“There is enough to pay our rent, and we have been comfortable, too, thanks to Miss Elinor, who has saved us many a shilling by her timely acts of charity.”
Miss Elinor had been to them a ministering angel, and however much she might be disliked at the white house on the hill, she was loved and honored at the brown house in the hollow, and that night when Alice Warren sought her pillow, she breathed a prayer for the kind woman who was to befriend her in more ways than one.
CHAPTER VI.
PAY-DAY.
Miss Elinor sat alone in her pleasant parlor, bending over her bit of embroidery, and setting her needle into the dainty fabric in a manner plainly indicating a mind ill at ease. And for a lady of her temperament, Miss Elinor was a good deal disturbed. During the past week her brother had spent four evenings at the white house on the hill, and though she had unreservedly given him her opinion of the young lady Adelaide, he persisted in saying she was the most agreeable and intelligent girl in Oakland. It was in vain that she told him of the wristband, saying she had no doubt they sewed secretly for a living.
He only smiled incredulously, telling her, however, that he should like Adelaide all the better if he found she was skillful in shirt-making.
In short, Miss Elinor began to have some wellfounded fears that she should yet have an opportunity of making the house uncomfortable, both to herself and the wife her brother might bring there and it was this reflection which made her so nervous, that pleasant March afternoon.
“I would rather he married little Alice Warren—blind father and all,” she thought, just as the door opened softly, and “little Alice Warren” stood within the room.
She had been to the store to see Mr. Howland, she said, and as he was not there she had come to the house, hoping to find him, for she would rather give the money into his hand and know there was no mistake.
“What money, child?” asked Miss Elinor, and Alice replied that “it was pay-day,” at the same time opening the little box and showing the pieces of money she had saved from her earnings.