"I am so happy—so happy!" she murmured to the radiant reflection which smiled back at her from out its shadowy depths. She leaned forward and touched the cold smooth surface with her lips in a sudden passion of gratitude for the fair, richly tinted skin, the large bright eyes with their long curling lashes, the masses of brown waving hair, and the pliant beauty of the strong young figure in the mirror.
"If I had been freckled and stoop-shouldered and awkward, like Louise Glenny, he couldn't have loved me," she was thinking.
She sank to her knees after awhile and buried her face in the coverlid of her little bed. But she could think only of the look in his eyes when he had said "I love you," and of the thrilling touch of his lips on hers. She crept into bed and lay there in a wide-eyed rapture, while the village clock struck one, and after a long, blissful hour, two. Then she fell asleep, and did not hear the telephone bell which called her tired father from his bed in the dim, cold hour between three and four.
She was still rosily asleep and dreaming when Mrs. North came softly into the room in the broad sunlight of the winter morning.
"Isn't Lizzie awake yet?" inquired a brisk voice from the hall. "My, my! but girls are idle creatures nowadays!"
The owner of the voice followed this dictum with a quick patter of softly shod feet.
"I didn't like to call her, mother," apologised Mrs. North. "She came in late, and——"
Grandmother Carroll pursed up her small, wise mouth. "I heard her," she said, "and that young man with her. I don't know, daughter, but what we ought to inquire into his prospects and character a little more carefully, if he's to be allowed to come here so constant. Lizzie's very young, and——"
"Oh, grandma!" protested a drowsy voice from the pillows; "I'm twenty!"
"Twenty; yes, I know you're twenty, my dear; quite old enough, I should say, to be out of bed before nine in the morning."