“That you might take her place with me, cheat her somehow of what she apparently considers hers. She sees, as you have guessed, that I do not like her. May she not be all the more jealous of you just because of that?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Kate was thinking clearly again. “She isn’t horrid like that. I know it. She’s too beautiful and lovely. There’s something about her that makes any such idea just impossible. She mayn’t like me, and I may be cross with her, but for all that—for all that I know she’s not a mean person, Aunt Katherine.”
Kate was amazed herself at having so suddenly become Elsie’s champion. Loyalty to that strange girl had apparently been born in her all in a second. Or was it loyalty only to the comrade she had glimpsed flashingly, once in the mirror last night, and once in sunshine this morning? Whatever it was to, it was very real and staunch.
Aunt Katherine’s face lightened remarkably. “You may be right, and I earnestly hope you are,” she said. “For if Elsie were unfriendly toward you for any such reason—well, it would be the last straw, the very last.”
As they spun along toward home through the cooling air, Miss Frazier’s expression grew happier and happier. Kate had done for her what she could not do for herself: lightened real suspicions, and eased her heart.
It was almost dinner time when they arrived. If Kate was to don her pink organdie she would have to hurry. She raced up the stairs and found Bertha in her room waiting for her.
“You have only ten minutes, Miss Kate,” she warned. “Your bath is set.”
A glance showed Kate the pink organdie freshly pressed, crisp and cool, hung over a chair back, and the white slip to go under it on the bed. Her pumps were set down by the dressing table and some fresh stockings near on a stool. Two baths a day! How comfortable! Kate, still aglow with her afternoon, had quite forgotten her self-consciousness with this lady’s maid.
“Has Miss Elsie dressed?” she asked.
Bertha answered rather worriedly: “No, and none of us have seen her all afternoon. I do wish she would come up. I can’t think how she’s been amusing herself, or where.”