CHAPTER II
armencita knocked. There was no answer. She knocked again. After the third knock she opened the door and, hand on the knob, looked in.
"Oh, Miss Frances, I was afraid you had gone out! I knocked and knocked, but you didn't say come in, so I thought I'd look. Please excuse me!"
The girl at the sewing-machine, which was close to the window and far from the door, stopped its running, turned in her chair, and held out her hand. "Hello, Carmencita! I'm glad it's you and not Miss Perkins. I wouldn't want Miss Perkins to see me trying to sew, but you can see. Take off your coat. Is it cold out?"
"Getting cold." The heavy coat was laid on one chair, and Carmencita, taking up a half-made gingham dress from another, sat in it and laid the garment in her lap. "I didn't know you knew how to sew."
"I don't." The girl at the machine laughed. "Those Simcoe children didn't have a dress to change in, and I'm practising on some skirts and waists for them. Every day I'm finding out something else I don't know how to do. I seem to have been taught a good many things there is no special need of knowing, and very few I can make use of down here."
"You didn't expect to come down here when you were learning things, did you?" Carmencita's eyes were gravely watching the efforts being made to thread the machine's needle. "I guess when you were a little girl you didn't know there were things like you see down here. What made you come here, Miss Frances? You didn't have to. What made you come?"
Into the fine fair face color crept slowly, and for a moment a sudden frown ridged the high forehead from which the dark hair, parted and brushed back, waved into a loose knot at the back of her head; then she laughed, and her dark eyes looked into Carmencita's blue ones.
"Why did I come?" The gingham dress on which she had been sewing was folded carefully. "I came to find out some of the things I did not know about. I wasn't of any particular use to anybody else. No one needed me. I had a life on my hands that I didn't know what to do with, and I thought perhaps—"