[CHAPTER III]
MARY LOUISE TELLS A STORY
The members of the board need not have concerned themselves in regard to the waiting girls. Josie and Mary Louise had been fully occupied. At the moment that the hubbub had arisen, marking the time when Dr. Weston had made his announcement, there had been a sharp tap on the office door. Josie had opened the door and there had entered a woman and two children, a girl of eight and a boy of about six. The girl carried a badly wrapped bundle of clothes.
Mary Louise and Josie felt a keen interest in all three. The woman was young—under thirty. She was handsome, with raven black hair and well-cut features. Her face was pale and her eyes gloomy. She carried herself with a slow, lazy grace. The good lines of her tall figure asserted themselves in spite of the cheap, ill-fitting serge suit. Josie always noticed hands and feet, because she declared they were more difficult to disguise than any other portion of one's anatomy. One glance at the woman's ungloved hands made Josie wonder at the well-kept nails and dimpled knuckles.
"No horny-handed daughter of toil, at least," was her mental note. She then instinctively glanced at the woman's feet.
"Too well shod for the serge suit," was her verdict, "high arched triple A with French heels, about a five, which is small for a person of her height. She must be at least five feet, ten inches."
This inventory took Josie the fraction of a second, so quick was she to see and pigeon-hole her observations in her well-ordered brain.
The children had evidently been crying. The girl's eyes and nose were red and the boy at intervals gave a dry sob as though he had been through a storm of weeping and could with difficulty stop. They clung to each other as they would had they been drowning. The woman pushed them into the room. The children's clothes were the worse for wear, and untidy. Their faces were dirty and showed signs of grimy little knuckles having been dug into streaming eyes. The eyes of both children were blue, as blue as cornflowers, and their hair very light, the boy's curling in tight rings but the girl's straight and bobbed.
"I want to see the manager," said the woman in a well-modulated voice.
"Dr. Weston will be here in a few minutes," said Mary Louise. "Won't you sit down?"
The young woman sank into a chair. She paid no attention to the children, but Josie found them a seat on a bench by the window. The little girl lifted the boy to the bench and put her arm around his shoulders, drawing him close to her sisterly bosom.