Flea sat upright, looking straight out of the window. As Dick stopped speaking she raised the sash and let in a wave of warm, sweet, damp air. The pink light streamed in with it, flooding the girl's figure and face. Her hair was tousled, and the dust of the bare boards had mixed with her tears to streak her cheeks. Yet the boy stared at her, open-mouthed and puzzled. Light that did not come through the window shone in her face; her eyes were two stars; her fingers were knotted tightly upon one another.
"You are sure that you are not fibbing, Dee? Did they really say that?"
"Certain sure. And Dick says it's true as gawspil. He know'd a baby oncet they thought was clean dead, and all on a suddint it come to, and sot up 'n' walked—like a maracle, you know. And his mother, she said right straight off, 'He will be somethin' wonderful.' And so he was. He fit in the las' war, an' killed, oh, thousands of the British, but girls can't fight, you know. That's 'cause why I arsked you what you s'posed you could 'a' been sparred for."
Flea put her arm about her brother's neck, and pulled the rough head to her shoulder. She and apple-cheeked, slow-witted Dee always got on well together.
"I love you, Dee," she said, in a gush of tenderness. "No matter how great a lady I get to be—and I'm going to be something very great some day—you and I will always be good friends. You won't tell anybody if I tell you a secret?"
The much-impressed Dee gave the desired promise.
"Then—I'm a heroine, Dee!"—sinking her voice—"a sure-enough heroine. And wonderful, beautiful things always happen to heroines. Like Miranda, and Olivia, and Portia, and Cordelia, and Perdita, and Juliet, and Hermione, and Rosalind, and ever and ever so many more ladies I've read about. I'll tell you about some of them to-morrow. They are not Sunday stories, you know."
Neither, for that matter, was that Sunday talk into which she now launched, holding the boy spellbound while the sun went down clear, and the bright clouds grew pale, then dark. Into Dee's greedy ears she poured the tales of what she meant to do and to be in the wondrous To-Come of her dreams.
The talk with her brother, the hopes rekindled by it, and his faith in her and her future made the out-goings of the unhappy day to rejoice. She laid her head upon her pillow that night in tolerable content with home and kindred. They had sung hymns together, as was the Sunday-night custom, and recited each a psalm and three questions in the Church Catechism to their father, who had then granted them the treat of a long story of his early life in Glasgow.
No misgivings as to to-morrow held her eyes waking as she nestled down under the patch-work coverlet she and Bea had put together and helped their mother quilt last winter. The school-room would be her own territory. As the only girl in the school who knew Mr. Tayloe, and had been particularly recommended to him by his patron (she had borrowed that word from an English story-book), she would be foremost in his esteem. In "playing ladies" before sleep got fast hold of her she saw herself introducing less-favored scholars to his favorable notice.