“Only that little, teenty thing? How funny! Why, mamma carried three most as big as my bed to Saratoga. You can’t have many dresses. What are you going to wear to dinner?”
“I’ve been to dinner.” And Maddy looked up in some surprise.
“You have! We never have it till five, when Guy is at home; but now they are gone, Mrs. Noah says we will have it at one, as folks ought to do. To-day I coaxed her to wait till you came, and the table is all set out so nicely for two. Can you carve, and do you like green turtle soup?”
Maddy was bewildered, but managed to reply that she could not carve, that she never saw any green turtle soup, and that she supposed she should wear to dinner the dress she had on.
“Why, we always change, even Mrs. Noah,” Jessie exclaimed, bending over the open trunk, and examining its contents.
Two calicoes, a blue muslin, a gingham, and a delaine, beside the one she had on—that was the sum total of Maddy’s wardrobe, and Jessie glanced at it a little ruefully as Maddy carefully shook out the nicely-folded dresses and laid them upon the bed. Here Mrs. Noah was heard calling Jessie, who ran away, leaving Maddy alone for a moment.
Maddy had seen the look Jessie gave the dresses, and for the first time there dawned upon her mind the possibility that her plain apparel, and ignorance of the ways of Aikenside, might be to her the cause of much mortification.
“And grandma said they were so nice, too, and did them up so carefully,” she said, her lip beginning to quiver, and her eyes filling with tears, thoughts of home came rushing over her.
She could not force them back, and laying her head upon the top of the despised hair trunk, she sobbed aloud. Guy Remington’s private room was in the hall, and as the doctor knew a book was to have been left there for him, he took the liberty of getting it; passing Maddy’s door he heard the low sound of weeping, and looking in, saw her where she sat or rather knelt upon the floor.
“Homesick so soon?” he said, advancing to her side, and then, amid a torrent of tears, the whole came out.