“I really should like a cup of tea,” Mrs. Holland replied gratefully.
She climbed the stairs slowly, not because she was weary, but because there was so much time before her. The door of the sewing room was open, and Hilda had drawn up a chair to the folding table. It looked comfortable there in the ugly, familiar little room, with the sun pouring in across the faded carpet. As she went in, she saw a pin on the floor, glinting silvery bright in the sun’s path, and she stooped to pick it up.
“See a pin and pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck”—that was what Miss Brown, the dressmaker, used to say to Joyce, and Joyce, as a tiny girl, used to trot about the room, her head bent, her hair falling over her eyes, earnestly looking for pins.
Mrs. Holland smiled, remembering a shocking episode. She had promised the child five cents a dozen for all the pins she picked up, and so many, many dozens had been recovered from the floor that day—an abnormal quantity. Before she went to sleep that night, Joyce had confessed her crime. She had secretly emptied Miss Brown’s papers of pins upon the floor. Poor, contrite little Joyce!
Over in the corner stood a dress form—a pompous thing with a marvelously rounded figure. “Aunt Sarah,” Joyce used to call it, very disrespectfully. Only yesterday a skirt of Joyce’s had hung on it. No Joyce now, no more of her laughter, no more of her dear voice!
A heavy and deliberate tread was coming along the hall. It was Frank. Madeline did not want to talk to him, or to any one, just then, but of course he would come. Whenever he was at home in the daytime, away from his beloved office, he was always a little forlorn, inclined to follow her about from room to room.
“Hello!” he said from the doorway. “So here you are, eh? Resting?”
“Come in, Frank,” she invited. “Hilda’s going to bring up tea.”
“Tea!” he repeated, with his big, hearty laugh. “Why, my dear girl, I’m full of pâté de foie gras, and lobster salad, and café parfait, and all the rest of it! Caterer did pretty well, don’t you think?”
He came in and sat down in a queer, old-fashioned rocking-chair, with an antimacassar tied to its back with faded ribbons. Such an incongruous figure he was in a sewing room, this big, handsome man in his morning coat, with spats, and a white gardenia in his buttonhole! He was smoking a cigar, and was enjoying it. He crossed his legs and leaned back, and Mrs. Holland smiled at the sight of the scarlet ribbons of the antimacassar peeping coyly over his broad shoulder.