closing, or opening; but that must have been fancy, for the orchard house was much too far away for a sound of that quality to carry to her.
As she curled down into bed again her eyes crinkled with her smile in the darkness. Well, here was mystery. She would write Sam and Lee that she would save their mystery story for duller times. Now she was living in one!
CHAPTER VI
“I WILL PAY FOR IT”
Kate was waked next morning by Elsie moving about in her room. She opened her eyes quickly and sat up. To her surprise Elsie was dressed and ready for the day. She looked as fresh as the July morning in a blue and white gingham, white sport shoes and stockings. Her hair was pinned up at her ears, and that made her look older but not less pretty than last night.
Kate was not a girl to wake up with a grudge on a morning like this, or on any morning, in fact. So she sang out now, “Hello!”
But Elsie, apparently, had not been mellowed by sleep. She responded to the “hello” with a nod. Then, much to Kate’s surprise, she came directly to the bed and picked up “The King of the Fairies” from the table there.
“Bertha told me you had borrowed my book,” she said. “I don’t mind your borrowing books. But I think you ought to ask. And Aunt Katherine didn’t give me this one. I’m going to read outdoors before breakfast, and I want ‘The King of the Fairies,’ if you don’t mind.”
Kate laughed. “It’s my copy, not yours,” she said. “Mother and I gave it to each other last Easter. It’s a perfectly great book, Mother thinks, and I brought it with me here because I love it so.”
Elsie was standing directly in the gilded morning sunlight. Kate had just waked up and her eyes were still a little dazed from sleep. That may account for her seeing again, flashingly, the comrade she had surprised in the mirror last night. Surely Elsie’s whole being in that flash radiated comradeship. And there was something more. Kate could not remember, but sometime in her life—it felt a long time ago—she had exchanged glances with that golden comrade! Or had it been just a vivid dream she had had, or perhaps only the ideal she had set up in her mind of the perfect comrade?
But Elsie almost instantly moved out of the sunlight nearer the bed, and everything was as before.
“Please pardon me,” she said coldly. “I don’t know why it never entered my head that you might have a copy of your own. That was stupid of me. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“So it is still on,” Kate told herself, as Elsie left the room. “She hates me. She hates me just awfully. And that was awfully rude about the book, even if it had been hers! How could she be so rude—to a guest? She is afraid of me, too. She is afraid I will discover the secret of the orchard house. Why, perhaps she doesn’t hate me, personally at all. Mayn’t it be just fear that makes her like that? For she has no reason to hate me, and of course if she has some secret in the orchard house she has every reason to think I may discover it. For I do mean to explore it thoroughly when I get around to it.”
Somehow the conviction she had come to, that fear rather than personal dislike was ruling Elsie’s conduct, comforted her. Moreover, it was a perfect morning—sunshine, a light breeze at the curtains, birds carolling (how had she ever slept through the noise those birds were making?) and the room pervaded by flower scents from balcony and gardens. It was with a light heart, then, that Kate allowed Bertha to run her bath, lay out her clothes, and finally even brush the bobbed hair. Such unneeded service seemed absurd to Kate, but it was in the order of this household, and some fresh sweetness she had brought from sleep made her eager to harmonize herself as much as possible with the world she had come back to. But even so, in a minute when Bertha’s back was turned, Kate grabbed the brush from the dressing table and gave a quick, surreptitious stroke that turned the bang Bertha had created into a wing across her brows; for Bertha, experienced lady’s maid as she was, had not caught the knack of that so quickly.
It was with a heart as bright as the morning that Kate finally went down the long stairs just as the soft-toned gong was sounding. There was no sign of breakfast being laid in the dining-room, so she wandered about the house, in and out of the rooms she had only glimpsed through open doors last night.
Everything was quite beautiful. Kate knew that Aunt Katherine had once been determined to “go in for art seriously.” But at that time money had been lacking for such a design, and she had with keen disappointment submitted to fate and become a school teacher. When wealth had suddenly come to her everyone thought she would, of course, take up study with some great master and become an artist. But this never came about. Perhaps the first disappointment had been too keen; perhaps in giving up her hope so definitely she had made it impossible for herself ever to renew it under any conditions. But now, wandering about these rooms that Aunt Katherine had made, Kate realized that she had turned artist in a way. Instead of painting on canvas she had created beauty in her environment. For her home was like a warmly painted picture with beautiful lights and shadows. And Kate soon felt as though she were walking around in a picture. The morning sunshine outside was its great gilded frame. That was how the utter silence and absence of human beings in these big downstairs rooms explained itself to her fancy; somehow she had walked into a picture painted by her great aunt, a picture hung up somewhere in an enormous gilded frame. This fancy stirred her imagination and she pretended so hard to herself that it became quite real.
