As quietly as they could, they helped her up the stairs and rummaged in their closets for towels and clothes. Then they all set to work, and in a little while the newcomer was dry and warmly dressed in civilized garments.
She was of about the same size as Cora and Belle, and they had no trouble in fitting her out. Bess would have been equally willing to contribute some of her belongings, but her “plumpness” forbade.
It was astonishing to see the difference wrought in Nina by the assumption of the garments of ordinary life. She looked in them, as Belle remarked, “to the manner born,” and when they had dressed her hair in the way they wore their own, there was little trace of the gypsy left, except her bronzed complexion.
She gave a little cry of feminine delight as they made her look at herself in the mirror.
“Oh, it’s so long since I wore clothes like these!” she murmured.
“And now,” said Cora, as she gazed with pleasure on the transformation that had been wrought, “we’ll all go down to the kitchen and see what we can get in the way of something to eat.”
They stole downstairs and the girls ransacked the larder. They found plenty of cold meat and bread and preserves. Belle got out a chafing dish and scrambled some eggs, and Cora brewed a pot of fragrant coffee. Bess set the table and they all gathered about it and ate heartily.
The girls thrilled with the romance of it all. The drenching storm, the midnight hour, the gypsy visitor, the feeling that they were involved in a mystery made them tingle. Then, too, the knowledge that all this was taking place while the other occupants of the house were unconscious of it gave a touch of the surreptitious and the clandestine that was not without its charm.
The gypsy girl of course was somewhat self-conscious, as she could not help being under the peculiar circumstances, but the girls noticed that her table manners were good, and they were more and more confirmed in their conviction that she was not what her dress and surroundings had made her appear.
She spoke mostly in monosyllables and only when addressed, and every once in a while they could see the look of anxiety and fear come into her eyes that they had noted the day before.