And so pretty Miss Kate was saved, and not so much as a scar marred the pink and white of her fair girl’s face. Her arms were burned rather badly, but they would heal, and no permanent harm had come to her.
Sally was burned much more severely, but she hardly felt the pain of it in her joy that she had saved her idol, for whom she would have been so willing even to die. They took her home very tenderly, and the first words she said, as they led her inside her mother’s door, were,—
“Now, mother, I know what I took the shawl for!”
I said how differently two lives would have ended if she had not taken that shawl. Pretty Miss Kate’s would have burned out then and there, no doubt; for if any one else were there with presence of mind enough to have saved her, certainly there was no other wrap there like “the shawl.” And then Sally might have grown up to the humblest kind of toil, instead of being what she is to-day; for Squire Oswald’s gratitude for his daughter’s saved life did not exhaust itself in words. From that moment he charged himself with Sally Green’s education, and gave her every advantage which his own daughter received. And, truth to tell, Sally, with her wonderful temperament, the wealth of poetry and devotion and hero-worship that was in her, soon outstripped pretty Miss Kate in her progress.
But no rivalry or jealousy ever came between them. As Sally had adored Kate’s loveliness, so, in time, Kate came to do homage to Sally’s genius; and the two were friends in the most complete sense of the word.
A BORROWED ROSEBUD.
There was a pattering footfall on the piazza, and Miss Ellen Harding went to look out. She saw a little figure standing there, among the rosebuds,—not one of the neighbors’ children, but a bonny little lassie, with curls of spun gold, and great, fearless brown eyes, and cheeks and lips as bright as the red roses on the climbing rosebush beside her.