Almost convulsively the girl held him close. “Oh, Baby Jim,” she said, “I’m awfully sorry I said that about cats, for even if the world is full of babies, after all, there’s only just one.”
An hour later Carol looked at the clock. “You’d better hurry, Dix,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to miss the stage.”
And hurry the little maid did, and at eight o’clock promptly she set off up the cañon trail with a song singing in her heart, and with feet that could hardly be kept from dancing.
Josephine Bayley was just finishing her breakfast when a tap came upon her door. With the girlish skip which had so shocked prim little Miss Archer, she went to open it, and, as she had supposed, she found Dixie, her freckled face aglow, standing outside.
She was wearing a very pretty leghorn hat wreathed with daisies.
“Why, Dixie, how nice you look!” the young woman exclaimed. “Come in, dear. We can see the stage when it comes up the valley road. What a pretty hat you have.”
The girl flushed. “’Tisn’t mine, teacher,” she confessed. “It belongs to Carol, but she just made me wear it.” Then she added in a burst of confidence: “Carol’s changed a lot since she went away to be ’dopted. Before that she never would let me even put this hat on in front of the mirror, let alone wear it outdoors, but this morning, when I was putting on my old hat that got caught in the rain last spring and sort of limped, she came right up and took it away, and then, before I knew what she was up to, she slipped back of me and put her treasure-hat right on my head, and when I said something might happen to it, she said, ‘All right, let it,’ but that she wasn’t going to have her big sister go to town in a hat that looked as though Biddy-hen had used it for a nest.”
There were sudden tears in the eyes of the little girl. “Oh, teacher,” she confided, “I did think that I always loved Carol as much as ever I could, but I’m loving her more every day, and Ken, too. He said last night, ‘Gee, sis. I’m glad now Carol went away to be ’dopted, for I’m so glad she came back.’”
“She is a dear, sweet girl,” Miss Bayley said, “and it was nice for her to want you to wear the hat which she so treasures, but I’m sure that nothing will happen to it, for there isn’t a cloud in the blue, blue sky, and we’re not expecting whirlwinds to carry it away.”
While they talked, Miss Bayley washed the few dishes and then Dixie helped her spread the bed in the screened-in porch, which was still a joy to the girl who had lived her twenty years in crowded New York.