"Wouldn't that be grand!" Mary Rose stopped paring potatoes for supper to look at her aunt with admiration. "It would be like living inside an organ, wouldn't it. I think it would be perfectly lovely."
CHAPTER VI
When Mary Rose went up to Mrs. Bracken's the next morning she took Jenny Lind with her and placed the cage on the kitchen table.
"I can't bear to be alone," she had explained to Aunt Kate. "If I don't have a friend with me I feel as if I was shut up in a dark closet."
First Mary Rose went into the big living-room and picked up papers, straightened the chairs and raised the shades as she had seen her aunt do the day before. It was a very splendid room to Mary Rose but there was something about it that made her frown as she stood in the doorway.
"It needs something. Even the chairs don't look as if they really knew each other. It doesn't feel as if people ever had a good time in it." She shook her head and thought of the shabby sitting-room in Mifflin—not big enough to swing a cat in, daddy had said—where she and daddy and Jenny Lind and George Washington and Solomon and Lena had been crowded together. Everyone had had good times there.
She winked back a tear as she went down the hall. She glanced in at an open door and stopped short as she found that she was looking into the black eyes of a woman on the bed.
"Are you Mrs. Donovan's niece?" the woman said faintly. "Come in. Gracious, but you're small for your age! You washed up very nicely yesterday. I didn't close my eyes last night and I'm not feeling well today, so I'm not going to get up for a while. I wish you would tell your uncle that Mrs. Matchan can't practice this morning. I must get some sleep. What's that in the kitchen?" she demanded as she heard a happy chirp-chirp.
"That's Jenny Lind." Mary Rose was all sympathy for this lovely lady who could not sleep. For a moment she had thought that she might be the enchanted princess but if she was Mrs. Bracken she was a married lady and Mary Rose had never heard of a married princess. All the princesses she knew ceased to exist when they began to live happily ever after.