By N. O. LORIMER.
CHAPTER III.
f you had peeped into the big attic bedroom the three girls occupied at the top of the high New York boarding-house, you would have seen Ada Nicoli in her pretty white dressing-gown—such a pitiful reminder of her former luxury—putting little Sadie’s hair into curl-papers. In her lonely life she had grown passionately attached to her two little sisters who were so dependent on her, and the thing that hurt her most about her poverty was seeing little Sadie look careless and neglected. Often at night she was so tired and weary that it took all her courage to brush and dress their two heads of hair, and see that their clothes were in proper order for going to school the next day. A hat-box full of Southern bank-notes, which had been Marjorie’s and Sadie’s amusement for many a day in their old home for playing at store-keeping, came in handy for curling Sadie’s hair, and the child always wanted Ada to tell her the same story, how her mother’s mother had saved up the bank-notes during the great war, believing that the South would be victorious, and how she had made some of the notes during the war by making slippers out of the felt carpets and selling them.
“If they were all real good dollars now, Ada,” the child said, “we needn’t live in this hen-roost any longer, need we?”
Ada took the child in her arms. “Poor little Sadie,” she said. “While we three are together, it doesn’t so much matter, does it? We can have a little fun sometimes, can’t we?”
“It isn’t so bad, siss,” the child answered, “but I do want to go to Barnum’s, and I wish the girls at school wouldn’t say, ‘When’s your father coming back? He’s been visiting for a long time.’”
Then Marjorie chimed in with—“I passed two of the girls I used to go to school with to-day, Ada, and they both looked in at a shop window when I passed.”
“Never mind,” Ada said, with her heart growing sadder every minute. “It’s a good thing not to be at school with girls who are so vulgar.” Ada’s own rich friends had also disappeared in a marvellous fashion. It is true she had left her old home so suddenly, and had to avoid seeing people whom it would be painful to meet in her altered circumstances, so much that, perhaps, they were not altogether to blame. She had been working for some months at Madame Maude’s now, and she had found that she had very little time in her busy life for musing over the faithlessness of her rich friends. Her mother’s mental condition had not improved, and she had not had a single line from her father. He had left the country to avoid disgrace as well as ruin. The cold weather had come, and Ada was feeling the hardship of walking every morning and evening to her business. It was a long way, and the girl’s constitution was not suited to the strain made upon it. The people in the boarding-house had watched her growing slighter and paler as the weeks passed, and her eyes had grown feverishly bright. Marjory was a selfish, peevish child, who did not do what she could to help her sister.
“She’s not worth Ada’s little finger!” the fat boarder would exclaim, when the child deceived her sister by making friends with girls that Ada had asked her not to know, and had spent Ada’s hardly-earned money on candies, and iced-cream sodas. “She’s her father’s own child, that’s what she is, and Ada Nicoli’s too fine a girl to kill herself for that saucy brat.”