“If I were you I’d go to sleep,” Kate whispered. Elsie’s pallor bothered her. But Elsie did not deign to answer.
Kate, back in her room, with over four hours before breakfast stretching away ahead of her, curled up on the foot of the bed with “The King of the Fairies” in her hands. She opened it just anywhere, much as one opens conversation with a friend just anywhere. It is the presence you want. And the presence of the soul in this book did not fail her now. How it drove walls backward and pushed roofs skyward! And as for out-of-doors, it made that boundless, lifting veils and veils of air disclosing Fairyland or Paradise, in any case the realler than real.
Kate was withdrawing from the chintz-curtained Kate on the bed. She was rising up out of that drowsy figure. She was floating. But the flowers from the chintz were still decking her, only they were living flowers now, smelling all the sweeter for the rain soaking their petals. And the birds from the chintz were with her, too, changed to living birds, soaring, floating, drifting with her, singing shrilly in the rain. The mysterious, many-coloured portals of sleep were opening to her far off beyond the last lifted veil of air.
It was nine-fifteen before she woke.
CHAPTER XVI
ONE END OF THE STRING
Breakfast was served in the little blue-and-white breakfast-room. A fire burned there cheerfully in the grate, making it possible to leave the doors open on to the rain-beaten terrace. The storms of the night had subsided into a steady, hard downpour.
“What a day!” Miss Frazier exclaimed when she appeared.
Kate had come into the room just ahead of her. Moved by an impulse of affection she went to her aunt and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you for that beautiful party,” she said. “It was gorgeous.”
Miss Frazier was pleased. “Thank you, my dear, for paying back so, in being happy about it, the little that is done for you. ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ may be, but the art of receiving graciously is a rare and beautiful accomplishment. I hope Elsie’s experience with Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith didn’t entirely keep the evening from being ‘gorgeous’ for her, too. Where is she?”
“Dressing, I think.”