Mrs. Graham came back into the room holding a telegram in her hand which she tore open quickly. Her face went red and then rather white.
"What is it, mother?" said Dorothy eagerly. "Have they arrived?"
"They have been in London two days," said Mrs. Graham, with a curious catch in her breath, and she glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. "They want me up for a day's shopping. If I had known, I could have gone with father."
Dorothy stood staring at her mother with wide-open eyes. Half a dozen castles in the air seemed tumbling about her head at the same time.
They were expecting her mother's cousins over from America. Dorothy had been chattering about them to the girls at school all the term, and it was in honour of these very cousins she was having her first Bond Street costume. Her mother had not said that was the reason, but Dorothy knew it. She had a sweet, really big hat too, with tiny rosebuds, and new gloves and boots. As a rule her mother was not particular about getting everything new at the same time, but she had taken enough pains this time to please Dorothy herself.
"They do dress children so at Boston," Dorothy had overheard her mother say to Mr. Graham, as a sort of excuse. "I should like Dollie to look nice."
And from that one sentence Dorothy had conjured up all sorts of things about these wonderful cousins. Of course she thought they were coming to stay with them. She expected there would be girls of her own age, and that they would be so charmed with their English cousin that they would invite her to go back to Boston with them. She had talked about them, and thought about them so much that she imagined her mother had told her all this, but really Mrs. Graham, who talked very little, didn't know much about her cousins herself, so she could not have given her little daughter all this information if she had been inclined to.
And now it all seemed so tame. First no costume, then an ordinary wire to ask mother to go up for a day's shopping. They might have come from Surrey instead of America. And two whole days before they wired at all.
Perhaps Mrs. Graham was thinking something of the kind too, for she stood biting her lip, with the colour going and coming in pretty blushes on her cheek, as if she could not make up her mind.
She was just "mother" to Dorothy, but to other people Mrs. Graham was both pretty and sweet.