THE TURNED-ABOUT GIRLS

Blithe McBride

Hands Off!

Hugh Gwyeth: A Roundhead Cavalier

Soldier Rigdale, Ill. by R. Birch

The Making of Christopher Ferringham

A Little Captive Lad, Ill. by Will Grefe

Merrylips, Ill. by F. Merrill

The Turned-about Girls, Ill. by Blanche Greer

But just as she reached the gap Caroline came pattering out of the dark and clutched her—

THE TURNED-ABOUT GIRLS

BY

BEULAH MARIE DIX

AUTHOR OF “MERRYLIPS,” “BLITHE MCBRIDE,” ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1922

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1922,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922.

FERRIS

PRINTING COMPANY

NEW YORK CITY

To

MY TRUSTY AND WELL-BELOVED DAUGHTER

EVELYN GREENLEAF FLEBBE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[But just as she reached the Gap, Caroline came pattering out of the dark and clutched her—]

[“Jacqueline! It’s I—Cousin Penelope. Don’t be frightened”]

[“Don’t! Don’t!” wailed Jacqueline and clasped Aunt Martha tight. “Don’t you cry. There’s nothing to cry about”]

THE TURNED-ABOUT GIRLS

CHAPTER I
STRANGERS ON THE LIMITED

At Chicago, on a hot afternoon in early summer, two little girls got aboard the car on the Limited that was bound through to Boston. Both little girls had bobbed brown hair and brown eyes and both were going on eleven, but there all likeness between them ended.

The larger of the two little girls wore a black silk frock embroidered with amber-colored butterflies and curlicues, and black silk knickerbockers. The socks that stopped just below her sturdy brown knees were of black silk, and her black sandals had tiny buckles of onyx. She wore a hat of fine black straw, and in her arms she carried a little black vanity bag, two big books with colored pictures on their jackets, and a box tied up in white paper and gilt cord that screamed—and smelled—of chocolates.

Before her walked a solemn brown porter, laden with suitcases and handbags and hatboxes. Behind her walked a worried young woman, in a fresh blue linen suit. Thus attended the little girl passed along the aisle, with the air of a good-natured young princess, and vanished into the drawing-room at the end of the car. When the solemn-looking porter came out of the drawing-room, he was no longer solemn but smiling, and the piece of silver that he pocketed was large and round.

The smaller of the little girls had watched this progress admiringly, but without envy. She was a serious little girl, and this was her first long journey in the world. She sat very still in her seat, which was back to the engine, and she clasped a doll tight in her arms. The doll wore a neat print dress and frilled underclothes, and though the day was hot, a crocheted sweater and a cunningly made hood. The little girl herself wore a dress of pink and white checked gingham which was a little faded and a little short for her. Her hat was of white straw with a wreath of pink flowers, and her socks were white, and so were her buttoned boots. Over her arm she carried a knitted sweater coat of red, and at her feet stood a large suitcase which had seen much travel.

“Did you see the little girl in black?” she whispered to the doll, whose name was Mildred. “Do you s’pose she’s in mourning for somebody? Well, people can be just as sorry inside—we know it, don’t we, Mildred?—even if they have to wear last summer’s clothes, and they happen to be pink.”

Mildred was a very intelligent doll. She had steady blue eyes, a sweet smile, and a shock of flaxen curls. She showed her intelligence by always listening sympathetically and never speaking. So she did not let on now that she saw tears in her young mother’s eyes.

Meantime in the drawing-room the little girl in black silk had put down her books and her bag, and hung up her hat, and rung for the porter.

“I want a pillow,” she told the worried young lady who accompanied her, “and a table so I can play Canfield and—oh, yes! I want a big long drink of lemonade.”

“I’m afraid the porter won’t come till the train has started,” the young lady told her. “Can’t you read your books until then? What are they?”

The little girl resigned herself quite sweetly to going without her pillow and her table, and even her lemonade. She sat down beside her companion and showed her the books.

“This one is about Robin Hood,” she said, “but I’ve heard of him before. This other one is some book!”

“My dear!” the lady murmured in rebuke.

“I’ll say it is!” the little girl affirmed. “I read it nights in my berth till Auntie Blair switched off my light. Some book, I’ll tell the world! It’s called ‘The Prince and the Pauper.’”

And if a kind old guardian hadn’t happened to give that little girl a gorgeous copy of the beloved romance, when she left Los Angeles, and if the little girl hadn’t “eaten it up,” and dreamed of it, and lived herself into it on the long railway journey, this story, as you soon will see, would never have been written.

CHAPTER II
MILDRED, MISTRESS OF CEREMONIES

At the first call for dinner the little girl in the drawing-room left her pillow, which had grown hot, and her crayola outfit, which had long since displaced the game of Canfield in her favor. Very glad of the change, she went with her companion into the dining car. They sat at a little table, just big enough for two, with shining plated ware and a starched white cloth, and a water bottle plugged with a fresh napkin. The little girl ate soup, and roast beef, and baked potatoes, and asparagus, and vanilla ice-cream with lady fingers, and some preserved strawberries besides.

Back in the sleeping car the little girl in the checked gingham had waited anxiously to see what her neighbors would do when supper time came. There was no one of whom she could ask questions. She was in the conductor’s care, to be sure, but he seemed to her a remote and very grand person.

Presently she saw that people about her, mothers of families and tired-looking gray women who traveled alone, were taking lunch boxes from their bags. Some of them made the porter set up tables for them, but the little girl would never have dared ask such a service from the lordly black man. She placed Mildred in a corner of her seat, and she heaved up the suitcase, which she found almost too heavy for her, and put it on the opposite seat, which the gentleman with the massive watch chain had left vacant some time ago, when he went (to her great relief) into the smoking car. She opened the suitcase. Inside it, neatly folded, were a fresh nightgown, a change of underwear, a clean dress, in case her trunk should go astray, a pair of knitted bed shoes, sadly worn, a comb and brush, a fairylike wardrobe which was all Mildred’s, and lastly a pasteboard shoe box, full of lunch.

The little girl took out the shoe box and opened it with all sorts of precaution not to make crumbs on the floor, or on the beautiful plush seat. In the box were some peanut-butter sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, two doughnuts, four raisin cookies, some soda crackers, an apple, and a piece of chocolate. She was to eat the sandwiches that night, the egg for breakfast, the crackers and chocolate for next day’s lunch, and the sweets and the apple when she pleased. She was to get water in her own cup, there in the sleeper, and she was on no account to go into the dining car, for the prices that they charged were downright robbery, and like as not there were ptomaines (whatever they might be!) in the food. So the little girl ate her peanut-butter sandwiches, and her cookies, and drank her cup of water, and thought how wonderful it was to travel, and how nice that she was not homesick—not at all, scarcely!—and not the least bit afraid.

She had put away the lunch box very carefully, and she was undressing Mildred for the night, with Mildred’s little nightgown, trimmed with Hamburg edging, laid ready on the arm of the seat beside her, when the little girl in black silk came strolling back from the dining car. The little girl in gingham knew that she was coming, but she had been taught that it was not pretty to stare, so she kept her eyes glued to the wee buttons on Mildred’s waistband.

