Her chin quivered as she looked up at the picture of a beautiful woman upon the delicately tinted wall of the pretty bedroom—that of the mother who had died when she was twelve.
The dark Southern eyes, which her own reflected, called to her.
She rose and stood before the picture.
“Mother!” she whispered, palpitating. “Mother!” above a breath. “I am scarce sixteen and a half now: I—might—begin to take your place more with Father—and with Sybil, too!”
When, in that holy of holies, a girl’s prayer-nook, Olive knelt a little later, the growing wing-feather for which she prayed was not a rhyming-power—nor power to match any one of the feats which she had to-night seen performed—but that she might soar to be like her mother.
CHAPTER V
A MINIATURE
“Jessica! Ho! Jessica-a. Olive is looking for you-u, Jessica. She’s gone into the library now.” Sybil Deering’s high, laughing voice, rilling and trilling on terminal vowels like the spring note of a meadow-lark, rang up the broad staircase of the Deering mansion.
“Oh! is she? I’m coming. I’ll be down in just a minute,” sang back the girlish tones which had called the Bluebird on the playground; in the smallest of the guest-rooms upstairs—a pretty nest, like Olive’s bedroom—Jessica Holley laid down a paint-brush, closed a box of water-colors which looked as if it had seen service in other hands than hers, thrust aside a smeared palette, daubed with burnt sienna, yellow and black, on which she had been experimenting with colors in order to get something like the right shade for a Camp Fire Girl’s ceremonial dress of khaki and, forthwith, proceeded to the library.
“Jessica, when are we going to take those things to the little deaf-and-dumb girl, the frock you made for her—which you exhibited at the Council Fire last night—and the shoes I bought? I’m just longing to see her in them,” said Olive directly she showed her nose within the realm of books.