That is why she almost started when she finally did hear voices and the clink of china. Coming out of the picture into everyday life, suddenly like that, was something of a jar. And she was probably late for breakfast wherever it was being served. She hurried her steps and found Aunt Katherine and Elsie already at the meal. They were sitting at a little table under a peach tree growing up between the flags of a terrace just outside a sunny breakfast-room. How delightful! Kate was glad now to step down out of the picture.
Aunt Katherine greeted her with a welcoming smile. And having just stepped down out of Aunt Katherine’s picture Kate felt that she understood her, that they were very close to each other really. How different, and how pleasantly different, Great Aunt Katherine was proving herself from Kate’s preconceived ideas of her.
Kate took the little garden chair waiting for her and unfolded her napkin. Coffee was percolating visibly in two large glass globes set one on top of the other before Aunt Katherine. The silver sugar bowl and cream pitcher turned all the sunlight that found them into a million diamond sparkles. A half grapefruit with ice snuggled about it was at Kate’s place. Kate lifted the slender pointed spoon made just for grapefruit, and gratefully tasted the tart pulp and juice.
“Elsie might have shown you the way,” Aunt Katherine was saying. “I thought of course you would come down together.”
“I am sorry I was late. But it was fun wandering around in the house trying to find you.” And then Kate told them all about how she had felt herself in a picture.
Aunt Katherine was pleased. “Was it really like that to you, my house?” she asked.
“Oh, yes! and more so than I know how to say. Most of the windows and doors open, the glimpses of tree branches and flowers and sky, the light and shade in the rooms, all the flowers in vases in surprising places, the colours of everything, the hangings——”
Kate stopped, embarrassed by her own enthusiasm, or perhaps discomfited by Elsie’s cool gaze. But she had said more than enough to give Aunt Katherine very real and deep pleasure.
“Then I see,” she told Kate, “why you did not mind wandering about alone or our seeming inhospitality. And I think your dress, my dear, fitted into the picture. It is a very poetic dress.”
Kate flushed with pleasure. “Mother would love to hear you say that,” she said. “We made it out of the new chintz curtains in her bedroom. You see I had to have some dresses, and there were the curtains. Mother thought——”
But at mention of her mother Kate saw in morning light what she had failed to see last night in lamplight: the deepening of pain lines around Aunt Katherine’s eyes and mouth, a cloud of pain somehow in her face. So she broke off her account of Katherine’s ingenuity.
“I’m glad you like it,” she finished lamely.
“I have brought you the key to the orchard house,” Aunt Katherine said, as though it were a matter she would like to be done with quickly. “Elsie will show you all over it and around it. Then I have an errand at the post office I wish you girls would do for me. I have a very busy morning ahead. The car is at your disposal this morning, and I should think you would take a good long ride. It is really too warm to do anything more energetic. At least, it promises to be a very warm day.”
Kate looked at the key which Aunt Katherine had handed her. It was an old-fashioned brass key, clumsy and heavy but not too big to go into her pocket. When she had tucked it away there she raised defiant eyes to Elsie. But her defiance suddenly turned to pity. Elsie looked so troubled!
Aunt Katherine with a word of apology to the girls picked up the mail now lying at her place and began reading the one or two personal letters she found among the circulars, pleas for charity, and advertisements. Kate leaned toward Elsie and said quickly and softly, “Don’t worry. You’re safe to-day and to-morrow, too, and for as long as you mind, I guess. If I see the little house sometime, what does it matter when?”
Elsie nodded to signify that she had caught the very low words, and her face cleared.
“Ungrateful thing! She might at least have thanked me,” Kate reflected.
