He hadn’t been able to find a single word about any child who was lost, or who had strayed, or who had been stolen!
“Good!” he exclaimed, and he looked with great relief at the heap of papers about him, their splotches of color and assertive head-lines having no further interest for him. He smiled complacently.
In the meantime, in the sunny sitting-room up-stairs, Flora had broken the news to Mrs. Baron—the news touching Bonnie May and the new dress.
It had been a very difficult thing to do, because Mrs. Baron was always at her worst on Sunday mornings.
It was on Sunday mornings that she felt most keenly the lapse of the neighborhood from former glories to a condition of sordid griminess. It was on these mornings that she fared forth to the old church, only three blocks away, in which the best people in town had formerly worshipped, but which had been deserted by nearly all the old parishioners.
It was Mrs. Baron’s contention that it was indelicate, to say the least, for people to desert a church. There were things in the church life, she maintained, which could not be transplanted, and which constituted the very warp and woof of the domestic as well as the social foundations. She had come to regard herself as a kind of standard-bearer in this relationship, and she attended services somewhat ostentatiously, with the belief that she was not only lending her influence, but administering a rebuke as well. Ignoring the protests of her family, she had even consented to play the organ for the Sunday-school services. As a young lady she had learned to read music, as a matter of course, and though she possessed no musical intelligence, and had found it impossible to regain the old manual skill she had once possessed, she played the simple hymns with a kind of proud rigor, because she believed her participation in the services in this direction must impart an authority to the proceedings which the abler playing of some obscure individual could not have imparted.
Indeed, Mrs. Baron was a personage on Sunday mornings; a gallant general leading a forlorn hope proudly and firmly.
When Flora confessed to her that the dress had been rejected, she was too greatly amazed to say a great deal. She had also entered upon her stoic mood—her Sunday-morning mood.
“You see, she is simply determined not to get along,” she declared with finality. She took the dress into her own hands and regarded it critically. “Do you see how carefully the feather-stitching is done?” she demanded.
“Yes,” agreed Flora, “the—the feather-stitching is beautiful. But really, I don’t believe she is simply perverse. If you could have seen the dismay in her eyes—” Flora smiled at the recollection.