Nobody seemed to have taught the little girl in silk, or, if so, they had had their labor for their pains. She stopped short, very firmly planted in the swaying car, and she smiled at Mildred who smiled back.

“Jacqueline, please!” said the worried young lady in the blue linen suit, which was not so fresh as when she wore it first aboard the train.

“I’ll come in a minute,” the silken Jacqueline told her casually. “I want to talk to the doll.”

At that the little girl in gingham looked up, as she had been dying to do.

“Hello!” said Jacqueline. She had a rebellious mouth, and a square boyish chin, and brown eyes as direct as a boy’s, that could be merry when they chose—and just now chose.

The little girl in gingham smiled shyly. She had an oval face, pale olive in tint, not glowing with red through the brown tan like Jacqueline’s. Her smile was timid, and her brown eyes were soft.

“She looks like a nice child,” thought the young woman in linen, “and even if she isn’t, if Jacqueline has made up her mind to know her, I’m helpless.”

She washed her hands of her charge, as the saying is, and went into the drawing-room. Don’t blame her too severely! She was young, she was worn out with a hard winter’s teaching, and after all, Jacqueline, with her lordly ways, had been “wished upon her.” She went into the drawing-room, and Jacqueline, like one accustomed to getting her way, sat down in the place that the little girl in gingham eagerly made for her in the seat at her side.

CHAPTER III
A BOND IN COMMON

“What’s your name?” asked Jacqueline.

The little girl in gingham blushed and kept her eyes fixed on Mildred’s buttons.

“Caroline,” she said, in a small voice. “For my grandmother.”

“My name’s Jacqueline Gildersleeve,” cut in her companion. “At school they call me Jackie. I’ll let you.”

Caroline smiled shyly.

“I like Jacqueline better,” she said. “It’s like trumpets and red sunsets.”

Jacqueline turned in the plush seat and looked at her, much impressed.

“You’re a funny kid,” she said. “How can anybody’s name be like a trumpet?”

“But names are all music and things,” the little girl in gingham insisted. “That’s why I don’t care for Caroline. It’s like a bushel of wheat. Muzzy always called me Carol. That’s a nice name—like Christmas trees, and snow outside, and yellow candles.”

“Is your mother with you?” asked Jacqueline.

“No,” Caroline answered, and made herself very busy with Mildred’s nightdress. “My mother is—dead.”

“Oh!” said Jacqueline blankly, and seemed for a moment unable to think of anything else to say.

“She died last winter,” Caroline went on, in her patient little voice. “That’s why I’m going to my half-aunt Martha. Have you—lost somebody, too? I see you’re wearing black.”

“Oh, that’s just not to show dirt,” Jacqueline explained. “But I haven’t any mother nor father. They died ages ago. Aunt Edie takes care of me, and Judge Blair is my guardian. Have you got a father?”

Caroline shook her head.

“Daddy died three years ago when everybody had the flu. He was on a newspaper. My mother gave music lessons. We had a room with the piano in it, and a gas flat we cooked breakfast on, and a couch that pulled out and made a bed for us both.”

It was very clear that Caroline was talking against time. Equally clear that the brown eyes that she kept obstinately fixed on Mildred were filling fast with tears.

Jacqueline tumbled out of her seat, just missed a stout old lady as she caromed down the aisle, and vanished into the drawing-room. Before Caroline had dried her eyes—and Caroline was not slow about it, either!—Jacqueline was back, and in her hand was a big satin-covered box.

“Have some chocolates?” she urged, as she slid into the seat beside Caroline. “Those big whales are scrumptious, only they’re full of goo. Hold your hanky under your chin when you bite into them! Here, I’ll take your doll.”

Jacqueline took Mildred on her lap, very carefully, to Caroline’s great relief. She examined the trimming of her small, clean nightgown and tenderly slipped her into the little flowered crêpe kimono, while Caroline still struggled with the gooey chocolate.

“What cunning little ducky clothes!” cooed Jacqueline.

“My mother made ’em,” Caroline spoke thickly because of the chocolate. “She could make most anything. She made my dress, too—it was for best last summer, but I’ve grown since then. She knitted my sweater, too.”

Caroline bent her head and stroked the red sleeve dumbly.

“Have another chocolate,” coaxed Jacqueline. “Have a lot! Try the one that’s like a porcupine! Have a gummy one!”

“I dassen’t,” said Caroline. “I’ve got a hole in my tooth, and caramels always make it ache.”

“That’s too bad,” agreed Jacqueline. “I’ve got braces in my mouth so I can’t eat caramels at all. Oh, well, I’ll give ’em to the Fish.”

Caroline looked at her questioningly.

“I mean Miss Fisher,” said naughty Jacqueline mincingly. “The piece of cheese I’m traveling with.”

“You mean the lady in the blue dress?” asked Caroline.

Jacqueline nodded and cuddled Mildred to her. She looked quite gentle until she smiled, and then the imps of mischief crinkled in her eyes.

“Auntie Blair changed at Chicago for Montreal, and I’m to go East with Miss Fisher that she knew ages ago in college. She’s a fuss. She didn’t want me to speak to you. And she’s not my aunt or anything. I shall talk to you as long as I want to.”

Caroline longed to say: “Please do!” She was fascinated with this bold little girl, who used words her mother had never let her utter, and was afraid of nobody, not even the black porter or the august conductor. But she hardly dared say: “Please do!” She only smiled vaguely and picked a small chocolate-covered nut from the satin box.

“Do you go to school?” Jacqueline asked abruptly.

“Oh, yes,” stammered Caroline. “I’ll go into the sixth grade in September. That is, I would have gone into it. I don’t know what school I’ll be in, where I’m going.”

“Do you like school?”

Caroline looked dubious.

“I like the reading lessons and the history,” she said. “I can’t do arithmetic. I’d rather play the piano.”

“Play the piano!” Jacqueline repeated, as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean you like to practice?”

“Oh, yes!” said Caroline from her heart.

“Good night!” said Jacqueline.

“Don’t—don’t you?” faltered Caroline.

Jacqueline, like the skipper in “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” laughed a scornful laugh.

“But I’m going to get out of it this summer,” she boasted darkly. “I’ll tell my Great-aunt Eunice I’ve sprained my thumb, or something. She hasn’t seen me for years and years. I suppose she thinks I’m a little goody-goody. Well, she’s going to get the surprise of her life.”

Jacqueline tossed her head defiantly, and Caroline fairly glowed with admiration.

“You’re not a bit afraid of strangers, are you?” she quavered.

Jacqueline smiled in a superior way, as if to challenge: “Bring on your strangers!”

“I am,” admitted Caroline. “And I don’t know any of them. I never saw my half-aunt Martha, and I don’t know anything about my half-cousins, but I do hope they have a piano, and that there aren’t too many babies.”

“Don’t you like ’em?” queried Jacqueline.

“I—I’m kind of tired of them,” Caroline confessed shamefacedly. “I stayed with Cousin Delia after Muzzy died, and she had twins besides two odd ones, and when one fretted, the others always kept him company.”

“You ought to shake ’em,” counseled Jacqueline. “Shake ’em good and hard. I would! You’re too meek. Don’t you let your old half-aunt go and boss you.”

“But—but she’s giving me a home,” persisted Caroline. “That is, if we get along. If we don’t——”

“Well?” said Jacqueline, with shameless curiosity.

“I suppose I’ll go to an—an Institution,” whispered Caroline. “You know—orphan asylum.”

“Oh!” said Jacqueline, again blankly. There seemed nothing more to say. But she did have the inspiration to put Mildred into Caroline’s arms, and Caroline hugged her dumbly, with her dark little head bent low over Mildred’s sleek gold curls.

“You’d better keep the chocolates,” said Jacqueline, in a brisk little voice. “I always have lots, and the box will be nice to put your doll’s clothes in.”

“I—I oughtn’t to,” gasped Caroline, overcome with the glory of the gift.

“The box is mine,” snapped Jacqueline. “I can give it away if I want to, can’t I? I’d like to see the Fish stop me.”

Suddenly the hard little termagant softened. She put her arm round Caroline and Mildred.

“Of course your half-aunt will like you,” she said, “and you’ll stay with her, and maybe there’s a piano. Does she live in Boston?”

“No,” answered Caroline, nestling close to her new friend. “She lives on a farm in a place called Longmeadow.”

“Longmeadow?” parroted Jacqueline.

“And I get off at a place called Baring Junction.”

Jacqueline suddenly squeezed Caroline in a hug that really endangered Mildred.

“Can you beat it?” she cried. “I get off at Baring Junction, and I’m going to Longmeadow, just the same as you!”

CHAPTER IV
THE BIG IDEA

The fact that the two little girls were going to the same town was the finishing link in the chain of friendship that they had forged so rapidly. They talked that evening about their schools, and their games, and the books they had read until Miss Fisher and Caroline’s own sense of propriety plucked them apart. In the morning they began where they had left off, while Miss Fisher, who was quite exhausted, after a car-sick night, remained aloof and shook her head in utter helplessness.

Now Miss Fisher’s car-sickness has a great deal to do with the story. She was honestly feeling that she could not endure another hour in the train, when she received a telegram at Albany. Friends of hers, whom she had not seen in months, a nice girl and her even nicer brother (so Miss Fisher thought), wired that they would meet her at the train in Pittsfield and whisk her away for a blissful week-end in the Berkshires before she went on to her aunt’s house in Boston. For an instant Miss Fisher thought of duty and the tiresome, unruly child she had agreed to chaperon. Then she thought of the deadly hours in the train, and the nice girl’s even nicer brother.

Miss Fisher lurched out into the car and captured Jacqueline. To Jacqueline she explained that she had to leave the train at Pittsfield, and that Jacqueline would remain in the care of the conductor and the porter till she reached Baring Junction, where those officials would deliver her to her great-aunt. Jacqueline was of course to be a very good girl.

“Sure!” promised Jacqueline—too readily, a suspicious person might have thought.

But Miss Fisher was too fluttered with her own affairs to be suspicious. She tripped gayly off the train at Pittsfield, into the arms of her friends, and out of this story. Of course her conduct was quite blameworthy, and so Jacqueline’s Aunt Edie and several other people said later. Just the same Jacqueline should not have called her a fish, and certainly not a piece of cheese.

The moment Miss Fisher’s rumpled blue linen skirt had vanished from the car, Jacqueline laid hold of Caroline’s suitcase and, like a valorous small ant with a huge crumb, tugged it into the drawing-room. Caroline snatched up her hat and her sweater, and with Mildred in her arms followed after protesting.

“You come along,” Jacqueline over-rode her protests. “We can sprawl all we want to in here, and people won’t stop to stare at Mildred, and ask us our names, and do we like to travel. Wouldn’t they be peeved if we asked them questions like that, without being introduced?”

So Caroline and Jacqueline and Mildred settled down to enjoy the privacy and comfort of the drawing-room, without the disadvantages of Miss Fisher’s presence. But somehow they didn’t enjoy themselves much. For they couldn’t forget—that is, Caroline and Jacqueline couldn’t, for I don’t know about Mildred—that the pretty little gold watch on Jacqueline’s wrist, with its madly racing minute-hand, was tearing away the hours, so very few now, before the train reached Baring Junction.

“I’m going to have a rotten summer,” complained Jacqueline. “Oh, I wish I’d made Aunt Edie let me go to a camp! Great-aunt Eunice is as old as the hills and Cousin Penelope is most as old. It will be poky at their house, and I can’t do this, or Aunt Eunice will be scared, and I can’t do that, or Cousin Penelope will scold. Oh, shivering chimpanzees! I wish I’d gone to camp!”

But poor little Caroline had no words for the misery that possessed her, as the minutes ran by and the hour came nearer that should deliver her into the hands of grudging strangers.

“I—I hope half-aunt Martha’s boys aren’t big,” she confided to Jacqueline. “I—I’m afraid of boys.”

“I’m not,” said Jacqueline. “I’d rather face fifteen boys than one old piano.”

“And I hope they don’t make me pitch hay or drive cows—I’m scared of cows,” quavered Caroline.

“I’d rather drive a million cows than have to be starched up and on my good behavior with a pack of tiresome aunts,” Jacqueline returned gloomily.

“Oh!” Caroline was goaded into crying. “If only you were me, and I were you!”

Jacqueline snorted derision. What’s the use of wishing? Then her gaze wandered to the helter-skelter heap of her belongings on the couch—hat-box, vanity bag, coat, suitcase, books!

Books! Her eyes fell on the gay jacket of “The Prince and the Pauper.”

Suddenly she grasped Caroline’s arm so hard that Caroline squeaked: “Ow!”

“Don’t stop to ow!” bade Jacqueline. “Because if you’ve got your nerve with you, I’ve got the dandiest plan so you can have a piano this summer, and no babies to tend, and no boys, nor nothing.”

Caroline merely stared and held Mildred tight. She really feared that the heat of the day had affected Jacqueline’s head.

“Your bossy old half-aunt has never seen you,” went on Jacqueline, “and my Gildersleeve relations haven’t seen me since I was three years old.”

“Yes,” nodded Caroline. That much she thought it safe to grant.

“They’re each of them expecting a little girl most eleven years old, with brown hair and eyes, and her hair bobbed.”

“Yes,” Caroline freely admitted.

“Well, then!” Jacqueline concluded triumphantly. “Suppose we go and change clothes, like Prince Edward and Tom Canty in ‘The Prince and the Pauper,’ and you say you’re me, and I say I’m you,—and who’s to know the difference?”

CHAPTER V
TURNED-ABOUT GIRLS

It was thoroughly wrong, the deception that Jacqueline had suggested. She knew it was wrong, but she didn’t care. As for Caroline, her mind was such a jumble of cows and boys and fierce half-aunts (so much more ogreish in suggestion than whole aunts!) and an Institution, looming in the background, that she hardly knew right from wrong.

Only as she followed Jacqueline’s example and began to unfasten her rumpled frock, she mustered the spirit to falter:

“But they’ll find out right away——”

“No, they won’t, unless you’re a silly.”

“But some day your Aunt Edith who knows you will come——”

“Not before September,” said Jacqueline cheerily, “and by that time summer will be over, and we’ll have had our fun. Think of the piano!”

