"Yes; I thought Stevens said Ada was crazy to go," echoed Hans.
"She will be all right when she is once off, my dears," said Ruth. "You run and get in. There's good little boys; get into the fly. Look! I declare there is Puck, knowing as well as possible that Miss Ada is going."
At last Ada was gone, clinging to the last to her mother and to Salome, and saying, "Give Raymond and Reg my love; don't forget."
Ada was not the first to find that the longed-for pleasure is not all that imagination pictured; and well might Ruth say, as she turned back into her little shop,—
"There, I didn't think she had so much heart, that I didn't."
"Everybody's heart ain't always in their mouths, Ruth," was Frank's rejoinder. "Still waters run deep, my dear."
"Then you are one of the deepest I ever saw, Frank; you never waste a word. I do believe if I hadn't helped you, you never would have come to the point with me."
"That's an old story now, my dear," said Frank, rubbing his floury face with his hand. "Don't be offended, my dear," he continued. "I don't say it wasn't a good story, for me anyhow, that I did come to the point."
After Ada's departure Salome made a great effort to settle down into a fixed routine. She wrote out a list of the lessons with her little brothers, and with Reginald's help got over the formidable arithmetic better than might have been expected. Irksome as this routine was to a girl of her dreamy and imaginative temperament, she bravely struggled to take each day as it came, and do the best with it. Stevens, who did all the needle-work and small washing of the family, could not always walk with her children, but she clung to this habit of a past life; and soon after the one o'clock dinner in the short winter days Hans and Carl would set off on a shopping expedition with Stevens, or for a walk over the downs. And while Mrs. Wilton rested quietly for an hour, Salome would sit down to her story, and forget the present in the society of the imaginary children of whom she wrote. Unconsciously she reproduced the dear old home of her happy childhood,—the stately trees, the emerald turf, the little lake with the rustic bridge. Her children were the idealized children of her own experience, and the circumstances in which she placed them and the adventures which befell them were, like the "monkey stories," for the most part reproductions of incidents which lay treasured in the storehouse of her memory. Thanks to Miss Barnes's admirable teaching, Salome was guiltless of slips of grammar, and wrote a fair hand. This "thinking on paper" has a peculiar fascination in it for the young; and no one could have grudged Salome these hours she spent over her manuscript, full of hope and even belief that by her hand the weight of care might be lifted from her mother.
Christmas drew on, and Reginald was full of his examinations—so full, that he sat up late at night with his papers, and had but little time to give to the consideration of Salome's tale.