“I wish to goodness you would! No, I don’t! Come here, Sally!” Jessica stretched out a hand as the other girl rose to her feet. “I don’t mean to be raspy and snappy; I have tried to live up to the Camp Fire law all the time we’ve been here, to ‘Be happy!’ I oughtn’t to say that, for it didn’t really take any ‘trying’—I have been! But every one of the rest of you girls have a home to go back to—when this—this jolly camping-time is over. I haven’t!”
“Haven’t you a home with the Deerings, with Olive and Sybil and their awfully rich father—and your Cousin Anne?”
“Olive heard, to-day, from her father that he’s going to be married again in the fall; Sybil doesn’t know it yet; she only told me. Olive is away off on a sand-hill, now, making up her mind to be lovely to the new stepmother because she thinks that’s what her own mother would have her do. But”—a long-drawn gasp—“perhaps the new wife won’t want Cousin Anne or me in the house—me, anyway, as I’m no relation at all to the Deerings.”
“Pshaw, I’ll bet she’ll be delighted to have you! If not, Cousin Anne and you can live together.”
“Cousin Anne hasn’t enough money to support herself, much less me! She had, but she lost most of it a few years ago by the failure of a mining company in which she had invested largely. She had just enough left for ‘pin money’, as Mr. Deering, who’s her cousin, told her; so he offered her a home in his house to be a kind of mother to his daughters and superintend their education. Then”—another long gasp shaking the moss-green shoulders—“then when the friend of Mother’s who took me in after my mother died nearly two years and a half ago—(I used to help her with her housework, this friend, and call her ‘Auntie’ though she wasn’t any relation, either), when she had to go to China with her husband, Cousin Anne was so worried, not knowing what was to become of me, that Mr. Deering, to please her, I suppose, invited me on a visit to his home for a year, or a year and a half, until I get through high school.... But oh!—oh! it’s hard for a girl like me to lose both father and mother—not to belong to anybody—really.”
Yet, even as her lips quivered upon this climax of her sorrow, Morning-Glory sat deliberately up, exposing her face to Sally’s voice, and gazed off at the far-out tide which the ever-quickening southwesterly wind was ruffling with a prophecy of squalls and rain, determined not to make a scene here on the cloudy sands as she did in the Deerings’ library under the glamor of that painted window where the young monk pored over a parchment book.
But the association of then and now presently made her chin tremble again; blindly she caught at Sally’s hand.
“You—you were laughing at my pasty sheet of glass,” she gasped. “But this morning, when I got thinking how, in ten days, now, we’ll leave these lovely Sugarloaf dunes, go back to the city and to school, to hard work, studying, I felt that if—if I could only study along the lines Father had picked out for me, I wouldn’t mind quite so much—that it would seem to bring me nearer to him and to my mother, too.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“He had it all planned before he died three years ago that I was to take up his work—study art and design—become an artist. He thought I could by an’ by earn my living, as he did, by getting into the designing-room connected with some big stained-glass works where they turn out beautiful painted windows.... He”—breathlessly—“he said I had just the same love of color that he had. And I have! I have!” passionately. “When I wake early and watch a dawn here over the river and those opposite white dunes, I feel it—feel it in my very toes!” curling up those tingling members.