“Sure!”
“Nice Jackie—kiss me goo’ night!”
Jacqueline did so. What a hot little thing Nellie was—but how cunning! That funny baby, too, was a darling, and Freddie, who gurgled when you tickled him. Neil had promised to show her a woodchuck’s hole in the morning, and Dickie had boasted about his rabbits.
“It might be worse,” Jacqueline reconsidered, “and if I back out, I’ll never get another chance to wear Peggy Janes, and cut on behind carts, and be poor and rowdy. I guess now I’m in, I’d better stick it out for a day or two.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE END OF A PERFECT DAY
When Caroline woke in the morning, she was surprised to find herself still in the green and golden room with the bookshelves. She had rather expected to find that the house with the dim, cool rooms, and the songful piano, the white and nickel bath and the ladies (not her relatives!) who were so kind and friendly, were all alike the fancies of a dream, and that she was back in Cousin Delia’s close little stuffy house, with the smell of frizzled breakfast ham wafting up from the kitchen, and the eldest baby clamoring to be dressed at once.
But the room, she found, was real, and the bath was real. She could almost believe that she was really Jacqueline. She only wished she were!
She dressed herself in the henna-colored frock, and she dressed Mildred very carefully, in a little white muslin with pink sprays, most becoming to Mildred’s blond beauty. Then she opened her bed to air, and sat down by the window, where she could watch the mountain. In the morning light it was quite different from the mountain of yesterday afternoon. The green of the trees and the red of the exposed sandstone were very sharp in the strong sunlight, and gave the huge pile a spick and span look, as if it had made itself fine for the summer day.
She had put on the little watch which was Jacqueline’s, though it seemed almost too nice to wear every day, and the little watch said that it was half past eight, when there came a knock at the door. Caroline flew to open it, and there stood Aunt Eunice, in a cool gray and white lawn.
“Good morning, Aunt Eunice!” cried Caroline. “Oh, how nice you look!”