The Wheezy not only remodeled ancient dresses into stiff pinafores for Felice but she had to make the cushions that fitted in the dog hampers, down-stuffed oval affairs covered with heavy dull blue silk. The Wheezy sputtered that she couldn't see why "under the shining heavens, dogs should sleep on things traipsed out like comp'ny bedroom pin-cushions with letters tied onto their collars—"
Which so puzzled Felice that on one of those furtive occasions when she managed a few words with Zeb she demanded an answer. Zeb slapped his sides and chuckled.
"Because, Missy, putting on the frills and writing out the pedigree in French like he does makes folks pay jes' about twict as much for those dogs—"
Which was very bewildering, for Felice had not the remotest idea in this world what to pay for anything meant. How could she?
There was one very vivid recollection of Octavia. The recollection of the only time that the child remembered seeing her mother in a chair. How this miracle was accomplished only Octavia and Mademoiselle D'Ormy could have told, but on a certain day in a chair she was and the heavy rose silk curtains were drawn before the bed alcove and the room was gay with flowers and a ruddy fire glowed in the iron grate under the carved white mantlepiece. Felice sat adoringly on a footstool at her feet and they talked a great deal about a time when Maman should not only sit in a chair but should walk. It seemed that Octavia hoped to take her daughter to a place she referred to rather vaguely as The House in the Woods. Octavia had lived in this house in the woods when she was a girl and she was very much worried about what might have happened to the garden of that house. She thought that she and Felice ought to make it lovely again—if Piqueur were only still strong enough to help them. But before Felice had had time to find out just who Piqueur was, Mademoiselle had ushered in a curly-haired young man who carried a portfolio exactly like the one that Certain Legal Matters carried. And it was while Mademoiselle was taking Felice back to the garden that she heard her mother say,
"You must be patient with the silly fears of a woman who mistrusts all lawyers—these deeds are duplicates of those that another—"
In the garden Felice told Mademoiselle D'Ormy who the curly-haired person was—it was not for nothing that Felice had been staring at the pictures in the big Shakespeare Illustrated on the drawing-room table.
"It's the Portia Person who is talking with Maman—" she assured
Mademoiselle gravely, "she looks like a man but she's really a lady—"
The Portia Person was surely as gentle as a lady when he hurried into the garden a little later and sent Mademoiselle back to his client by the fireside. He looked down at Felice—she was embroidering that day, seated primly before the ebony tambour frame.
"Felicia," he said chokily, "will you try to remember something? Will you try to remember—if—if your mother goes away and you're ever in trouble that you're to come to see me? That my name is Ralph—John Ralph? And that you'll find me at Temple Bar, here in Brooklyn?"