But very soon she learned that Elsie was thanking her for that impulsive gesture of generosity in her own way. When they joined each other in the big car that was waiting for them at the door, half an hour later, Elsie was plainly trying to force herself to be friendly and natural. But since this friendliness was forced, Kate’s response to it was of necessity forced, too. Oh, how different everything was turning out between these two girls from the way Kate had dreamed it!
“Don’t you think Oakdale is pretty?” Elsie asked. “People care so much about their gardens. And then the streets are all so wide and shady, and where they aren’t wide they are just little lanes like ours that end perhaps in a gate or an open meadow. Those endings of streets seem romantic to me always.”
“Yes, I think they are romantic,” Kate agreed. “And when your lane turned all the away around and ended in the orchard, that must have been awfully romantic. I wonder why Aunt Katherine ever let the grass grow over it so that it got lost, the end of the lane!”
Something in Elsie’s restrained silence at this remark made Kate realize that she had blundered. Oh, dear! She hadn’t meant to. Truly! She tried to explain.
“You see it was my mother’s house, Elsie. You can’t know what fun it is to imagine your mother a little girl, to see for the first time the house where she was born and the places where she played. Everything about your mother’s childhood—well, there’s a kind of mystery about it.”
Elsie deliberately turned away her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. What an idiot I am! I had forgotten about your mother! How could I be such a—brute!”
Elsie looked at Timothy’s back steadily. “Don’t be so sorry as all that,” she replied coolly and without any apparent emotion in her voice. “My mother was killed in an automobile accident in France two years ago. But I never knew her, anyway. When I was at home she was usually somewhere else, at house-parties or sanitariums, or abroad. And I was only home for holidays. She sent me off to boarding school when I was eight. Her being dead hasn’t made much difference to me. I was terribly sorry for her when they told me, that was all. She was so pretty, and too young-seeming to be a mother. And she would have hated dying! Sometimes I ache for her when I think of that. But that’s all.”
“Oh, how can you! How can you speak about a dead mother like that!” Kate’s heart was crying. But she only said, after a second: “There are lots of jolly-looking girls and boys in this town. Do you know them all? They keep looking at us, but you never speak. Don’t you see people? Mother’s like that. She’s so absent minded.”
But even this was an unfortunate subject. Unlucky Kate!
“I know who most of them are but of course I don’t know them socially.”
This was amazing. “Why not?”
But here all Elsie’s attempt at friendliness broke down. She turned on Kate a tigerish face. “Yes, why not?” she almost hissed. “You know very well, Kate Marshall, why not. Here’s the post office.”
Kate was shocked. “Well, I certainly don’t know ‘why not’,” she contradicted. “I haven’t the least idea—unless you treat them in the rude, horrid way you treat me.”
The car had drawn up to the curb and come to a stand-still before the pride of Oakdale’s civic life, its white marble post office built on the lines of a Greek temple. Elsie’s only answer to Kate’s denial was a shrug.
“Have you letters? And are there any errands?”
Timothy stood on the sidewalk asking for orders.
Elsie stood up quickly. “I’ll post the letters myself,” she answered him. Kate noticed for the first time a package that Elsie was carrying. Across the top the word “Manuscript” was written in a round hand, and the address was that of a publishing house and caught Kate’s attention because it was the same publishing house that had brought out “The King of the Fairies.” Kate read the large round black handwriting quite mechanically and without any motive of curiosity as Elsie stepped past her out of the car.
When Elsie was halfway up the post-office steps she turned and ran back to the curb. “Tell me,” she said, “didn’t Aunt Katherine ask us to do something for her? I’ve quite forgotten what it was.”
“Yes. A dollar book of stamps and ten special deliveries. She gave you the money.”
“Oh, thanks. Good for your memory.”
“What is she sending to those publishers?” Kate found herself wondering when the spinning glass doors had closed on her “cousin.” “There was a special delivery stamp on it, too. And it filled her mind so full that she quite forgot Aunt’s errands. Can Elsie be trying to write? Oh, wouldn’t that be exciting!”
“Now Holt and Holt’s,” Elsie ordered Timothy when she returned to the car.
“Holt and Holt’s is a grocery store. I noticed it as we came by,” Kate said. “I didn’t hear Aunt Katherine say anything about groceries.”
“Of course not. Julia, the cook, attends to all that over the telephone. This is my errand. Do you mind?”
