“He’s late getting home tonight,” she told herself aloud, after she had searched the outer darkness in vain for any answering signal, but there was not even the faintest trace of troubled worry in her words. She merely smiled with mock severity.
“He’s later than he ought to be––even if it is his last week back in the hills. Next week I’ll have to make him wait–––”
Her vaguely murmured threat drifted away into nothingness, left unfinished as she rose and stood, hands lightly bracketed upon her hips, scrutinizing the completed work.
“There,” she went on softly, sighing in deep relief, “there––that’s done––if––if it will only fit.”
She removed the cluster of pins from her mouth and unfastened the long strip of newspaper from the section of the old black skirt which she had ripped apart that afternoon for a pattern. It was far too short––that old skirt––to duplicate the long free lines of the brilliant red and black costume of the dancer beside her elbow on the table, but Dryad Anderson’s shears, coasting rapidly around the edge of the worn cloth, had left a wide margin of safety at the hem.
The critical frown upon her forehead smoothed little by little while she lifted cautiously that long strip of paper pattern and turned with it dangling from one hip to walk up and down before the tilted mirror at the far end of the room, viewing her reflected 42 image from every possible angle. Even the thoughtful pucker at the corners of her eyes disappeared and she nodded her small head with its loosened mass of hair in judicious satisfaction.
“I do believe that’s it,” the hushed voice mused on, “or, if it isn’t, it is as near as I can ever hope to get it. If––if only it doesn’t sag at the heels––and if it does I’ll have to–––”
Again with a last approving glance flung over one shoulder the murmured comment, whatever it might have been, was finished wordlessly. Her fingers, in spite of their very smallness as strong and straight and clean-jointed as those of the old man bent double over his bench in the back room, lingered absently over the folding of that last paper pattern, and when she finally added it to the top of the stack already folded and piled beside the lamp her eyes had become velvety blank with preoccupation.
From early afternoon, ever since the Judge himself had whirled up to the sagging gate at the end of their rotting boardwalk and clambered out of his yellow-wheeled buckboard to knock with measured solemnity at the front door, Dryad had been rushing madly from task to task and pausing always in just such fashion in the midst of each to stand dreamily immobile, everything else forgotten for the moment in an effort to visualize it––to understand that it was real, after all, and not just a cobweb fabric 43 of her own fancy, like the dreams she was always weaving to make the long week days pass more quickly.
It was more than a few years since the last time Judge Maynard had driven up to the gate of that old, drab cottage; and now standing there with one slim outstretched hand lovingly patting the bundle of paper patterns which represented her afternoon’s work, she smiled with gentle derision for the mental picture she had carried all those years of the wealthiest man in Boltonwood.