She leaned on her broom, trembling, desire to have a good time fighting with her institution-bred timidity. Then she looked down at her dress—the blue-and-white-checked gingham, faded, dull, that she had worn for months at the orphanage. If they should come into the kitchen—any of those laughing, gay girls and boys—and find her in the uniform of state charity they would despise her, never dream of asking her to come in, to dance—
Her hands suddenly gripped her broom fiercely. Within a minute she had finished her last task of the evening, had brushed the crumbs and dust into the black tin dust pan, emptied it into the kitchen range. Then, breathless with haste, afraid that timidity would overtake her, she ran up the back stairs to the garret.
Her cold little hands trembled with eagerness as she jerked her work dress over her head and arrayed her slight body in the lace-trimmed white lawn “Sunday dress” which she had worn earlier in the day on her trip from the orphanage. Excitedly, she slapped her pale, faintly flushed cheeks to make them more red, then bit her lips hard in lieu of lipstick.
When she tiptoed down the dark hall of the garret she found David Nash’s door ajar, caught a glimpse of the university student-farmhand bent over a pine table crowded with books.
She crept on to the head of the narrow, steep stairs, and there her courage failed her. The dance music, coming in full and strong over the radio, had just begun, and she could hear the shuffle of feet on the bare floor of the living room. How had she thought for one minute that she could brave those alien eyes, intrude, uninvited, upon Pearl’s party? Hadn’t Pearl made it cruelly clear that she despised her, resented her, because of David’s interest in her?
“Want to dance?”
She had been leaning over the narrow pine banister, but she straightened then, a hand going to her heart, for it was David standing near her in the dark, and his voice was very kind.
CHAPTER III
At 11 o’clock that Saturday night Sally Ford blew out the flame in the small kerosene lamp—the electric light wires had not been brought to the garret—and then knelt beside the low cot bed to pray, as she had been taught to do in the orphanage.
After she had raced mechanically through her childish “Now-I-lay-me,” she lifted her small face, that gleamed pearly-white in the faint moonlight, and, clasping her thin little hands tightly, spoke in a low, passionate voice directly to God, whom she imagined bending His majestic head to listen: