Louie.”
Suddenly the tears blurred into her eyes at thought of the little disappointed sister yet taking care for her in her absence. Dear little Louie! How hard it must have been for her! And she remembered the sigh she had heard from the kitchen a little while ago. Well, she was thankful she had been awakened right away and not allowed to go on in her selfish indifference. She glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to nine. She had lost a lot of time mooning over her own troubles. She had but seven hours in which to work wonders before any one returned. She must go to work at once.
CHAPTER IV
A hasty survey of the larder showed a scant supply of materials. There were flour and sugar and half a basket of potatoes. Some cans of tomatoes and corn, a paper bag of dried beans, another of rice, two eggs in a basin, and a dish of discouraged-looking fried potatoes with burnt edges completed the count. A small bit of butter on a plate and the end of a baker’s loaf of bread had evidently been left on the dining-room table for her. There were a good many things needed from the store, and she began to write them down on the other side of her sister’s note. A further investigation revealed half a bottle of milk that had soured. Cornelia’s face brightened. That would make a wonderful gingerbread, and she wrote down “Molasses, soda, brown sugar, baking-powder,” on her list.
It wasn’t as if Cornelia hadn’t spent the first sixteen years of her life at home with her mother, for she knew how to cook and manage quite well before she went away to school; only of course she hadn’t done a thing at it since she left home, and like most girls she thought she hated the very idea of kitchen work.
“Now, where do they buy things?” she wondered aloud to the clock as if it were alive. “I shall have to find out. I suppose if I take a basket and go far enough, I shall come to a store. If I don’t I can ask somebody.”
She ran upstairs, and got her hat and coat, and patted her pocketbook happily. At least she was not penniless, and did not have to wait until her father came home for what she wanted to get; for she had almost all of the last money her mother had sent before her illness. It had been sent for new spring clothes, and Cornelia had been so busy she had not had time to buy them. It sent a glad thrill through her heart now, strangely mingled with a pang at the things that she had planned and that now would not be hers. Yet, after all, the pang did not last; for already her mind was taken up with the new interests and needs of home, and she was genuinely glad that she had the money still unspent.
Down the dull little street she sped, thinking of all she had to do in the house before the family came home, trying not to feel the desolation of the night before as she passed the little commonplace houses and saw what kind of a neighborhood she had come to live in, trying not to realize that almost every house showed neglect or poverty of some kind. Well, what of it? If she did live in a neighborhood that was utterly uncongenial, she could at least make their little home more comfortable. She knew she could. She could feel the ability for it tingling to her very finger-tips, and she smiled as she hurried on to the next corner, where the gleam of a trolley track gave hint of a possible business street. She paused at the corner and looked each way, a pretty picture of girlhood, balancing daintily on her neat little feet and looking quite out of place in that neighborhood. Some of her new neighbors eyed her from behind their Nottingham lace curtains and their blue paper shades, and wondered unsympathetically where she came from and how she had strayed there, and a young matron in a dirty silver lace boudoir-cap with fluttering pink and blue ribbons came out with her market basket, and gave a cool, calculating stare, so far in another world that she did not mind being caught at it.
The boudoir-cap was almost too much for Cornelia, bobbing about the fat, red face of the frowsy woman; but the market basket gave her a hint, and she gracefully fell in behind her fellow shopper, and presently arrived at a market.
About this time Mrs. Knowlton and her son sat in the hotel dining-room downtown, eating their breakfast. A telegram had just been laid beside the son’s plate, and he looked up from reading it with a troubled brow.