After another minute of scurrying Elsie appeared in Kate’s door. “It was nice of you to wait for me,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’ve made you late.”
Aunt Katherine lifted her brows when she saw Elsie still in her blue and white morning dress. But the fact that the girls had come in together, actually arm-in-arm, made up for much. In fact, it put Aunt Katherine into a light and gay mood. Things were beginning to go as she had planned now. At dinner she told Elsie about the party set for Friday night. And Elsie, who herself was in a gay spirit, thanked her aunt prettily for everything—the coming party, the promised frock, and the seats for “The Blue Bird.”
“Why, she is a human being, after all,” Kate admitted. “This morning and last night seems like some dream I had about her.” And Kate opened her hazel eyes a little wider now as she looked at Elsie across the table. She was on the watch for the reappearance of the vanishing comrade.
That evening again Miss Frazier sent the girls to walk in the garden. She herself settled down in the big winged chair under her especial reading lamp and picked up “The King of the Fairies,” which Kate had not forgotten to place there.
The orchard drew all Kate’s attention once they were out in the growing starlight. She looked toward it often as they paced back and forth on the garden paths. At first she talked to Elsie about her afternoon, the ride, and the Green Shutter Tea Room. But Elsie, though she listened with interest, and even took pains to ask questions, in return gave Kate no information as to how she had spent the hours. Even so, Elsie was so completely changed that finally Kate had the hardihood to tell her laughingly about the light she had seen in the orchard house last night before falling to sleep.
“I am sure I saw the light. But of course I couldn’t have heard the door,” she finished. “That must have been imagination, for sound doesn’t carry like that.”
But at this mention of the orchard house Elsie’s new manner fell from her as though she had dropped a cloak. She stiffened as they walked and her voice took on restraint.
“If you imagined the sound of the door, why wasn’t the light imagination, too?” she asked reasonably. “Or it may have been fireflies in the trees. See them now.”
It was true enough. Over in the orchard fireflies were twinkling, almost in clouds.
“It wasn’t like firefly light, just the same.”