Dulcie answered her, her sharp slangy syllables falling incisively after Felicia's low drawl.
"I don't know that it's any of your business but they amount to about two hundred dollars. I know what you're thinking, that with the furniture we could open a rooming house. I've been thinking that myself while Miss Day was gone. I've experience you know, my beastly step-aunt does make a good thing of it. So if you wanted to rent the basement and had some furniture of your own Miss Day might consider it."
Janet's thin arms rested akimbo. She nodded.
"If you've lodgings to let you've got to have some one to keep 'em tidy. There's a good bit o' money there for an able body. If the furnishings is what she ree-presents and you'd conseeder takin' me in on shares—I might conseeder—"
"Consider what?" gasped Dulcie.
"Conseeder advancing for the storage of the furnishings—with the furnishings as security o' course. And doin' some cleanin' toward the matter o' what ma rent would be. Mind I'm no sayin' I would until I see the furnishings. I'm on'y conseederin'—I'll have the matter o' some ladders—" she peered again down the dark hallway, "and I'd want a neat ticket in the window—"
At midnight, by the embers of their dying fire, Felicia lay with Dulcie's rug about her, plaintively pretending from the feel of the chair, that she was the young Felice of those long years ago, journeying toward the beloved House in the Woods. It was an easy pretense for she could glimpse the dark waters of the bay and the silent ships drifting on the tide. A spring fog seeped through the open windows and she was quite as miserable as she had been on that memorable trip. Beside her in her own chair, Dulcie talked and talked, a thousand details that Felicia's tired wits could not follow. It did not seem at all a miracle to her that she had found Janet. She accepted her with the simplicity with which she accepted any one who came into her life.
"The garden is a little old pippin," Dulcie boasted. "We can make that all O. K. in a day or so, but the house did stump me! Janet MacGregor is an angel sent straight from heaven. If I ever get a commish' to sculpt an angel I shall use Janet MacGregor for my model, little Miss By-the-Day," she sighed drowsily, "your middle name must be Luck."
"My middle name is Trenton," answered Felicia literally. "Dulcie, I am going to tell you something. Something you must remember. When our little garden is lovely again, if any one—ever—kisses—you out there and you love him—don't let any one take you away from him. Because it might be too long afterward that you come back—you might be old like Grandy and Piqueur—so that he wouldn't know you when he saw you. He wouldn't know that you were the—Girl,—"
Something in the level flatness of her tones almost broke the Sculptor Girl's heart. She reached out her hand and caught Felicia's and gripped it hard. She did not say much but what she said Felicia found strangely comforting.