The “blue-blooded” little girl looked with horror at the dress. It was silk, but how she had always hated bright red. She actually drew herself up as she said: “I don’t wish to wear it. I wish a blue silk dress.”
Now it happened that Mrs. Clayburn, on second thought, had decided to climb the stairs and see just how the little orphan liked her new surroundings, and so, holding the hand of Sylvia, she had just entered the room unseen as this most ungrateful remark was being uttered.
“Indeed, Miss Martin?” she said in a tone of mingled iciness and sarcasm. “What can you, a mere charity orphan, be thinking of to tell what you wish to wear? You ought to be humbly grateful that you are being taken out of that tumble-down log cabin and permitted to live in a house as handsome as any belonging to the best families.”
For one brief moment a spark of Martin pride flamed up in the heart of the small girl. Their log cabin was not tumble-down. Only that summer an artist from the East had said that it was the most picturesque home that he had seen in the whole State of Nevada. That was when the crimson rambler had been a riot of bloom.
Wisely she said nothing, but meekly permitted the maid to put on the hated red dress.
The swish of the silk was something after all.
Poor little Carol had not started out well, and she was to find that, although she was living in a rose-garden, it was not one without thorns.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CAROL IN DISGRACE
The dinner was one of many courses, and there were two very formal guests, and, to Mr. Clayburn’s mortification, as well as Carol’s, the hostess, wishing to impress the fashionable Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis Burrell, from Reno, with her philanthropic generosity, told in detail the story of Carol’s life, beginning when her mother was a stranded actress in the year of the big strike over at Silver City.
The kind man glanced often at the small girl whose face was becoming as scarlet as a peony. He well knew that he would be publicly rebuked by his wife if he remonstrated or attempted to change the conversation, and yet were it not better that he should bear the brunt of it than this mere child who had been invited to come to their home? But, before he had time to decide just how best to intervene, Mrs. Clayburn had reached a point in her narrative which necessitated a description of the father, who, she informed them, had been a no-account rancher, called by the mountaineers “Pine Tree Martin.” She said no more, for the small girl, with flaming eyes, had risen so suddenly that her chair fell back with a crash. “’Tisn’t so!” she cried, her small hands clenched. “’Tisn’t so, at all!” She had whirled to face the visitors. “He was the kindest, best father there ever was to Dixie, Ken, Baby Jim, and me.” Then, bursting into tears, she ran from the room and groped her way blindly up-stairs and into the room to which Fanchon had first taken her.