“Oh, I don’t know what to do!” wailed Caroline. She was a shivering little figure, barelegged, in her underclothes, with her soiled and mussed checked gingham in a heap at her feet.

“Now you do as I tell you,” counseled Jacqueline in her most masterful manner. “Why, Caroline, it’s nothing but a joke, and just the minute you want to, we’ll change back. Be a good sport now! Come on!” When Jacqueline smiled she was irresistible. She smiled now. Caroline wavered.

“If you don’t,” said Jacqueline sweetly, “you’re a quitter, and I’ll never speak to you again.”

To lose Jacqueline, the one friend she had in this new world into which she was being cast, was more than Caroline could bear.

“I’m not a quitter,” she vowed. “I’ll show you. Wait till I get out some clothes.”

The big shabby much-traveled suitcase that was Caroline’s, and the smart black leather case that was Jacqueline’s, alike held fresh changes of clothes. In these the little girls dressed themselves from the skin out. Caroline gasped a little at the silk socks, the delicate undergarments, the knickers and the frock of henna-colored crêpe in which she rather guiltily encased herself. Jacqueline tumbled gleefully into cotton socks, much-mended plain cotton underwear, and a fresh frock of brown and white gingham, with a big patch in the back breadth.

“I’m bigger than you,” she chuckled. “These clothes look awful skimpy on me. I’ll tell your half-aunt that I shot up last winter. I did really, so it isn’t a fib.”

“Your clothes look—nice on me,” said Caroline, as she caught a glimpse in the mirror of the strange child into which she had turned herself. “They fit me.”

“That’s because they’re short for me,” Jacqueline told her. “Aunt Edie has ’em made that way—it’s the smartest thing, this year. She’d think you looked dowdy with your skirt way down to your knees, but probably Great-aunt Eunice won’t mind.”

In a businesslike way she restrapped the black leather suitcase.

“That’s yours now, remember,” she told Caroline, “and the hatbox, and the black hat, and the coat, and my watch here,—don’t forget to wind it!—and those two books, and the vanity bag. Hang on to it! The check for my trunk—your trunk it will be now—and the key to it are there in the little purse.”

“But there’s money in it, too,” protested Caroline. “Oh, Jackie, I can’t take your money.”

“You won’t take much of it,” Jacqueline assured her. “I shall slip three dollars to the porter, and tell him not to give us away.”

Caroline looked at her admiringly. She hadn’t thought of the porter. She felt quite sure that if ever a woman became president of the United States, as she had heard was now possible, Jacqueline would be that woman.

“Now sit down,” bade Jacqueline, and poked Caroline into a seat. “We’re only half an hour from Baring Junction——”

“Oh!” Caroline softly squeaked.

“Don’t oh! We’ve got to get things straight because they may ask questions. Now your father was John Gildersleeve——”

“No, he wasn’t!” protested Caroline.

“You ninny! Don’t you see—you’re me now—Jacqueline Gildersleeve. Your father was John Gildersleeve. He was born and brought up in Longmeadow, and he and Cousin Penelope went to school together. By and by he grew up, and his father and mother died, and he went out to California. He was in the oil business. My mother—I mean, she’s your mother now—was Marion Delane. Her father had a big ranch, with horses and things, and Aunt Edith is her sister. And she died—not Aunt Edith, but my mother that you must call your mother—when my baby brother came, and he died, too, and my father was killed the next autumn in the oil fields. I’ve lived with Aunt Edith ever since, and our place is called Buena Vista—that’s Spanish for Fair View—and first I had governesses, but last year I went to boarding school. Aunt Edith married my new uncle Jimmie Knowlton on the fifth day of June. He’s Colonel Knowlton—he was in the air service—and he took me up twice in his plane, and we did a tailspin—oh, boy! He’s some uncle. But they didn’t want me on their honeymoon—they’ve gone to Alaska—that’s why I’m going to Great-aunt Eunice. She’s wanted me to spend a summer with her for years and years. I don’t believe she likes Aunt Edith much.”

Jacqueline paused at last for breath, and fixed her eyes on the trembling Caroline.

“Can you remember all that?” she asked sternly.

“I—I guess so,” Caroline answered dubiously.

“You’ll be all right,” Jacqueline encouraged. “Aunt Edie hardly ever wrote letters to Great-aunt Eunice, so she doesn’t really know much about us. Now see if I remember what I’ve got to know. I’m you now—Caroline Tait. My father was Henry Tait, and he was born in Longmeadow, and he came to Chicago years ago and was on a newspaper when he died. And he met my mother out there, and her name was Frances Meade, and she was a music teacher, and none of the Longmeadow folks ever saw her. And I’ve been living with her cousin, Delia Meade, and I’m going to my father’s half-sister, and her name is Martha Conway. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” Caroline nodded, “but oh! I’ve just thought. Won’t we have to write letters back to your Aunt Edith and my Cousin Delia—and they’ll see that the handwriting isn’t ours?”

For as much as half a second, Jacqueline hesitated. Then she rose to the occasion.

“I’ve got two post-cards shut up in my Robin Hood book. Quick! Write to your Cousin Delia on this one that you’ve got safe to Baring Junction, and your half-aunt met you and is very nice.”

“But I don’t know if she is!” protested truthful Caroline.

“You’ve got to take chances sometimes,” Jacqueline silenced her. “Hurry up and write, and I’ll write one, too, to my Aunt Edie.”

Hastily and in pencil the post-cards were written. From a recess in the vanity bag Jacqueline dug out two stamps, the worse for wear but still stickable. These she fixed upon the cards.

“The porter’ll post ’em,” she said. “That’ll satisfy your Cousin Delia and my Aunt Edie—and we’ve simply got to get out of writing them any more letters, somehow.”

Then the black porter hammered at the door, and Jacqueline bade him enter, and in her lordly manner permitted him to brush her off.

“Ain’ yo’ done mix yo’ clothes up, Missy?” he asked with interest.

Caroline quaked. Jacqueline merely dimpled.

“Of course we have,” she said. “We’re going to put something over on our relations. You see, I know her folks just like she knows mine.”

(Which was true in the letter, but not in the spirit. Jacqueline might as well have told a fib and been done with it.)

The porter seemed to hesitate.

“It will be all right,” Jacqueline told him loftily. “Here’s something for you. Take off that young lady and her luggage as soon as the train stops. I’ll look out for myself.”

So sure of herself she was that the porter, like Caroline, was put to silence. He pocketed the money that she gave him, chuckled, muttered that she was “de beatermost,” and went his way.

“We’ll be there in five minutes now,” said Jacqueline. “Put on this hat. Here, give me yours. Take the books. Give me the doll.”

“Oh, no!” cried Caroline, and clasped Mildred to her.

“But look here,” said Jacqueline, “I’m you and the doll is yours, so I’ve got to have her.”

“Oh, I can’t—I can’t!” cried Caroline. “Not Mildred! Don’t you see? Daddy gave her to me—the Christmas before he died—and Muzzy made all her clothes—I can’t give her up, Jackie—not even to you—she’d be homesick.”

“Now stop it!” commanded Jacqueline. “I don’t want your silly old doll! Take her along with you. It won’t give us away.”

