No one will ever know how often the thought of the little rosary in the sandalwood box helped Lloyd to listen patiently, and to keep tryst with the expectations of those about her, so that at nightfall there might be another pearl to slip on the silken cord, in token of another day unstained by selfishness.
There was rarely time for envying the girls at school now. The days were too full. Almost before it seemed possible, the locusts were in bloom and it was mid-May by the calendar. In that time perfect health had come back to her. There were no more crying spells now, no more hours of nervous exhaustion, of fretful impatience over trifles. She went singing about the house, with a colour in her cheeks that rivalled the pink of the apple blossoms.
"Spring has come indoors as well as out," said Mrs. Sherman one morning. "I think that we may safely count that your Christmas vacation is over, and you may go back to your music lessons whenever you choose."
The night before her birthday, Lloyd sat with her elbows on her dressing-table, peering into the mirror with a very serious face.
"You'll be sixteen yeahs old in the mawning, Lloyd Sherman," she told the girl in the glass. "'Sweet sixteen!' You've come to the end of lots of things, and to-morrow it will be like going through a gate that you've seen ahead of you for a long, long time. A big, wide gate that you have looked forward to for yeahs, and things are bound to be different on the othah side."
Next morning, just in fun, she trailed down to breakfast in one of her mother's white dresses, with her hair piled on the top of her head. It was very becoming so, but it made her look so tall and womanly that she was sure her grandfather would object to it.
"He'll nevah let me grow up if he can help it," she said, half-pouting, as she gave a final glance over her shoulder at the mirror, vastly pleased with her young ladylike appearance. "He'll say, 'Tut, tut! That's not grandpa's Little Colonel.' But I can't stay his Little Colonel always."
She was standing by the window looking down the locust avenue when he came in to breakfast, so she did not see his start of surprise at sight of her. But his half-whispered exclamation, "Amanthis!" told her why he failed to make the speech she expected to hear. With her hair done high, showing the beautiful curve of her head and throat as she stood half-turned toward him, he had caught another glimpse of her startling resemblance to the portrait. He could not regret losing his Little Colonel if that loss were to give him a living reminder of a beloved memory.
After breakfast, when an armful of birthday gifts had been duly admired and the donors thanked, and she had spent nearly an hour enjoying them, she strolled down the avenue, feeling very much grown up with the long dress trailing behind her. She wandered down to the entrance gate, hoping to meet Alec, who had gone for the mail. She was sure there would be a letter from Betty, for Betty never forgot people's birthdays. Then she trailed back again under the white arch of fragrant locust blooms. At the half-way seat she sat down and tucked a spray of the blossoms into her hair and fastened another at her belt. She had not long to wait there, enjoying the freshness of the sweet May morning, for in a few minutes Alec came up the avenue with a handful of letters and papers. She sorted out her own eagerly, six letters and a package.
She opened Betty's first. It was a long one, ending with a birthday greeting in rhyme, and enclosing a handkerchief which she had made herself, sheer and fine and daintily hemstitched, with her initials embroidered in one corner in the smallest letters possible.