Miss Ferris considered. Anybody else would have said, “What things, for instance?” but Miss Ferris never asked stupid questions like that. She only smiled back at you and read what she wanted to know in your face.
“Well,” she began slowly after a minute, “I’d go to bed very early, so as to get well rested, and next morning I’d look around to find somebody with a big, real trouble that I could help, perhaps—or try to help anyhow. And first of all I’d take off my hat and stay to dinner at the Hilton.”
When Betty bid Miss Ferris good-night after a merry evening in the Hilton House parlors, she was her smiling self again.
“I’m all right even without the going-to-bed-early part,” she declared eagerly. “The things I can’t help I won’t worry about. The things I oughtn’t to mind I won’t mind—not one little speck. I guess that disposes of all my troubles, and the first thing to-morrow I’ll begin hunting for somebody to help. I don’t believe I’ve thought much about helping lately—except helping father by earning this money. Things are so different——”
“No, they’re not,” Miss Ferris cut her short, “because you’re the very same Betty Wales.”
“Am I?” Betty wondered, as she buttoned the coat of her last year’s suit and ran down the hill. “I suppose I am. Now there’s Rachel—she couldn’t be any dearer if she owned a gold mine. Besides, I promised father I wouldn’t care and I won’t.”
CHAPTER VII
MARY, THE PERFECT PATRON
Madeline had been gone for three weeks and never sent so much as a line of “inspirations” back to the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, when the expressman drove up one morning with a great mahogany writing-desk for Betty, with “Sent by M. Ayres” on the shipping ticket. On one of the lovely old-fashioned brass knobs was tied a note, and Betty stopped unpacking the desk to read it.
“The chief joy of having a tea-shop,” Madeline wrote, “is that it grows on your hands. I never was quite satisfied with your desk. A harness cupboard, with a covered watering trough underneath it, ought to have made a picturesque and Tally-ho-ish effect, but some way it didn’t. Yesterday I went out into the country to meditate on my Literary Career, and at the little old inn where I lunched I saw the very thing, which I enclose herewith. (That’s what I say to all the editors about my stories. I hope you’ll like the enclosure well enough to keep it, which is a thing no editor has done yet.)
“Isn’t the inlay lovely, and don’t you adore the bulgy little compartments? There’s also a secret drawer—not the fake kind that anybody can open after a little hunting, but the real thing. I got all these fascinating features for a song, with the recipe for the most luscious cake thrown in—literally thrown in, Miss Betty Wales. Open the secret drawer, and you’ll find it. (Ha! ha! A lively hunt you’ll have first.) It’s called Aunt Martha’s cake, and if it doesn’t make a hit for the Tally-ho, I shall lose faith in the Harding appetite.