“But her clothes—they’re in my suitcase—your suitcase—”

Already Jacqueline was tearing open the shabby suitcase.

“You shan’t gum the show now,” she panted. “We’d look like—like a couple of boobs. Here are the clothes. Take ’em, quick!”

“I can’t get your suitcase open,” chittered Caroline.

The train was slowing down for Baring Junction. Moments counted. Jacqueline seized the nearly emptied satin candy box and crammed its remaining contents into the pockets of the brown and white gingham that she wore.

“I told you her clothes would go into the candy box,” she said as she hastily crushed Mildred’s wardrobe into the satin receptacle. “Take it quick—here’s the porter—I’ll strap the suitcase.”

“Oh, Jackie!” Caroline turned wildly to her friend, like a frightened kitten that doesn’t know which way to run.

“Wipe your eyes, kid, and don’t weaken!” bade Jacqueline stoutly. “Porter, take the books, too—her hands are full. Beat it now, Carol! Ask for Mrs. Eunice Gildersleeve and don’t forget there’s sure to be a piano!”

CHAPTER VI
CLAIMED AND CALLED FOR

In the wake of the grinning black porter, Caroline stumbled out of the drawing-room. She had only a few steps to take through the narrow passage to the vestibule, and in those few steps she hadn’t time enough to reconsider, and call up her courage and run back to Jacqueline, with a refusal to go on with this naughty deception. She had time only to feel, in Jacqueline’s finery, like the poor little old woman in the nursery-song:

Lawkamussy on me,

This can’t be I!

Then she stood in the swaying, cinder-powdered vestibule. Through the open door she saw the dark red walls of a country station creeping by and people hurrying to be alongside the steps when the car should stop. Strange people—hundreds of people, they seemed to her. Oh, she wanted her half-aunt—she even wanted the cows! Jacqueline’s Great-aunt Eunice would be terrible. She would know at once that Caroline was a little fraud. She would send her away to an Institution.

But now there was no turning back. The train had stopped. The porter had leaped nimbly off. A stout man in the vestibule behind Caroline was bumping her silken calves with his heavy bag, and fuming at her for blocking the way. Caroline clutched Mildred tight to the bosom of Jacqueline’s henna-colored frock, and scrambled down the steep steps of the car. She was glad that the porter steadied her with a hand on her arm. She felt so sick and dizzy that she could scarcely see.

A tall lady was beside her instantly. In the strong sunlight of the station platform, so different from the stuffy dusk of the train, Caroline could not make out her features but she had an impression of white clothes and she caught the scent of violets.

“This is Jacqueline, isn’t it?” the lady said, in a clear, low voice.

Caroline nodded, blinking between tears and sun-blindness.

“You’re Great-aunt Eunice?” she faltered.

“No, my dear,” said the low voice, with a ripple of laughter in it. “She’s waiting over there in the car. Bring along her things, Frank. Come quickly, Jacqueline! Let’s get out of this frightful press.”

The stout man had bumped the lady with his clumsy bag, and his gruff “Beg pardon!” did not seem in the least to mollify her. She put her gloved hand on Caroline’s shoulder and hurried her away across the wide platform, with its pillared red roof.

In the shade of the elm trees at the other side of the platform a stately limousine was parked among humbler touring cars and sedans. A stout elderly lady looked eagerly from the window.

One desperate glance Caroline cast behind her. She saw a self-assured small figure, in a scant brown and white gingham dress, propel itself down the car steps, behind a big shabby suitcase. She saw a squarely-built woman in an old straw hat hurrying toward the car steps, and she saw the little figure cast itself into her arms. Jacqueline had taken possession of half-aunt Martha.

Caroline had no chance to see more, for now she was at the side of the limousine.

“Mother, here’s Jacqueline,” said the lady in white, who was evidently Jacqueline’s Cousin Penelope. “This is Aunt Eunice, Jacqueline.”

The old lady, who wore gray clothes and had pretty white hair, nodded and smiled at Caroline from her cozy seat. But Caroline, all confusion and on the verge of tears, had no time to greet her, for Cousin Penelope asked just then for the trunk-check.

“It’s here—in my bag,” quavered Caroline, as she struggled with the unfamiliar clasp of Jacqueline’s vanity bag.

“Do help her, Penelope. She’s tired out, poor little mite,” said Aunt Eunice.

Cousin Penelope took the bag in her brisk way, and opened it. She made a queer little face, as she saw the very grown-up small vials and powder-puff inside, but she said nothing. By instinct, probably, she opened the little purse and took out the trunk-check and gave it to her chauffeur, who came up at that moment with the hand-luggage.

“Tell them to send the trunk up by express,” she bade him. “Jump in, Jacqueline. We’ll be away from this wretched hot station in a couple of minutes now.”

Caroline stepped gingerly into the limousine. With its cool gray upholstery, its little side-pockets full of bottles and notebooks, its hanging crystal vase of marguerites, it seemed to her a little palace on wheels. She sank upon the cushions with a sigh of relief.

“You are tired, you poor little thing,” said Aunt Eunice. “Now just rest. We won’t trouble you with questions about the journey. You’re here safe—that’s all that really matters.”

Caroline nestled back in her seat and hugged Mildred to her. The train that had sheltered her had pulled out of the station. Jacqueline, her dear and dangerous friend of twenty-four hours, was gone. She had nothing left but Mildred.

Cousin Penelope stepped into the car in a regal manner. Her dress was of soft shimmery white, and she wore a sweater coat of mauve silk, and a white hat with a mauve silk scarf about the crown. A faint scent of violets breathed from her when she moved. Why, she wasn’t old like Aunt Eunice, as Jacqueline had said she would be. She was young—not so young, perhaps, as Caroline’s beloved Sunday School teacher, but still young, and such a pretty lady!

Frank, the well-trained chauffeur, came at a military gait across the sunny station platform. He closed the door of the car, then stepped to his seat. A moment later the great car glided—oh, so smoothly and softly!—away from the platform and under the elms of the station park into a wide street where two-story brick buildings cast long shadows in the late afternoon light.

“Where are we going?” Caroline wondered. “Oh, I hope it’s ever so far. If I could only sit here with Mildred forever and ever.”

Cousin Penelope pulled up a window.

“I know the air is too much for you, Mother,” she said crisply.

Aunt Eunice seemed rather to sigh but she offered no protest.

“By the way, Jacqueline,” Cousin Penelope turned to Caroline who sat between the two ladies, “I didn’t see that Miss Fisher, who was to look after you from Chicago. I wished of course to thank her.”

“She got off at Pittsfield,” Caroline managed to find her tongue.

“Indeed!” said Cousin Penelope in an icy voice. What things she could evidently have said to Miss Fisher!

“And left you to travel by yourself?” cried Aunt Eunice. “No wonder she’s tired and upset, Penelope, all alone like that.”

“I—I played with a little girl,” explained Caroline, “and I always have Mildred.”

“Is that your dolly’s name?” Aunt Eunice asked quickly.

Caroline nodded.

Aunt Eunice patted her hand with her soft plump palm.

“It’s nice to see a little girl that loves dolls,” she said. “Not many of them do, nowadays.”

