But several days passed and no reply came from the absent step-sister. Meanwhile the work of dress-making went briskly on, to the secret distress of the little fraud, as she called herself when alone.
“Oh, it’s too bad, ruining all these fine things cutting them up for me! I shall never wear them, and they will not do for Louise, she is so much bigger than I am! Oh, why don’t she write and put a stop to it all?” she thought impatiently, and in her trouble she wrote another letter, telling Louise of the sacrifice of the finery, and begging her incoherently to “do something.”
By the time that she could reasonably expect a reply to this second appeal several very pretty dresses were completed, and one evening soon after tea when she had hurried upstairs to have a real good cry over Louise’s unaccountable silence, she was startled by the abrupt entrance of Mrs. Barry’s maid with the muslin dress thrown over her arm.
“Mrs. Barry wants you to dress and come down to the parlor,” she said.
Molly stared.
“What for?” she inquired ungrammatically.
Agnes Walker shook her head laconically and answered:
“I can’t tell. She wants to see how your new dresses fit, perhaps, or to give you some lessons in managing your train. Anyway, she told me to dress you and send you down.”
“Here’s a lark,” said the merry girl to herself, forgetting all about her tears of a minute before.
She submitted coolly to Agnes Walker’s help, exclaiming gayly: