"This," he said simply, "is Smiles."
They all arose, and Ethel stepped quickly forward with outstretched hands. She had told herself that she meant to be very kind to the little savage to whom her brother had taken such an astonishing fancy; but now, something in the slender form and the half-frightened expression in the pale, sweet face caused her to forget everything else except that the stranger was alone and ill at ease. Both her arms went out to Rose with a motherly gesture, and, as she drew her within them, she said, "Why, my dear child."
"Yes, she is a child," broke in Muriel, eagerly seizing one of Smiles' hands. "I thought that she was a grown-up woman; but see, she wears her hair down on her neck just like a school girl."
Let it be said that Miss Merriman had caught the note struck by Rose that morning, and had arrayed her to appear as young and simple as possible.
"A child? Of course she is," echoed Mr. MacDonald in a hearty voice. "My dear, Donald has told us so much about you that I feel almost as though I had known you all your life. But," he added with little wrinkles forming at the corners of his kindly gray eyes, "I would like to have seen you, as my son did first, in that one-piece calico dress. He described the picture that you made very graphically."
"Oh, look, mother. She's going to smile. Remember how pretty Uncle Don told us she looked when ..."
Rose's shyly budding smile changed to silvery laughter in which all the rest joined, and with it was sealed the bond of an enduring friendship. Then baby Don was brought down from the nursery for inspection and, before he had been contentedly curled in the newcomer's arms many minutes, he was actually trying to lisp "Mileth," which Ethel proudly pronounced to be the first articulate word in his vocabulary, if those universal sounds, which doting parents have ever taken to mean Mother and Father, be excepted. He liked it so well that he insisted upon repeating it over and over, with eyes screwed up tight and mouth opened very wide, which gave him so comical an expression that every one laughed, including himself.
Manlike, Donald had planned to get all the meetings over with at once, and had asked his sister to invite Marion in for afternoon tea and to meet his "protégé and prodigy"—as Ethel had phrased it in her invitation. He had, however, purposely refrained from mentioning the fact to Rose, and when Miss Treville entered, stately as a goddess, very beautiful and a trifle condescending in manner, as she extended her white-gloved hand and said, "So this is little Rose," the girl felt a sudden chill succeed the warmth of hospitality which had served to banish all her timid reserve, had brought a glow of happy color to her cheeks and a sparkle to her luminous eyes, and had made her as wholly natural as she would have been at home among her simple neighbors of the mountains.
Donald felt the psychological change, and sensed the reason for it; but although, in a clumsy manner, he did his best to restore the atmosphere of comradeship, he knew that he was failing. Marion also tried, and tried sincerely, to bring Rose into the conversation; but the girl had become embarrassed and silent, and to her own surprise the society woman vaguely realized that she, too, was embarrassed and not at her best. She tried to shake off the feeling with the thought that it was absurd that one who had been at ease in the presence of royalty should feel so in that of a simple mountain girl; but she could not wholly banish the feeling or the impression that the girl's deep, unusual eyes were looking down beneath the surface, which she knew was perfectly appointed—had she not, for no reason at all she told herself, taken special pains in dressing?—and that, although there was something of awed admiration in her frank gaze, it also held a suggestion of something which was not entirely approval. Donald felt it, too, and it irritated him; so much so that he was frankly glad when his fiancée announced that she must depart to attend a social engagement. Perhaps it was because he was ashamed of such a feeling that he kissed her with unusual warmth, as he handed her into the waiting motor car, and he found himself flushing deeply, without reason, when he returned to the drawing room and saw Rose standing by one of the windows, looking out at the departing limousine with its two liveried attendants.
"She is very beautiful," the girl whispered to him, as he joined her.