She smiled at Caroline, and Caroline, looking up at her, smiled back. It didn’t matter whether she were Jacqueline or Caroline—she knew that she was going to like Aunt Eunice.

CHAPTER VII
LIKE A DREAM

Smoothly and softly the limousine glided out from among the brick buildings of Baring Junction—not a great many of them!—and along a country road which was edged sometimes with a rail fence, and sometimes with a stone wall, but always with a green wayside growth of blackberry and elderbush, alder, and in the low places, young shoots of willow. Pastures slipped by the windows of the car, and farm-yards, and meadows. Once they drove slowly over a wooden bridge, with a roof and sides that made a tunnel where their wheels echoed in a rumbling, hollow fashion; and Caroline wondered if Mildred were afraid.

Then they came to a wide street, with green lawns between the sidewalk and the road, and elms that almost met above them. The street was bordered with big comfortable houses, white or cream or red, which were set well apart in lawns and gardens, unlike the cramped suburban houses to which Caroline was accustomed.

“This is Longmeadow Street, dear,” explained Aunt Eunice. “That brick house with the horse-chestnut trees before it, is the John Gildersleeve place, where your father was born, and his father before him. And here’s the William Gildersleeve place—our place—and we’ve got home.”

A smooth white driveway carried them behind a tall hedge of box. The color and fragrance of an old-fashioned garden were on the left hand, and on the right a plushy green lawn, and a white house, very square and big and substantial, with windows set with many panes of glass.

“It’s such an e-normous house,” thought Caroline, in a panic.

Would there be a butler? In the motion pictures to which Cousin Delia had sometimes taken Caroline, there were often butlers, and they were always very proud and fat. And would she find a lot of knives and forks at her place at table and not know which one to use first? And would she be found out at once and sent away in disgrace? She hoped not—at least not until to-morrow! She couldn’t stand it to meet any more new people today, now that she had found Aunt Eunice so kind.

They went from the porch through a wide doorway with a paneled door and a big brass knocker, into a long hall with a curving staircase. The dark floor was as shiny as glass, and the white paint of the woodwork was as dazzling as snow. The furniture was of dark wood, with red winey gleams beneath its polished surface.

There was a tall case of drawers, which seemed by their weight to have bowed the slim legs on which they rested, and a table—no, half a table—against the wall. On the table were two brass candlesticks, and between them a dull blue bowl, which held some little, pale pink roses. Oh, if only Muzzy had not taught her that she simply must not stare! There was so much to see in this wonderful house!

At the top of the curved staircase was a long, cool hall, with cream white doors on either side. Aunt Eunice herself opened the third door on the right.

“This will be your room, my dear,” she said, and motioned for Caroline to follow her across the threshold.

To Caroline it seemed as if she stepped suddenly into a quiet green pool, the room was so still and cool and goldeny green. There was a dull green border to the oyster white rug that covered the floor, and a pattern of wreathed leaves picked out in green upon the pale gray furniture. Green leaves where golden figures of canaries were half hidden, made a deep frieze above the cool, pale paper with which the walls were hung. The curtains at the windows and upon the low book-shelves, the cushions of the chairs, the covering upon the bed, all had the same pattern of green leaves and gold canaries. Outside the window that was opposite the door, were the green, sibilant leaves of an elm, and through them came the late sunshine in a powdery dust of gold.

Caroline said nothing. She just stared, in spite of all that her mother had taught her. Then she turned toward Aunt Eunice a quivering little face.

“My room?” she asked.

“Yes, darling.”

“Doesn’t anybody have to sleep with me?”

“Not in that narrow bed, child. You’re not afraid to be alone?”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Caroline. “I like to be alone with my thoughts, and all last winter——”

She stopped. She could feel her heart beating fast with the terror of a narrow escape. For she had almost said that all last winter, in Cousin Delia’s little house, she hadn’t had a corner to call her own, no, nor a minute of time.

“Never mind, dear,” said Aunt Eunice and patted her shoulder gently.

But there was a little pucker between Aunt Eunice’s eyebrows. She was going to tell Penelope later just what she thought of this Aunt Edith (not on the Gildersleeve side of the family, thank goodness!) who had packed that shy little sensitive girl off to a boarding school!

“You’ll want to rest a bit before dinner,” Aunt Eunice filled up the awkward little pause, “and wash, too, after the train. There’s the door to the bathroom, over by the dressing-table. Can you manage by yourself, or shall I send Sallie to help you?”

“I can manage, thank you!” Caroline assured her.

To her own ears her voice sounded dry, and oh! she didn’t want to seem ungrateful, when her heart was just bursting with joy that was almost rapture. So, as Aunt Eunice turned away, Caroline slipped up to her side and laid a hand on her arm.

“Thank you!” she whispered shyly. “It’s—it’s like a dream room and I—I’ll take awful good care of everything. I can make my own bed,” she added proudly. “And I can sweep and dust as nice as anybody.”

Aunt Eunice beamed approvingly.

“Why, what a sensible school your aunt must have sent you to,” she said. “But you needn’t do tasks in vacation, little girl. Sallie will take care of your room. Now wash your hands and brush your hair, and bring a good appetite with you to the dinner table.”

With a nod and a smile—and Aunt Eunice’s smile was the kind that you waited for eagerly, because it made her whole face brighten—Aunt Eunice left the room and closed the door behind her. Very carefully Caroline put her coat (Jacqueline’s coat that was!) and her hat and the satin candy box full of doll-clothes down upon a chair, and then, with Mildred in her arms, she walked slowly and almost a-tiptoe with reverence round the room.

There were pictures on the walls—lovely fairytale pictures, such as she had seen in windows of gorgeous shops, with cobalt blue seas and airy mountains, towered castles and dark thickets shot through with sunshine. There were pretty things on the dressing-table—little trays and boxes of thin china, patterned in green and gold, two slender perfume bottles of cool green glass, a lovely little lady in brocaded silk, with her hair piled high, whose skirts when lifted revealed a hidden pin-cushion. On the writing-desk by the window there was a green blotter with gold and green leather corners, and a brass owl, which was an inkwell, and a brass turtle which miraculously was a stamp box. On the little shelves of the desk were sheets of creamy paper, large and small, and engraved on each sheet was the legend: The Chimnies, Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

“Oh, dear,” thought Caroline, “if only I could write to somebody on this ducky paper, but I mustn’t ever, because my handwriting isn’t Jackie’s, and it would give us all away.”

With a little sigh, she turned from the desk and looked out at the windows. There were two of them. The western window looked into the elms. The northern window looked across some fields to a low mountain, a great heap of dark trees and raw red cliffs, which humped itself like a gigantic beast against the sky.

Caroline was gazing at the mountain, when there came a rap at the door, and a neat middle-aged maid, who must be Sallie, brought in her suitcase (Jacqueline’s suitcase!) and the hatbox. Sallie also offered to help Caroline wash her face. Dear me! If Sallie had known the little girl was Caroline, and not Jacqueline, she would have known that at Cousin Delia’s Caroline had not only washed her own face, but several other little faces besides.

