“Oh, I guess not,” rejoined the man, lifting his foot, and giving a curiously resigned sigh as he sent an apprehensive glance into the girl’s face.
“Dear, dear! isn’t he funny?” murmured the girl, bending low and giving a gentle poke with the pencil in her hand. “Only fancy,” she added, straightening herself, “only fancy if we had so many feet. Just picture the size of our shoe bill!” And she laughed and turned away.
“Well, by gum!” ejaculated the man, looking after her. Then he fell to work, and his whistle, as he worked, carried something of the song of a bird set free from a cage.
A week passed.
The days were spent by Alma in roaming the woods and fields, pencil and paper in hand; they were spent by her mother in the hot kitchen over a hotter stove. To Alma’s protests and pleadings Mrs. Kelsey was deaf. Alma’s place was not there, her work was not housework, declared Alma’s mother.
On Mrs. Kelsey the strain was beginning to tell. It was not the work alone--though that was no light matter, owing to her anxiety that Alma’s pleasure and comfort should find nothing wanting--it was more than the work.
Every night at six the anxious little woman, flushed from biscuit-baking and chicken-broiling and almost sick with fatigue, got out the black silk gown and the white lace collar and put them on with trembling hands. Thus robed in state she descended to the supper-table, there to confront her husband still more miserable in the stiff collar and black coat.
Nor yet was this all. Neither the work nor the black silk dress contained for Mrs. Kelsey quite the possibilities of soul torture that were to be found in the words that fell from her lips. As the days passed, the task the little woman had set for herself became more and more hopeless, until she scarcely could bring herself to speak at all, so stumbling and halting were her sentences.
At the end of the eighth day came the culmination of it all. Alma, her nose sniffing the air, ran into the kitchen that night to find no one in the room, and the biscuits burning in the oven. She removed the biscuits, threw wide the doors and windows, then hurried upstairs to her mother’s room.
“Why, mother!”