Kate refused to rise to the sarcasm in Elsie’s “Do you mind?”
But at the grocers’ she said, “I think I’ll come, too, and stretch my legs.”
“All right.” But Kate distinctly felt that Elsie did not at all like the idea of having her companionship in the store. However, her pride would not let her turn back now, of course.
Elsie’s order was given briskly: “A head of crisp Iceland lettuce,” she said, “a small bottle of salad oil, genuine Italian, half a pound of almonds, half a dozen eggs, and the smallest loaf of bread you have. Oh, yes, and a pound of flour, if you sell so little.”
“Thanks,” said the young clerk who had written the order down in his book.
But Elsie waited. He looked at her inquiringly. “Anything more?”
“No. But I want what I ordered.”
“I thought we’d send it, of course. It will be quite a load.”
“No. Please do the things up and put them into my car for me. How much is it all?”
“Oh, that’s all right. You’re Miss Frazier, aren’t you? You folks have a charge account here.”
“However, I want to pay for these things myself. Do not by any means put them on Miss Frazier’s account.” Elsie spoke primly but with flushed cheeks that contradicted her outward composure.
“Thought I’d just tell you. Yesterday when you came in and paid for things Mr. Holt said there must be some mistake.”
“There is no mistake. And will you please put the box of eggs in a bag? Not just tie them with a string like that!”
“We’re going up your way, miss, in about ten minutes. Why don’t we take ’em?”
But Elsie shook her head, biting her lips with annoyance at the young man’s persistence. She commanded him to put the things into the car.
“To the Bookshop now,” she ordered Timothy as they started again.
At the Bookshop Kate did not speak of getting out, though it certainly attracted her more than the grocery store. But Elsie herself turned at the door. “Don’t you want to come, too, Kate?” she called. “It’s an awfully cunning little place.”
Kate and her mother were always drawn by bookshops wherever they found them, and they spent in them during the course of a year a sum that it would have taken no budget expert to see was all out of proportion to their income. But then, Katherine always said when the subject of “budgeting” came up that it was as foolish to make rules about the spending of money as it would be to make rules about the spending of time. It was a matter for the individual, strictly. Kate followed Elsie eagerly, now.
It was such a little shop that Kate, although she immediately gravitated toward a table of books that interested her particularly, could not avoid hearing Elsie’s conversation with the Bookshop woman.
“Have you Havelock Ellis’s ‘Dance of Life’?” she asked.
“Yes, a new order has just come in. I knew Miss Frazier wanted it and I was sending it up first thing this afternoon. Would you like to take it?”
“Yes, I’ll take one for my aunt, if she ordered it. I’ll take two. One is for myself, and I will pay for it.”
“Your aunt always charges. Sha’n’t I charge them both?”
“No, I will pay for it. How much is it?”
“Four dollars.”
“Four dollars! Oh, dear! So much?”
The woman was very obliging. “Why not charge it?” she suggested again, for Elsie was looking woefully into her purse.
“No. Let me think a minute. Well, I won’t buy it to-day.”
Elsie’s face had so fallen, she was so obviously disappointed, that Kate went over to her. “I have money,” she offered. “Five dollars. You can borrow from me.”
But as she spoke her glance quite unconsciously fell upon the purse opened in Elsie’s hand. A little roll of crisp bills lay there for any one to see, amounting surely to more than four dollars.
“No, thanks.” Elsie replied, snapping the purse shut. “Let’s go home.”
Kate turned it over quickly as they went back to the car. Why had Elsie acted, as she certainly had acted, as though she did not have four dollars in her purse when it was perfectly plain that she had more? And why did she want the book, anyway? Katherine had bought that book less than a week ago, and Kate had had an opportunity to look into it to find what of interest there might be for herself. She had found nothing. It was decidedly a book for adults, a rather deep book, and, to Kate’s mind, a dull book. But perhaps Elsie only wanted it to give away. Anyway, she would ask no questions. It was none of her business.
Timothy showed distinct surprise at Elsie’s nonchalant “Home, Timothy.” And Kate understood his surprise. Aunt Katherine had given them the car for the morning and Timothy was all prepared to start off on a long drive. But Elsie had apparently forgotten about this in her worry over the book. And Kate had no impulse to remind her. If things were only as one might expect them to be, not all so strangely mysterious and unpleasant, a car at her disposal and a comrade on a beautiful summer morning like this would have seemed the height of pleasure. But such a ride with Elsie would certainly be no fun, and she did not think until it was too late that she alone with Timothy might start off on an exploring adventure.
