Helen Culver spoke at last. “Well, Rosanna, what are you thinking? Have you any plan at all?”
The dark child spoke. “No, Helen, I can’t think of a thing. It makes me so provoked!”
“Tell me, will you not?” asked Elise in her pretty broken English. She was trying so hard to speak like Rosanna and Helen that she could scarcely be prevailed upon to say anything in French.
Many months had passed since Elise, in the care of the kind ladies of the American Red Cross, had come over from France to her adopted guardian, young Mr. Horton. She had grown to be quite American during that time, and was very proud of her attainments. The dark and dreadful past was indeed far behind, and while she sometimes wept for her dear grandmother, who had died in Mr. Horton’s tender arms in the old château at home, she loved her foster mother, Mrs. Hargrave, with all her heart. And with Elise laughing and dancing through it, the great old Hargrave house was changed indeed. While Elise was crossing the ocean, Mrs. Hargrave had fitted up three rooms for her. There was a sitting-room, that was like the sunny outdoors, with its dainty flowered chintzes, its ivory wicker furniture, its plants and canaries singing in wicker cages. Then there was a bedroom that simply put you to sleep just to look at it: all blue and silver, like a summer evening. Nothing sang here, but there was a big music box, old as Mrs. Hargrave herself, that tinkled Elise to sleep if she so wished. And the bathroom was papered so that you didn’t look at uninteresting tiles set like blocks when you splashed around in the tub. No; there seemed to be miles and miles of sunny sea-beach with little shells lying on the wet sand and sea gulls swinging overhead.
Mrs. Hargrave was so delighted with all this when it was finished that it made her discontented with her own sitting-room with its dim old hangings and walnut furniture.
“No wonder I was beginning to grow old,” she said to her life-long friend, Mrs. Horton. “No wonder at all! All this dismal old stuff is going up in the attic. I shall bring down my great great-grandmother’s mahogany and have all my wicker furniture cushioned with parrots and roses.”
“It sounds dreadful,” said Mrs. Horton.
“It won’t be,” retorted her friend. “It will be perfectly lovely. Did you know that I can play the piano? I can, and well. I had forgotten it. I am going to have birds too—not canaries, but four cunning little green love-birds. They are going to have all that bay window for themselves. And I shall have a quarter grand piano put right there.”
“I do think you are foolish,” said Mrs. Horton, who was a cautious person. “What if this child turns out to be a failure? All you have is my son’s word for it, and what does a boy twenty-four years old know about little girls? You ought to wait and see what sort of a child she is.”
“I have faith, my dear,” said her friend. “I have been so lonely for so many long years that I feel sure that at last the good Lord is going to send me a real little daughter.”