“You will please to observe,” said Linda, “that they are flowing sleeves and they are not intended to come below the elbows; but it’s a piece of luck I tried it on, for it reminds me that it’s a jacket suit and I must have a blouse. When you get the shoe money, make it enough for a blouse—two blouses, Katy, one for school and one to fuss up in a little.”
Without stopping to change her clothing, Linda ran to the garage and hurried back to the city. It was less than an hour’s run, but she made it in ample time to park her car and buy the shoes. She selected a pair of low oxfords of beautiful colour, matching the stockings. Then she hurried to one of the big dry-goods stores and bought the two waists and an inexpensive straw hat that would harmonize with the suit; a hat small enough to stick, in the wind, with brim enough to shade her eyes. In about two hours she was back with Katy and they were in her room trying on the new clothing.
“It dumbfounds me,” said Linda, “to have Eileen do this for me.”
She had put on the shoes and stockings, a plain georgette blouse of a soft, brownish wood-gray, with a bit of heavy brown silk embroidery decorating the front, and the jacket. The dress was of silky changeable tricolette, the skirt plain. Where a fold lifted and was strongly lighted, it was an exquisite silver-gray; where a shadow fell deeply it was gray-brown. The coat reached half way to the knees. It had a rippling skirt with a row of brown embroidery around it, a deep belt with double buttoning at the waistline, and collar and sleeves in a more elaborate pattern of the same embroidery as the skirt. Linda perched the hat on her head, pulled it down securely, and faced Katy.
“Now then!” she challenged.
“And it’s a perfect dress!” said Katy proudly, “and you’re just the colleen to wear it. My, but I wisht your father could be seeing ye the now.”
With almost reverent hands Linda removed the clothing and laid it away. Then she read a letter from Marian that was waiting for her, telling Katy scraps of it in running comment as she scanned the sheets.
“She likes her boarding place. There are nice people in it. She has got a wonderful view from the windows of her room. She is making friends. She thinks one of the men at Nicholson and Snow’s is just fine; he is helping her all he can, on the course she is taking. And she wants us to look carefully everywhere for any scrap of paper along the hedge or around the shrubbery on the north side of the house. One of her three sheets of plans is missing. I don’t see where in the world it could have gone, Katy.”
Katy spread out her hands in despair.
“There was not a scrap of a sheet of paper in the room when I cleaned it,” she said, “not a scrap. And if I had seen a sheet flying around the yard I would have picked it up. She just must be mistaken about having lost it here. She must have opened her case on the train and lost it there.”