"Some doctors are out-and-out fools," murmured the old woman to herself. "He were a very nice spoke gentleman—tall and genteel, and he treated me like a lady, which any true man would; but when he said I had got writers' cramp in this hand, it must have been nonsense. For there, I never write; ef I spell through a letter once in six months to my poor sister's only child in Australia, it's the very most that I can do. Writers' cramp, indeed! Well, it's a comfort to know that he must be wrong. I wonder how Ally has got on with the work. Poor dear! I'll have to do more of that feather-stitching than ever, now that Ally has lost her situation."
Alison looked up and saw her grandmother standing near her. She had, of course, been taught the feather-stitching. Mrs. Reed had confided this important secret to her once in a time of serious illness.
"For I may die, and it may go out of the fam'ly," she said. "It was begun by my grandmother, who got the first notion of it in the sort of trail of the leaves. My grandmother was a Simpson—most respectable folk—farmers of the best sort. She had wonderful linen, as fine as silk. She made it all herself, and then she hemmed it and marked it and feather-stitched it with them trailing leaves. She taught the trail to my mother, who married Phipps, and mother had a turn for needlework, and she gave it that little twist and rise which makes it so wonderful pretty and neat; but 'twas I popped on the real finish, quilting it, so to speak, and making it the richest trimming, and the most dainty you could find. You must learn it, Alison; it would be a sin and a shame for it to die with me. It must stay in the fam'ly, and you must 'ave it on yer wedding linen, that you must."
Grannie had taken great pains teaching Alison, and Alison had tried hard to learn, but, unlike the Phippses and the Simpsons, she had no real turn for fine needlework. She learned the wonderful stitch, it is true, but only in a sort of fashion.
Now, the secret of that stitch it is not for me to disclose. It had to be done with a twist here, and a loop there, and a sudden clever bringing round of the thread from the left to the right at a critical moment; then followed a still more clever darting of the needle through a loop, which suddenly appeared just when it was least expected. The feather-stitching involved many movements of the hand and arm, and certainly gave a splendid effect to the fine linen or cambric on which it was worked. Grannie could do it almost with her eyes shut, but Alison, who thought she knew all about it, found when she began to practice that she had not taken the right loop nor the proper twist, and she quite forgot the clever under-movement which brought the thread from left to right, and made that sort of crinkled scroll which all the other workwomen in West London tried to imitate in vain. Grannie was trimming some beautiful underlinen for a titled lady; it was made of the finest cambric, and the feather-stitching was to be a special feature.
She stood now, looked down at her pretty grandchild, and saw that she had ruined the work.
"Poor dear," muttered the old woman to herself, "she dint got the turn of it, or maybe her head is confused. No wonder, I'm sure; for a cleverer nor neater girl than Alison don't live."
"There, my love," she said, speaking aloud, "I've come back. You can put away the work now."
"Oh, Grannie!" said the girl, looking up with flushed cheeks, "have I done it right? It looks wrong somehow; it aint a bit rich like what you do."
"Dearie me," said the old woman, "as ef that mattered. You pop it back into my drawer now."