“I know—I know you never meant to be anything but lovely to me!” sobbed the figure in the chair. “But, oh”—wildly weeping—“if my father or my mother could have lived! I know that your father, Olive—that Mr. Deering—invited me to come here for this last year or so that I’ll be in high school, when he had never even seen me, simply because Cousin Anne was so worried about my having nowhere—nowhere to go after Auntie (of course, she wasn’t really my auntie, only a friend of Mother’s who took me in after Mother died) sailed for China with her husband who’s a missionary. They didn’t think that China, the part that she’s going to, would be good for me!” pathetically.
“I’m sure it wouldn’t—pig-tails and Boxers and stuff!” wailed Olive helplessly, her face wet too, as if the window’s melting shafts of color dripped upon it. “There, Jessica! There, Jess darling; you know we all just love to have you with us!” perching upon the arm of the library chair, laying her beautiful dark head with the ringlet curl against the stricken brown one.
The curl tickled Jessica’s neck; impulsively she caught and kissed it, fondled it like a flower against her wet cheek.
“Yes, ev-er-ybody has been so good to me,” she gasped, reviving enough for heartfelt emphasis. “You’ve shared things with me, Sybil and you; and Cousin Anne insists on giving me a little pocket-money from time to time, just as she gives me clothes—she’s so dear!—and just as she’s insisting on paying my camp-board in that seashore camp, so that I may have the fun of going with the other girls to those beautiful Sugarloaf sand-dunes.”
Sugarloaf! Never did sugar-lump drop into a tart cup with more ameliorating sweetness than dropped that word, now, into the troubled waters pulsing to and fro between the girls’ hearts, although it breathed of brine, not sugar.
Olive started, sat up straight upon the chair-arm. She had thought of more words to conjure with, to win back joy or, at any rate, distract from sorrow.
“Jessica!” she said solemnly, “I’ve got a teeter-ladder in my brain. Ever since we visited the playground that day I’ve had a teeter-ladder in my head.”
Jessica choked upon the next sob which mixed itself up with her startled breath. Her nose ceased burrowing in the leather nest of a chair-button. She sat up and turned her face round.
“Oh! you needn’t stare at me; I’m not going out of my mind; I haven’t got a giant stride there, too,” laughingly. “But the ladder keeps seesawing all the time; it’s like a game of ‘Jenkins: Hands up! Hands down!’ One minute the ladder teeters down toward the Sugarloaf, and the hotel, that Father proposed our going to this summer, Sybil and I, is away up in the air, with the teacher of modern dancing from whom we’re to take lessons, crowing on top: Cock-a-doodle-doo! Tooraloo! Like that!
“Next minute down with the hotel—up with the Sugarloaf and the Camp Fire Girls dancing the Leaf Dance among the white dunes!”