As the tears filled her eyes, she pressed her pocket handkerchief to them and would have risen. But her mother, who had ousted Betty from her place beside the chair, put out a gentle hand to restrain her. Mrs. Harrow began to feel that her daughter was in a fever and delirious.
Rose fixed her great, dark, hollow eyes upon her.
“If you don’t let me go out with Betty, this is what I shall do. Mama Harrow,” she threatened vehemently. “I shall lie on that bed and cry until I am sick, and then I’ll cry till I die. I might as well die, anyhow, if I’ve got to go back to—everything!”
“O, Rosy darling, you’ll break my heart!” protested her mother.
“I mean it,” said Rose firmly. Then suddenly she reached out and seized her mother’s hand.
“O, mama, I want to go just awfully! I want to, just as I used to want things, and—it will make me happy as I used to be happy,” she pleaded.
Mrs. Harrow yielded perforce. She fetched Rose’s hat and spring jacket, though with manifest reluctance, looking daggers at the naughty girl who had incited the mischief. Rose suffered her to put on the wraps as if she had been an invalid, but she broke free and, finding the stair, slid down the bannister.
At the door, she turned, hugged and kissed her mother and bade her cheer up. Mrs. Harrow patted her shoulder but frowned darkly at Betty. As the girls went down the flagged walk, however, arm-in-arm, the mother relented. For it seemed like a happy dream of Rose. Her hand loosely resting on Betty’s arm, the girl walked lightly and fearlessly beside her, only her pallor and a slight weakness differentiating her from the girl who had gone through that gate in just that manner so many times in that past which Mrs. Harrow had believed forever past. Rose was chattering, too, quite in the old way, and just as they turned the corner into the avenue, her laugh rang out,—the sweetest music in the world to the woman on the porch. As she entered the house, tears streamed down her face, but her heart was lighter than it had been in many a day. And presently she was trying to decide what Betty would like best for tea. For she meant to keep the girl and have a real feast to celebrate the wonderful occasion.
CHAPTER IX
“TOMMY, I have missed you shockingly. You haven’t been in for days and days. I suppose science has been benefiting at my expense. Magic must have been working like yeast?” Mr. Meadowcroft observed pensively.