After Sallie had gone, Caroline opened the door and went into the bathroom. It was not a bit like Cousin Delia’s bathroom, with its golden oak woodwork and its zinc tub which Caroline had so often scrubbed. This bathroom was all white tiles and shining nickel, and had a porcelain tub big enough for half a dozen Carolines. On the nickel rods were big towels and little towels and middle-sized towels, thick towels and thin towels, rough towels and smooth towels, all marked with a beautiful big G.

Caroline took off the henna-colored frock most particularly, and she washed her face with some very faintly scented white soap, not forgetting to wash behind her ears, and she washed her neck and her hands and her knees, too, but she decided to let her feet go until after dinner. Then she opened her suitcase (really Jacqueline’s!) and feeling a little apologetic, even though it was Jacqueline’s own plan that she was carrying out, she took Jacqueline’s pretty blue leather traveling-case, with its ivory implements, and she made her hair smooth and her hands tidy.

Caroline, you see, was a gentle little girl, and in the haphazard months at Cousin Delia’s she had not forgotten the careful teachings of her gentle little mother. If she had, her whole story might have turned out very differently. She made herself now as fresh and tidy as possible. Then she sat down in the low rocker beside the bookcase, and looked at the books—such a lot of books, not new ones, she could see, but new to her, bound volumes of St. Nicholas, and a whole set of Miss Alcott, books by Laura E. Richards, and Miss Molesworth, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Juliana Ewing.

She was dipping into “We and the World” when she heard a knock at her door, and there on the threshold, not waiting to be asked in, stood Cousin Penelope. Now that her hat was off, Caroline saw that she had pretty, fair hair, but she had also a forehead so high and white that it gave her rather a forbidding look.

“Day-dreaming, Jacqueline?” said Cousin Penelope briskly.

“I—I was looking at the books,” Caroline explained, as she rose hastily. “I never saw so many.”

Penelope pursed her lips. To herself she said that she must mention to her mother that “Aunt Edie” was evidently an outdoor sort, without any claim to culture. Didn’t it prove the point, when Cousin Jack’s poor little daughter was so unused to books that she was quite excited over three shelves of old-fashioned, shabby juveniles?

But to Caroline, Penelope merely said:

“Those were my books, Jacqueline, when I was your age. Your father and I often read them together on rainy days. You’ll have plenty of time to read them this summer; but you must come now, for dinner will be waiting.”

Penelope spoke crisply, coolly, and her tone made something inside Caroline curl up tight, like a sea-anemone when you touch it.

“Cousin Penelope doesn’t like me,” she told herself.

CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC IN THE TWILIGHT

In Cousin Penelope’s wake, for she did not quite dare to walk at her side, as she had walked with Aunt Eunice, Caroline went down to the dining room.

To feel as she felt on entering that cool, orderly room, with its white paint and dark paper, its old portraits and its severe, highly polished dark furniture, you would need to have lived for six months with Cousin Delia, whose dining room furniture was all of golden oak, carved in endless curves and curlicues, and who kept a piece of fly-paper on the golden oak sideboard, between the blue glass lemonade set and the plated silver cake dish.

With a sense almost of going to church, Caroline slipped into the place at the table to which Aunt Eunice smilingly motioned her. There was no cloth on the table, just drawn-work doilies of sheer white linen, and on the largest doily in the center was a crystal bowl with pale small roses. The glasses were almost as thin as soap-bubbles, and the silver was thin, and highly polished, and plain. All this Caroline had noted in the first instant, and in the second she noted with relief that there was no butler after all, only the good-humored maid, Sallie. Then she took courage, and decided that, even though there were several knives and forks and spoons at her place, she would be all right if she began at each end and worked inward.

Probably in all her life Caroline had never eaten a meal that tasted so good as that first dinner at The Chimnies. There was a clear, well-flavored soup, in a deep plate covered with Chinese figures in lettuce green and raspberry pink. With the soup were little golden-hued dice which were like glorified bread crumbs. Then there were slices of pink ham, with fat as white as marble, amber brown balls of potato, delicate small peas, a crisp salad of lettuce and ice cold cucumber, with pale, firm cheese and salty toasted crackers, and last of all little tarts of fresh strawberries, topped with whipped cream.

Caroline ate, silently and earnestly. She had eaten her last three meals, remember, out of a shoe box.

Very early, with the soup, Aunt Eunice asked her if she would like a glass of milk.

“Yes, please, thank you,” said Caroline, “if it isn’t too much trouble.”

After that, conversation so far as concerned Caroline, ceased to exist. She ate, and was glad that no one noticed her, or so she thought. But someone must have noticed her, it seemed. For when Caroline was half through her little tart, eating in careful small bites, as her mother had taught her, and holding her fork nicely, Cousin Penelope spoke out of a clear sky.

“She really favors our side of the family, doesn’t she, Mother?”

“Jacqueline?”

“Yes. The resemblance is striking. Just look at Great-aunt Joanna Gildersleeve.”

For the life of her Caroline couldn’t help looking round, in the direction in which Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope both were looking. She half expected to see another great-aunt standing right at her elbow. But instead she only saw, hanging upon the wall above the sideboard, the portrait of a rather forbidding lady in a cap, with a curtain parting on a landscape just behind her.

“I don’t quite see the likeness,” murmured Aunt Eunice.

“It’s something in the inner curve of the eyebrow and the set of the nostrils,” Cousin Penelope explained patiently. “It’s almost indefinable but quite unmistakable.”

Aunt Eunice did not dispute the point. Neither, you may be sure, did Caroline.

When dinner was over they went into a large, square room that opened off the dining room. All round the room were shelves of books in many-colored bindings, and there was a great writing-table across the western window. There was a fireplace, masked with an old-fashioned fire-screen on which a landscape was worked in faded silks, and above the fireplace was a marble mantel on which were a pair of bronze vases. But there was no piano!

Caroline sat down in a low chair, which Aunt Eunice recommended to her, and wished that she had Mildred in her arms. She began to feel very much alone, with these people who were really not her people, and a little bit frightened. Older folk than Caroline have felt that way, in a strange place, among strange faces, with the day ending, and no way of knowing what the next day may bring.

Sallie brought in a tray, with matches and a spirit-lamp, a canister that savored of rich coffee-berries, a little glass coffee machine, half filled with crystal clear hot water, two cups, thin as egg-shells, and small almost as eggs.

Aunt Eunice put the machine together, measured the coffee, as if she performed a religious ceremony, and set the lamp beneath the globe of water.

“Of course you don’t take coffee, my dear,” she spoke kindly to Caroline. “Go look in the drawer of the table over there. I think you’ll find a box of candied ginger. Help yourself!”

Caroline took courage, as she saw Aunt Eunice smile.

“If you don’t mind,” she whispered, “I’d rather—have you a piano?”

She felt that Cousin Penelope, cool and aloof in her chair by the window, looked at her, surprised and not altogether pleased.

“Of course, dear,” said Aunt Eunice readily. “Right across the hall in the long parlor. You can find your way?”

“Oh, yes,” Caroline nodded hastily.

She wanted to get to the piano quickly, before Cousin Penelope interfered. For she felt that Cousin Penelope was sitting up very straight and about to speak.

“Run along!” said Aunt Eunice. Did she, too, feel that Penelope was rising to remark?

Caroline “ran along.” She went so fast that she was almost out of earshot when Penelope expressed herself:

“Mother! That child—strumming on my piano!”

