Granted, if thieves and marauders and those awful things, thugs, carry little loads or sleep as tenderly as women—and never wake them; if they are polite and say good night—. What kind of marauding and—and thugging is that?
"What will Stefana think when she finds my apron in bed with her!" suddenly laughed Miss Theodosia, breaking the spell. "Funny Stefana! she goes to my heart, she and her starch—when they're asleep!"
But, awake, Stefana's starch went to Miss Theodosia's back and aching bones. It was three o'clock when she was ready to go to bed. Over chairs and the couch in her sitting-room, lay the three redeemed white dresses, soft again and very smoochless and smooth. Miss Theodosia stood and admired. She was full of pride and weariness. At last, at thirty-six, she had done real work; she loved the feel of it in her tired bones. She loved her night of adventuring. Life—she loved that. So she went to bed at three, when the birds were beginning to get up. If her throat—calm and grown-up throat—had not persistently tightened, she would have gone to sleep laughing at the remembrance of it all. All the funny night. Why wasn't it funny? Why couldn't she laugh? She sat up in bed.
On the morning after her adventurous night, as Miss Theodosia lingered luxuriously over her late breakfast, came bursting in Evangeline Flagg. A gray-checked something waved from her hand like a flag of truce. Evangeline always burst into things—houses, and rooms, and excited little speech.
"Here it is!—that is, if it's yours. Stefana says to ask. 'Tain't ours. Mercy gracious, no! We don't take our aperns to bed. Stefana never heard of such a thing. Neither o' us never. In bed—right straight in bed! An' Stefana hugging it up like everything! She says to ask you if it's yours because it ain't ours, nor anybody else's, an' it's got to be somebody's apern, and once I thought I saw a gray 'n' white one hanging through your window—I mean on a nail, but, mercy gracious, what was it doing in bed with me an' Stefana!"
Even Evangeline's breath had limitations. She stopped as headlong as she had begun. She unwound the large, voluminous-skirted apron from her grasp and extended it.
"Here 'tis, if it's yours," she gasped, spent. She was gazing at it with a species of awe; it was an "apern" of mystery, not a human apern. "An' if 't isn't, take it—Stefana said not to dare to bring it back. We—we're sort of afraid of it, honest. Though, of course, Stefana says it must 've blew in the window"—the tide of speech was coming in once more—"an'—an' sort of landed on the bed, an' Stefana kind of grabbed it in her sleep, thinking it was Elly Precious. But, mercy gracious!"
"Sit down," Miss Theodosia said, smiling. "Doesn't it tire you to talk as fast as that?"
"Some," admitted Evangeline, "but I don't mind. What I mind is ghosts—aperns an' the kind with—with legs." She dropped her voice. "I saw one las' night."
"Mercy gracious!" Miss Theodosia breathed.