"Yes, Dorothea. Just ring the bell; I want to speak to Mrs. Stirring. She roasted the turkey to a rag last Christmas, and I can't have it happen again. Yes, you were both called Dorothea,—a fancy of the two mothers. Great nonsense, of course; but when women take a notion into their heads, there's an end of it. What a time that girl is! Ring again. The morning will be gone, before I am able to start."
"O! I should like to know if Dorothea Erskine is alive still," cried Dorothea.
[CHAPTER III]
USING OPPORTUNITIES
"AND you going out alone, Miss Tracy! And the Colonel that particular! As he wouldn't hear of you crossing the road by yourself."
Mrs. Stirring was manifestly uneasy, counting herself in some sort responsible. She looked upon this motherless young lady as a charge upon her conscience,—otherwise, as one of the many burdens in her life. Mrs. Stirring was a person who professed to carry a great many burdens. She always had been, and always would be, laden with cares; not so much because she had really more cares than other people, as because she had less pluck and endurance for the bearing of them. Where Dorothea would have looked up and smiled, Mrs. Stirring looked down and sighed. The difference was in the individuals themselves; not in the weight of the burdens laid upon them.
To be sure, Mrs. Stirring was a widow, which sounds sad. There are women, however, to whom widowhood comes as a merciful release from unhappy wifehood, and Mrs. Stirring was one of these. She had married in haste, and had repented at leisure. When her husband was taken from her, she had been conscious in her heart of relief from a bitter thraldom, though much too correct a little person to let any such feeling appear through her showers of weeping,—for Mrs. Stirring was a person who had always tears at command. Still—there the consciousness was.
Now for years, she had been a successful lodging-house keeper, and was not only paying her way, but was laying by a nice little sum for the future. She had one child, a pretty winning little girl, and one faithful though uncouth domestic. This was not altogether a bad state of things. Nevertheless, Mrs. Stirring talked on plaintively of her trials and burdens, making capital of the widowhood which had been a release.
"And you going out alone, Miss!" she reiterated, coming upon Dorothea dressed for walking. Mrs. Stirring was apt to be untidy at this hour, and her cap had dropped awry; while Dorothea was the very pink of dainty neatness, in a costume of dark brown, with brown hat to match, relieved by a suggestion of red, the glasses over her happy eyes balanced as usual over the little nose.