“If I feel that I can,” said Rose. She stretched out her slender arms, from which the lace-trimmed sleeves of her night-gown fell away to the shoulder, and Sylvia let them close around her thin neck and felt the young cheek upon her own with a rapture like a lover's.
“Those folks she lived with in New York are going to Europe to-morrow,” she told Henry, when she was down-stairs again, “and they have treated that poor child mean. They have never told her a word about it until now. She says she thinks their rich aunt has died and left them her money, and they have just cleared out and left her.”
“Well, she can stay with us as long as she is contented,” said Henry.
“I rather guess she can,” said Sylvia.
Henry regarded her with the wondering expression which was often on his face nowadays. He had glimpses of the maternal depths of his wife's heart, which, while not understanding, he acquiesced in; but there was something else which baffled him.
But now for Sylvia came a time of contentment, apparently beyond anything which had ever come into her life. She fairly revelled in her possession of Rose, and the girl in her turn seemed to reciprocate. Although the life in East Westland was utterly at variance with the life she had known, she settled down in it, of course with sundry hitches of adjustment. For instance, she could not rid herself at first of the conviction that she must have, as she had always had, a maid.
“I don't know how to go to work,” she said to Sylvia one day. “Of course I must have a maid, but I wonder if I had better advertise or write some of my friends. Betty Morrison may know of some one, or Sally Maclean. Betty and Sally always seem to be able to find ways out of difficulties. Perhaps I had better write them. Maybe it would be safer than to advertise.”
Sylvia and Rose were sitting together in the south room that afternoon. Sylvia looked pathetically and wistfully at the girl. “What do you want a maid for?” she asked, timidly.
Rose stared. “What for? Why, what I always want a maid for: to attend to my wardrobe and assist me in dressing, to brush my hair, and—everything,” ended Rose, comprehensively.
Sylvia continued to regard her with that wistful, pathetic look.