When they got out of the car in front of their own door, Timothy, as a matter of course, expected to take the packages from the grocery store around to the servants’ entrance. But Elsie held out her hands for them. He relinquished them to her, plainly puzzled. Surely they were groceries!
When the two girls stood together in the big front hall Kate said briefly: “Good-bye. I’m going out into the garden.”
“Wait on the terrace outside the drawing-room and I’ll come with you,” Elsie responded, very unexpectedly. “First I’ll just run up to my room with these bundles. I know a lot about the kinds of flowers and things in the garden. Let me show it all to you.”
Kate was almost dazed by this suggestion. She had certainly been made to feel that Elsie was only too eager to get rid of her company. She stood where she had been left, wondering.
Why had Elsie taken lettuce and oil and bread and eggs and flour and nuts up to her room? What could she ever do with them up there?
“I’ll not ask her about it,” she promised herself, “just not a thing. But I shall write to Mother and the boys this morning. I won’t tell Mother how horrid Elsie is being, though. She would be too disappointed for me. And I’m really not having such a bad time as it might sound. But I’ll tell the boys just everything. They will be as mystified as I am. And to think I was dissatisfied with them for chums and wanted a girl! I’ll appreciate them when I get back, that’s certain. Oh, of course! Why didn’t I think at first! Elsie doesn’t trust me in the garden alone! That’s why she wants to come with me. She is afraid I won’t keep my promise. She’s afraid I will go ‘prowling’ around the orchard house. I just wish I hadn’t promised not to use the key. It would be something to do with this morning she’s spoiled. And something to write Mother about. And it might explain some of the mystery. There was a light last night. I saw it plain enough. The boys will be interested in all that. How soon can I expect letters from home, I wonder?”
With these thoughts Kate went out through the cool, shady drawing-room and on to the terrace. There in the shade of some trellised wisteria she sat down on a garden bench to wait for Elsie.
CHAPTER VII
“EVEN SO——”
Elsie was a very long time in coming. As the minutes dragged themselves along Kate’s cheeks began to get hot even before she realized that she was angry. But after she had waited so long that she was convinced Elsie was not coming at all she got up with a shrug. Any one who knew Kate would have seen at once that she was in no ordinary mood; for shrugs or any such Latin methods of self-expression were quite foreign to this girl, New England bred.
She went up to her room for paper. Now was the time to write to her mother and Sam and Lee. Certainly she had enough to tell them!
The door to the sitting-room across the hall was standing open and a glance assured Kate that it was empty. And while she did not actually look into Elsie’s room she heard no sound and felt that Elsie was not there. But she had no idea where Bertha had put the writing paper when she unpacked the suitcase and the envelopes and stamps. She searched through the drawers of the dressing table. But there were only her ribbons, her handkerchiefs, her underclothes arranged artistically. No sign of paper or fountain pen. So, although she had meant never to go into the sitting-room, she was forced to now. Her writing materials must be in the desk there.
She found them at once. And now being in the room, she took the occasion to look all about. It was the jolliest place imaginable for a girl to call her own! And since the morning had grown rather oppressively hot it was a refuge, too; for there was a breeze on this side of the house and it was the coolest spot Kate had found herself in that morning. Tree shadows stood on the walls, and leaf shadows shook in a green, cool light. It would be very nice to sit here and write. But Kate could not bring herself to do it. She reminded herself that this was Elsie’s desk and room, and therefore hateful.
Picking up her own property she hurried out and down the stairs. Once in the garden she made directly for the apple orchard. She would allow herself to walk along the edge viewing the orchard house from that angle. If Elsie called that prowling, let her! As she walked she felt the brass key in her pocket. But though now her whole mind was on the house and her desire to go into it, it never entered her head to break her promise. Elsie certainly deserved her anger, but revengeful thinking was quite outside of Kate’s mentality.
When she had walked the whole length of the orchard she came to a low, broad hedge that marked the termination of Aunt Katherine’s grounds. Near it she sat down, not in the orchard but in its shade, and placing her block of paper on her knee began to write.
