“Little Dixie Martin, you shall have one! You shall have a violin!” the young woman said, deeply touched. Then she added: “I only wish that I knew how to give you lessons, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. That is a true saying, dear, and you and I will keep watching for the way. Now, little ladykins, if you will stand up very straight and tall, I’d like to see if this pattern hangs well. I’m going to pin it on you, if you don’t mind, to get an idea of what kind of dress it will make.”
Miss Bayley did not tell that her real reason for wishing to pin on the pattern was to discover how much larger she would have to cut one before making a certain piece of shimmery green silk into a dress for Dixie.
When the pattern was on, the girl-teacher made many penciled notes on a bit of brown paper. “There, now,” she exclaimed, “we’ll cut out the material.”
Dixie, watching, suddenly put one hand on her heart, as though to still its too-rapid beating. “Oh, teacher,” she said in a little awed voice, “this is a wonderful minute, when we’re really going to begin to make a blue-silk dress for Carol.” Then she added almost wistfully: “How I do hope that dear old Grandmother Piggins knows that you are helping us. Before she died she sent for me and she said, ‘Dixie, dear, I’m glad to go, but I’m praying that somebody will be sent to take my place with you.’”
Then impulsively the child cuddled close to the girl-teacher and looked up with love shining in her eyes. “Miss Bayley, you are the answer to Grandmother Piggins’s prayer.”
Kneeling, the young woman held the little girl in a close embrace, as she said in a voice that trembled: “Dixie, I have wandered far, and have lost the simple faith, but, oh, what it means to me to know that I, even I, have been found worthy to be used as an answer to prayer!”
Then rising, she merrily added, “Now thread a needle, little Miss Seamstress, and sew these two edges together.”
Sitting in a low rocker, by a sunny open window, Dixie took painstaking little stitches, almost measuring each one, but when her girl-teacher noticed that, she laughingly said: “You needn’t be so careful, dear. The big thing in basting is to have the notches match and keep the edges together.”
For a moment the machine, which had been borrowed from the inn, hummed a merry song, then teacher looked up to see Dixie sitting very still, her sewing in her lap, while her eyes were gazing between fluttering white curtains and out toward the mountains.
“A penny for your dreams,” Miss Bayley called gayly, as she paused to snap a thread.