"There are ten of us still," said the girls, looking through tears at the consecrated upper shelf. "Jennie is working with us."
And they felt, every one, that the Penn Avenue library had received its "lifting up."
[CHAPTER I.]
SHE, Daisy, knelt upstairs in front of the window, looking down on the snowy street. A pretty picture she made, framed in the frosty window, her fresh young breath making fancy shapes of the frost-work.
A brown head, crowned with masses of hair of that peculiar shade of brown which makes you think when you look at it on a cloudy day, that the sun is certainly shining somewhere and rippling those waves of hair with gold.
It was not banged; it was not even frizzed. Daisy's mother belonged to that class, of which there are a few rare specimens still extant, who liked neither style, and Daisy herself belonged to that possibly still rarer class of girls, who liked above all things to dress to please her mother. There had been an attempt to make the brown hair lie in smooth and glossy bands, but Nature had been too much for the owner. The hair escaped, and waved and frizzed itself to that inimitable way which is so very pretty and becoming, and of which all the hair-pin efforts are such exasperating imitations.
Brown eyes under the hair, large, bright, sweet, sad or grave, according to the mood of the wearer. Eyes which changed with the changing expression, and seemed to do much of the speaking. For the rest, you may imagine her.
There was a clear complexion; there was a sweet mouth and rosy cheeks.
There are a great many such girls, and yet they lack the something which, shining in Daisy's face, made the looker want to turn and look again, and half smile, in sympathy with the charm lingering there.