“Dearest Mother”:—And then so suddenly that it startled her, tears blotted the two words. At the same minute she heard running feet. Kate winked fast and furiously and looked up. Elsie was standing over her. She was flushed from running in the heat and her eyes were very bright and soft. Again she was radiating happiness as on Kate’s first glimpse of her. On her arm swung a straw basket and one hand held a pair of shining shears. Kate felt that she would rather die on the spot than let Elsie guess that she was crying. But if Elsie saw the tears she showed no sign.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner, and that I asked you to wait.” She spoke in a conciliatory tone. “Truly I’m not so rude as I seemed. But I had an unexpected opportunity to attend to something that needed attention and there wasn’t time to run down and tell you. It had to be done quickly. But now I’m ready. I thought as we walked around I’d cut some flowers for our rooms. Aunt Katherine likes me to keep my vases filled.”
Now it was Kate who was cold and distant. Her shame in her tears made that necessary. “I’m writing to my mother,” she answered. “And I don’t need to be entertained a bit. Some other time I’ll help you with the flowers.”
Elsie’s glow flickered and went out. “Very well,” she said, and turned away sharply to cut some nasturtiums growing around the foot of an apple tree.
But just as she turned there came a shout from over the hedge. A boy older than themselves, in fact a young man of seventeen probably, had come to the tennis court, only a few paces beyond the hedge, with a racket and balls in his hand. He was calling to a girl on the steps of the piazza of the house next door. “Hurry up,” he shouted. “Come on.”
“Yes. Just a minute.” The girl was bending over on the steps, tying her shoe perhaps. In a minute she had come bounding down the long slope of the lawn and joined her brother.
Kate looked at them interestedly. “Who are they?” she asked of Elsie. Elsie gave her the information without turning. “That’s Rose Denton and her brother Jack. And they’d ask you to play, probably, if they saw you, and I weren’t here. They just barely speak to me.”
“Barely speak to you? And they live right next door?”
“Yes, queer, isn’t it!” The voice above the nasturtiums was sarcastic. “Only get yourself noticed and you’ll soon know them. Hope you have a good time.”
Elsie straightened up, adjusted her basket on her arm, and moved away. But Kate called after her, her voice shaking with anger, “I don’t know why you are so queer, Elsie Frazier, or why you haven’t friends. But while I’m visiting you it isn’t likely I’d play with people who won’t play with you, no matter how much they asked me. That’s that.”
Elsie turned and walked backward now. “Well, Kate Marshall, I’m afraid you’ll have just a horrid month then,” she prophesied. And with a strange, almost strangled little laugh she whirled about and was really off with her basket and shears.
Kate watched her as she went, floating toward the gardens across the smooth lawn. “She walks like a dryad,” she thought, “and she looks like a Dorothy Lathrop fairy.” Then she smiled a little woefully at her own fancy. “She may look like a fairy but she’s a horrid, stuck-up thing just the same,” she reminded herself.
But she found relief for her overcharged emotions when she came to the compositions of her letter to the Hart boys. There she described Elsie just as she was and had behaved. Not one unpleasant thing that Elsie had done was forgotten. Perhaps it was rather horrid of Kate to complain so unrestrainedly and set down so much criticism. But she did not give that a thought—not then. When the letter was finished and in its envelope she pulled it out again to add a postscript.
P. S. It’s all true what I have told you about Elsie Frazier, every bit. But even so, I don’t hate her and now that I’ve written about her I’m not even angry any more. She’s hardly said a friendly word or acted a bit as you would expect her to to a guest, but even so if she only were nice to me I’d be quite crazy about her. That isn’t just because she’s so pretty, either. I don’t know why I feel that way, but I do. She’s exactly the sort of chum I’ve always imagined having some day. And there’s one thing good I can tell you about her. She likes “The King of the Fairies,” I think. Anyway, she owns it. So what do you make of it all? And what about the light in the orchard house? And why do you suppose Elsie is so set against my using the key? And why did she buy those groceries and take them up to her room? Don’t tell Mother a word I’ve told you about how mean Elsie is. She must think I’m having a lovely time—at least, until I know whether I can stick it out or not. K.M.