“But the queen is not to be here,” said I, “so you must wear it, Alice; and I do not want you to be without your apron. I like that great white apron. I wonder if I will like to lay down my head upon it, Alice, when I am old?”
“When you are old, Alice will not be here, Miss Hester,” she said, with a smile; “you are like other young things, you think you will not be a young lady when you are married; but my darling, married or not married, the years take their full time to come.”
“Ah, I will never be a girl again,” said I, sighing with one of the half mock, half real sentimentalities of youth. “Alice, do you think, after all, my father is pleased?”
“I think,” she began, but she stopped and paused, and evidently took a second thought; “yes, Miss Hester, I think he is pleased,” she said, “he has every reason—yes, dear, don’t fear for your papa; it is all good—all better than anybody could have planned it—I know it is.”
“Do you know that you speak very oddly sometimes, Alice,” said I; “you speak as if you were a prophet, and knew something about us, that we did not ourselves know.”
“Don’t you think such things, Miss Hester,” said Alice, hurriedly, and her face reddened, “as I am no gipsy nor fortune-teller either, not a bit.”
“Are you angry?” said I, “angry at me, Alice?” I was a little surprised, and it was quite true that two or three times I had been at a loss to know what she meant.
“Angry at you—no, darling, nor never was all your life,” said Alice, “for all you have your own proud temper, Miss Hester—for I never was one to flatter. Will I send the box away? look, dear, if you have got all.”
I had got all that we wanted, and when she went away, I drew my chair to the window, and began a labor of love. Alice never changed the fashion of her garments, and while she labored night and day for me, I was making a cap for her, and braiding a great muslin apron, which she was to wear on the day. I was very busy with the apron, doing it after a fashion of my own, and in a pattern which Alice would think all the more of because it was my own design, though I am not very sure that it gained much in effect by that circumstance. I drew my seat near to the open window, into the sunshine, and began to work, singing to myself very quietly but very gladly, as the pattern grew under my fingers. My heart rejoiced in the beautiful day, and in its own gladness; and I do not know that this joy was less pleasant for the tremor of expectation, and the flutter of fear, which my strange new circumstances brought me. I glanced from the window, hearing a step in the garden, and there was Harry, wandering about looking up at me.
When he caught my eye, he began to beckon with all his might, and try to get me to come down to him. I had seen him already this morning, so I knew it was not because he had anything to say to me, and I shook my head, and returned to my work. Then he began to telegraph to me his despair, his impatience, his particular wish to talk to me—and kept me so occupied smiling at him, and answering his signals, that the apron did not make much more progress than if I had gone down. At last, however, Alice came back, and I looked from the window no more, but went on soberly with my occupation. I had no young friends to come to see my pretty things, so Alice began to put them away.