"Shelves and birdcage had all disappeared."
"Why—why!" gasped Mary Rose. She tried to put her head in the space where the shelves had been to see where Jenny Lind had gone.
"Jenny Lind!" she shrieked suddenly. She could not help it. If your pet canary was suddenly snatched from you by some mysterious power, I rather fancy you would shriek, too. "Jenny Lind!"
The crash of the kitchen bowl or Mary Rose's astonished shriek brought Mrs. Bracken from her bed. She stood in the doorway, one hand clutching the kimono she had thrown around her.
"You must be more quiet," she said crossly. "How can I sleep when you are making such a noise? And if you break any more dishes I shall have to charge you for them. It's pure carelessness."
"It's Jenny Lind," gulped Mary Rose, too frightened to think of dishes. And she tried to make Mrs. Bracken understand that Jenny Lind had been there, in that hole in the wall, and that now—Oh, where was she?
Mrs. Bracken shrugged her shoulders. "It's the dumbwaiter," she yawned. "Your bird has gone up to Mr. Wells or possibly higher. If it's Mr. Wells I don't suppose you'll see the bird again. He's a very peculiar man."
Mary Rose did not wait to hear another word. With Aunt Kate's big blue and white checked apron on, the dish mop in her hand, and a great fear in her heart, she dashed up the stairs and pounded on the door of the apartment above. Mr. Wells came himself and if he had looked cross and forbidding the night before he looked a thousand times crosser and more forbidding now. Indeed, he exactly fulfilled Mary Rose's idea of an ogre.
"Please don't hurt Jenny Lind," sobbed Mary Rose, as soon as she could gather breath to speak. "I'll take her right away."
"Hurt who? Who's Jenny Lind?" growled the ogre.
"My bird! my Jenny Lind! She came up to your house with a dumbwaiter." Mary Rose hadn't the faintest idea of what a dumbwaiter was and it sounded horrible to her. "Please, please, give her to me at once!" She fairly danced in her impatience. She would have rushed into the apartment but Mr. Wells stood in the doorway.
"The dumbwaiter?" Mary Rose had never heard a more unfriendly voice. He called to someone behind him and a Japanese man came and peered under Mr. Wells' arm as he held it against the frame of the door.
"Sako has taken nothing from the dumbwaiter this morning," Mr. Wells said very coldly after he had exchanged a few words with his servant. "But if you have lost your bird it is only what you must expect. Pets are not allowed in this house." And he scowled fiercely enough to frighten anyone but the owner of a lost canary.
"They are if they're not children nor cats nor dogs," insisted tearful Mary Rose. "Uncle Larry said the law never says one word about birds. Oh, are you quite sure Jenny Lind isn't in your house?" she wailed.
"I told you we have taken nothing from the dumbwaiter," impatiently. He thought he was wonderfully patient with the child. He could have ordered her out of the building at once. "Your bird may have gone up to the next floor."
"Perhaps she has." Mary Rose was on the stairs before he finished the sentence. "I'm sorry for bothering you," she called back, "but if one of your family was lost I rather think you'd try to find her."
Her voice rang out shrill and clear and it was such an unexpected sound in the Washington, where children's voices were forbidden, that old Mrs. Johnson opened her door in a spasm of curiosity. She closed it abruptly when she met the cold unfriendly glance of Mr. Wells' black eyes, and shook in her shoes.
Four doors faced Mary Rose when she reached the third floor. She knocked on all of them not to waste time. Two doors remained firmly closed. The other two opened simultaneously. In one stood a girl with yellow hair and blue eyes and in the other was a young man who promptly changed the morose expression he had put on when he rose for a pleasanter one as he glanced across at Miss Blanche Carter before he even looked at Mary Rose. Miss Carter looked at Mary Rose first and then at Mr. Robert Strahan.
"Oh, please," Mary Rose was almost, if not quite, in tears, "have you seen Jenny Lind?"
They stared at her. The only Jenny Lind they had ever heard of had been quietly in her grave for many years. They looked at each other. Mr. Strahan added a satisfied grin to his pleasant expression, for he had wished to know Miss Carter ever since he had met her on the stairs the day after he had moved into the Washington, but Fate had refused to bring them together. He determined to make the most of this rare opportunity as he kindly questioned Mary Rose.
"Who is Jenny Lind?"
"My canary," sobbed Mary Rose. "I put her on the shelf in Mrs. Bracken's kitchen and she—she disappeared!"
"Cats," suggested Mr. Strahan with a very knowing glance for Miss Carter.
Mary Rose shook her head. "Cats aren't allowed here. It was a dumbwaiter, Mrs. Bracken said." Her voice was filled with anguish. How hateful city life was!
"Oh! I thought it was the milkman." Miss Carter turned and ran into her flat, Mary Rose at her heels. After a moment's hesitation, in which he called himself a bashful idiot, Mr. Strahan deserted his doorway for his neighbor's. On the top shelf of a cupboard like that which had been in Mrs. Bracken's kitchen Mary Rose saw a bottle of milk. She groaned. But Miss Carter gave a pull somewhere and sent it higher. There on the lower shelf, swinging unconcernedly in her cage, was Jenny Lind. Mary Rose gave a joyous shriek.
"I thought I'd never see her again. I can't thank you, but I'll remember you as long as I live. I—I feel as if you'd saved her life." She shivered as she remembered the snap of Mr. Wells' black eyes, the click of his heavy jaw, when he had said that pets were not allowed in the building.
"What is all this excitement?" questioned a soft voice behind them, and Mary Rose whirled around and stared at another girl.
Now that her anxiety in regard to Jenny Lind was relieved, Mary Rose had time to think of other things. She brushed the tears from her eyes, and her face was wreathed with a dewy smile as she asked eagerly:
"Please, which—which of you is the enchanted princess?" One of them must be. She knew it by a funny prickle down her back.
Both girls laughed, the yellow-haired one and the brown.
"Princesses aren't enchanted now." Miss Carter pulled a lock of Mary Rose's yellow hair. "They have their eyes too wide open."
"But Mr. Jerry said there was, that in this very house was a most beautiful princess who was under the spell of a wicked witch. He said the old witch's name was Independence." Her words fairly ran over each other, she was so afraid something would happen before she could deliver Mr. Jerry's message to the princess. "And he said to tell the princess that the prince wasn't ever going to Jericho, but was going to stay right here on the job."
Miss Carter looked significantly at the brown-haired girl. "That message isn't for me," she told Mary Rose. "Independence and I are strangers. I can't bear the thing. I quite agree with Mr. Jerry that she is an old witch. Isn't someone a picture, Bess," she asked, "with her birdcage and checked apron?"
"She surely is." The impatient frown that had marred Miss Thorley's face at the mere mention of Mr. Jerry's name slipped away. "I must paint her. She'll make a fine ad. Who are you, honey?"
And Mary Rose told them who she was and how she had come from Mifflin to make her home with Aunt Kate and Uncle Larry in the cellar-basement, she meant; and how she had had to board out George Washington and had taken Jenny Lind to Mrs. Bracken's for company while she earned money to pay for George Washington's board.
"By jinks, what a jolly story," murmured Mr. Strahan who still clung to his neighbor's doorway and his opportunity. The two girls looked at him and the three smiled involuntarily.
"I must go back and finish the dishes," Mary Rose announced suddenly. "Mrs. Bracken won't like it if I stay away any longer. I'm sorry I bothered you," she smiled tremulously. "But I just had to find Jenny Lind. Thank you for your trouble. Good-by."
"Come and see us again?" The invitation came in a chorus.
Mary Rose stopped abruptly. "Is that an honest and true invitation?" she asked doubtfully. "Aunt Kate said I mustn't ever be a nuisance to the tenements because children aren't allowed here. I'm not a child, she said, because I'm going on fourteen, but I had to promise to be careful of the tenements."
"Bless the baby," murmured Miss Carter as she and Mr. Strahan stood in the hall and watched Mary Rose's head go down, down.
"I thought children were barred?" asked Mr. Strahan quickly, he was so afraid that Miss Carter would disappear also.
"I thought pets were barred, too. She's a quaint little thing. I suppose she is homesick. A city apartment house is not like a home in a small town," she said, as if she knew, and she sighed.
"It is not!" He agreed with her emphatically. He had come from a small town himself and he knew. "I think I'll make a little story out of this. I'm a newspaper man, you know, and there isn't anything a city editor likes better than he does a human interest story. I have a hunch that there is a lot of human interest in that kid."
"I fancy you are right. I'm a librarian myself, and I should be at my library this blessed moment. I'd far rather go down and help Mary Rose," and she laughed scornfully because she had such simple tastes.
He looked as if he admired them. "If you feel that way you surely aren't under the spell of that wicked witch Independence that Mary Rose talks of." There was nothing scornful in his laugh. It held so little scorn and so much admiration that she flushed.
"Independence!" she shrugged her shoulders. "I learned long ago that independence is just another word for loneliness. My friend, Miss Thorley, doesn't agree with me. We have very warm arguments over it."
"They haven't been warm enough to disturb me. You're very quiet neighbors. Doesn't the very quiet get on your nerves sometimes? It's something just to hear people, when you are alone and have no one to talk to."
"Lonely! You?" She was astonished. "I don't see how a young man could be lonely." Evidently her idea of masculine life was a merry round of social pleasure.
His laugh was a trifle bitter. "A man can be lonely for exactly the same reason a girl can," he asserted. "I've lived here for three months, and this is the first time I've spoken to you."
The color deepened in her cheeks. "I suppose I shouldn't be talking to you now but—Mary Rose—and we are neighbors. One does get so suspicious living with suspicious people," apologetically.
"Please don't be suspicious of me. I'm the most harmless man in Waloo. I'm too busy hanging on to my job to be dangerous. I propose a vote of thanks to Mary Rose for bringing us together. All in favor say aye. The ayes have it." He held out his hand.
She laughed consciously, but after a second she gave him her fingers. "It is pleasant to be able to speak to one's neighbors," she admitted with a hint of formality that in some way pleased Mr. Strahan.
Mary Rose stopped at Mr. Wells' door as she went downstairs. It would be but friendly to tell him that Jenny Lind was found, he must be anxious. But she hesitated before she rapped on the door, very gently this time.
Mr. Wells had not lost any of his grimness when he opened it. He had on his hat and he looked to Mary Rose's startled eyes as tall as the steeple of the Presbyterian Church in Mifflin.
"Well, what now?" he snapped.
Mary Rose caught her breath. "I thought you would like to know that Jenny Lind is safe." She lifted the cage so that he could see for himself how safe and comfortable Jenny Lind was. "She was on the lowest shelf of the dumbwaiter. The enchanted princess's milk bottle was on the top shelf." And she chuckled. Now that she was no longer frightened, Jenny Lind's adventure seemed a joke.
It was not a joke to Mr. Wells. "A city apartment house is no place for pets—or children," he said and shut the door.
Mary Rose stared at the mahogany panels. "Crosspatch," she whispered. And then she said it louder, "Crosspatch!"
The door opened as if by magic and Mr. Wells came out and shut it behind him.
"Did you say anything?" he asked coldly.
Mary Rose was too startled and too honest not to tell the truth.
"I said crosspatch," she faltered and waited bravely for the deluge.
The two looked at each other. The tall man with the nervous, irritable face and the little girl with the birdcage in her hand. She did not say that she had called him a crosspatch, and kindly Discretion whispered in Mr. Wells' ear that it would be wise to leave well enough alone. Without another word he stalked by Mary Rose down the stairs.
Mary Rose followed meekly. "It's a lucky thing, Jenny Lind, that you were not on his dumbwaiter. He's not what I call a very friendly man," she murmured.
She told Mr. Jerry all about it that afternoon when she ran over to see how George Washington was doing as a boarder. Mr. Jerry watched her curiously.
"Poor little kid," he thought. "She's up against it for fair with a cold-blooded bunch like that." He was very sympathetic and kind and quite enthusiastic over his new boarder. He cheered Mary Rose amazingly and lifted her to the seventh heaven of delight when he suggested that she should ride downtown with him in the automobile when he went for his Aunt Mary.
"You may take Jenny Lind and George Washington with you," he was good enough to say.
Mary Rose's dancing feet moved in a more sedate measure. "I think Jenny Lind has had ride enough for one day. And George Washington likes his four feet better than he does an automobile. He won't mind if we leave him behind."
"Then you may sit on the front seat with me," Mr. Jerry promised.
"It's very exciting living in the city," sighed Mary Rose, when she was on the front seat beside him. "I've been here only three days and see all that's happened. Oh, there's the lady who found Jenny Lind—and the enchanted princess, too!" she cried as they passed Miss Thorley and Miss Carter. "Isn't that the enchanted princess, Mr. Jerry?" She twisted around so that she could look into his face. He colored and his eyes seemed to darken as he spoke to the two girls. Miss Thorley nodded curtly, but Miss Carter waved a friendly hand. "My," sighed Mary Rose, "if I were a prince I wouldn't let any old witch Independence keep her enchanted."
"I wonder how you would prevent it," muttered Mr. Jerry under his breath. "Saying and doing, Mary Rose, are two very separate and distinct things."
"I know." Mary Rose felt quite capable of discussing the subject. "Mr. Mann, the Presbyterian minister in Mifflin, preached a whole sermon about that. He said the Lord didn't ever give you what you want right off quick. You had to work for it, and the more precious it was the harder you had to work. I should think that a beautiful princess would be the most precious thing a prince could work for, shouldn't you?"
Mr. Jerry took his hand from the wheel to squeeze Mary Rose's brown fingers. "I should!" he said solemnly. "I do, Mary Rose, I do!"