All this was not so conceited as it sounds; for Kate knew perfectly well that ordinarily she could lay no claim to prettiness, that the charm of the person clothed in crocus-yellow satin in the mirror before her was due to Madame Pearl’s artistic genius and the pert, star-pointed silver cap. And when the idea came to her to go down to the kitchen and display herself to Julia in this enchantment it was wholly for Julia’s pleasure she intended it; she would be taking herself down in the same impersonal way she would take a doll down to turn it round. For finery of this sort and the kind of glamour that beautiful clothes give, she did not for a minute associate with herself, her very self. Ever since Julia had appeared to her on the stairs, asked eager questions about her mother and bestowed the gingerbread man on Kate, she had wanted to see her again. It seemed so queer and unnatural to be eating the delicious meals she cooked and ignoring her presence in the house. Wasn’t she a friend of her mother’s? But until this minute Kate had been too shy or too strange in the ways of her aunt’s big smoothly running establishment to seek Julia out in the dim, distant servants’ apartments. Now, however, in her magic cap, looking and feeling like a young princess, and also disguised in a way, she had no hesitation about it. She felt sure that Julia would be interested and pleased, and that Katherine, if she were in Kate’s place, would do that very thing. But on second thought she decided to wait until just after dinner, for this hour would surely be about the busiest one in a cook’s day.
She crossed the room and sat down at her dressing table again, pulling out a drawer. She would reread a letter from Sam, a scrawl that had come in the afternoon’s mail when she was too much occupied to give it her full attention. She had merely glanced it down hastily and put it away in this drawer on top of the key to the orchard house. She read it now, bending her head and not bothering to pick it up.
“Don’t let her befool you, Kitty. Take our word, she’s just a silly snob. You’re worth millions of her any minute. What a figure she’d cut in that meadow—you know, with the King of the Fairies! She just wouldn’t be anything, would she? Teach her a lesson. We’d like to, Lee and I.” There was more of the same sort; but she did not pick it up to turn the page. There was an uneasy stirring in her heart. It hadn’t been very decent of her, writing like that about Elsie. She could not remember now just how she had done it, or why. She knew that both Sam and Lee must have struggled together over the composition of this letter in reply. They had evidently thought it a very important letter indeed, and spent their best efforts on it. She appreciated that, and she appreciated their hot partisanship, too. What she didn’t appreciate at this minute was her own motives in having so called out their sympathy. And she had better tear it up. It certainly wasn’t a letter meant for other eyes to see. With a strange little ache in her soul somewhere, probably in her conscience, she picked up the sheet. Then her heart stood still, and the fingers crumpling the paper turned cold. She went queerly sick. The key that should have lain there under the letter was gone. It was nowhere in the drawer. And whoever had taken the key could scarcely have failed to read the words staring there so blackly up at you, all in Sam’s print-like script!
Moreover—she saw it now—the thief had gone through the whole dressing table before hitting upon this particular drawer. Everything was a little out of place. The thief was Elsie, of course. No one else wanted the key. Well, serve her right, then, to have read about herself!
Kate tore the letter into shreds and dropped it back into the drawer. Then she strode through the bathroom, and stood in Elsie’s open door. Elsie was already decked in her fairy green frock, her curls tied loosely at her neck in a way that Madame Pearl had begged her to wear them. But quite regardless of her finery she was curled up in the window seat, her sandaled feet tucked under her, looking dreamily out toward the orchard house. She was lost in her thoughts for she did not hear or feel Kate when she came striding across the room to stand over her. Even in the temper she was in, Kate could not help thinking, “How unconcerned she is about that beautiful frock! It’s as though she was born in it. How delicate, how fairy she looks!”
Elsie started out of her reverie at Kate’s voice.
“Give me my key,” she was saying huskily, her hand held out.
Elsie, in spite of the suddenness of the attack, did not stir except to turn her head.
“What key?”
“You know very well what key. You stole it.”