Aunt Katherine dropped the yellow roses she was sorting—their wet stems and leaves instantly spreading white spots on to the polished surface of the little table. With a quick step she hurried toward the telephone booth. Kate snatched up the roses and remedied the harm they had done as well as she could with her pocket handkerchief. Then she and Elsie simply stood idly about waiting for the doors of the telephone booth to open and their Chieftain to reappear. For having seen Aunt Katherine work with the flowers they knew themselves incompetent to go ahead alone.
As Kate leaned against the banister, and Elsie smoothed her hair before a little gilt mirror on the wall near the door and secured the shell pins holding it, the front-door bell suddenly rang and Isadora came into the hall to answer it. A postman in livery standing there thrust a pad at her mumbling, “Sign here.”
Elsie dropped a shell pin on to the floor and rushed to Isadora. “It’s a special delivery,” she cried. “For me?”
Yes, it was for Elsie. She almost snatched it out of the postman’s hands and scrawled her signature on the pad that Isadora surrendered.
“All right,” she said, pushing the pad at the postman and the next instant shutting the door directly in his face. Had she shoved him out? Kate was not at all sure she hadn’t.
Then Elsie ran through the hall with the letter hugged up under her chin and up the stairs past Kate. “Tell Aunt Katherine I’ll be right back,” she called as she went. But she stopped on the first landing to lean over the banister and whisper down, “Don’t say anything about my having had a special delivery, will you, Kate?”
“Of course not, if you don’t want me to. It’s none of my business, is it?”
CHAPTER XIII
“YOU THIEF!”
Kate was dressed and ready for the party half an hour before dinner that night. She stood surveying herself in the long door mirror. Anticipation had brought unusual colour that glowed even through the tan on her cheeks, and the corners of her lips were sharply uptilted.
“The cap is certainly a wonder worker,” she reflected. “It is magic; it makes me pretty. That’s even better than having a cap to make you invisible, much better!” And when she smiled at this idea the girl in the glass smiled, too, and was fascinatingly pretty. “Oh, if Mother could only see me! She’d hardly believe. If the picture telephone were perfected and Aunt had one I’d spend my last cent to call Mother up.”