“She won’t hurt the piano fatally, my dear,” said Aunt Eunice, placidly but with unexpected firmness. “Poor little shy thing! She’s lonely and homesick, as any one can see, and if the piano gives her pleasure to-night, who would begrudge it?”

No one, evidently, while Aunt Eunice was around. Penelope sank back in her chair, but there was a little crease, not at all becoming, in her high white forehead.

Meantime Caroline had “found her way,” easily enough, across the hall and into the long parlor, which was as long as the book room and the dining room put together. Such a big room, with pictures that frowned on her through the twilight that was deepening, here on the east side of the house. But neither the bigness of the room, nor the dimness of it could daunt Caroline, for at the farther end she saw the polished bulk of a grand piano.

She flew to it across the dark polished floor and the dusky rugs. There had been no piano at Cousin Delia’s, only a talking machine. Cousin Delia liked a fox trot or a coon song as well as the next one.

Caroline sat down on the piano bench. She poised her hands for a second over the white keys, almost afraid to touch them lest they melt away and vanish. Then very softly but firmly she struck a chord, and another, and another. How the piano sang in its deep, golden throat! Such a piano as her precious Muzzy had dreamed of having some time for their very own! Caroline struck more chords, and ran a scale to limber her little fingers, which had grown the least bit stiff with lack of exercise.

“The dear little thing!” cooed Aunt Eunice over her coffee machine. “If she isn’t practicing her scales.”

She cast an appealing look at Penelope, but Penelope in the window looked unplacated.

Caroline found the pedals with her feet. She could just reach them. She could make the piano talk, now loud, now low. She played very softly a lullaby that her mother had made up, just for her—a very simple thing—one of the first that she had ever learned. The stiffness was going from her fingers. She and this beautiful, wonder working, deep throated piano were friends. She began to play the last thing that her mother had taught her, a rhapsody of Brahms.

In the library Aunt Eunice paused in her placid sipping of her coffee, and looked amazed, for Penelope had sat up in her chair, with a quick, passionate movement that was not like Penelope.

“Mother!” There was something like awe in Penelope’s voice. “That child can play.”

“Quite so, dear.”

“But it isn’t parrot-playing, Mother—there’s more than her funny little bit of ragged technique—there’s feeling—listen now!”

They listened, while their coffee cooled. Full, round golden notes sang through the old dim house, now loud, now low. Night winds blew—bells tolled—echoes wakened in a vast cathedral aisle beneath a myriad jewel-like stained windows.

“Why, Penelope! Don’t!” Aunt Eunice soothed suddenly, as if the Penelope who swallowed her hard sobs was again a little child.

“I can’t help it, Mother. Don’t you see? There is something after all in the power of the soul. That Delane woman—that horsy, tangoing California girl——”

“Penelope!”

“She’s dead, I know. I shouldn’t speak like that. But she had no music in her, and Jack hadn’t a note of it. But I—I——”

“Yes, dear.”

“Jack was my favorite cousin,” Penelope whispered. “You know how much I cared for him. Even when that Delane girl took him away. And now Jack’s child—my music is in her—and by that much she’s mine, not hers,—she’s mine!”

CHAPTER IX
PENELOPE UNBENDS

Caroline went up to bed at half past eight in a happy daze. She had played for ever so long in the parlor that at last was quite dark, Liszt and Brahms, simple arrangements, of course, which her mother had selected for her and then she had improvised rapturously, enjoying that piano as a man who has gone thirsty for hours in the heat may enjoy (too weak a word!) a draft of cool water.

At last Aunt Eunice had come and turned on the lights and told her it was bed time. Was she afraid to go to bed alone?

Caroline smiled vaguely and said: “No!”

Then with Aunt Eunice’s kiss on her cheek, she went up the stairs to her wonderful room. She found a shaded electric light turned on, the bedcover folded, the bedclothes turned down. A fresh nightgown from the suitcase lay on the bed, and the blue leather traveling-case was on the dressing-table.

Caroline undressed Mildred and put her in the fresh white bed. Oh, such a contrast that bed was to the stuffy berth on the train, and the rumpled bed with the thin mattress, all in lumps, that she had shared with the oldest baby (fat and a terrible crowder!) at Cousin Delia’s.

Then she went into the spick and span bathroom, and drew her own bath—all the hot water she wanted. At Cousin Delia’s the hot water supply had had a bad trick of giving out after the four babies were bathed and before it came Caroline’s turn. But here there was hot water and cold water and three kinds of soap. Caroline bathed luxuriously, and dried herself on one of the huge soft towels and slipped on the fresh nightgown (Jacqueline’s nightgown!). Then she faced a problem that had worried her, off and on, for the last half hour.

Toothbrush!

Of course the one in the blue leather traveling-case was Jacqueline’s. But to go to bed without washing one’s teeth seemed to Caroline impossible. She decided to look in the medicine closet. Perhaps she would find in it some sort of mouth-wash that would help her through the night, and then next day, with the money that was left in Jacqueline’s purse, she would buy a toothbrush.

There were all sorts of things in that Mother Robinson’s bag of a medicine closet; several kinds of fresh smelling soap in paper wrappers, rolls of cotton, bottles of sweet oil and mouth-wash, boracic acid and toilet-water. There were rolls of adhesive and jars of cold cream, papers of pins and crystal clear eye cups. There were also a couple of toothbrushes sealed in transparent paper cases.

Caroline looked and longed. At last she took one of the sealed brushes in her hand and went to the door that was opposite the door into her own room. Sallie had said something about this door’s opening into some one’s else room, and she must always leave it unlocked, when she went out of the bathroom.

Caroline knocked at the door. She hoped that Aunt Eunice would open to her, but instead it was Cousin Penelope in a loose lacy gown, who appeared on the threshold.

“I’m sorry,” faltered Caroline.

“No matter,” said Penelope, coolly but not unkindly. “I was only reading a silly book. What is it?”

“Could I—could I have this toothbrush?” hesitated Caroline. She felt guiltily that she must make some explanation, so she added: “I don’t want to use the one—the one I brought off the train.”

“You’re like me,” said Penelope, as if she were pleased with the resemblance. “I always want to throw away everything that I’ve used in the dirty cars. Of course, take the toothbrush, Jacqueline. Take anything you wish from the medicine closet. My own personal things I keep on my dressing-table.”

“Thank you very much,” said Caroline.

She stood there, shy and solemn, in the little short-sleeved, square-necked nightgown. She hardly knew whether to turn away or to linger. Because Cousin Penelope did not turn away.

Cousin Penelope seemed trying to speak, and apparently she did not find it easy.

“Jacqueline,” she brought out the words suddenly, “how long have you—taken lessons on the piano?”

“Always,” said Caroline truthfully, “except last winter.”

“Of course,” the thought flashed through Penelope’s mind, “they neglected her music at that horrid school where Edith Delane sent her—to get rid of her.” But what she said aloud to Caroline was: “Who taught you?”

No doubt Caroline ought to have said, “My mother,” and betrayed the whole deception that Jacqueline had led her into practicing. But it takes courage to destroy a lovely world in which, however undeservedly, one is very happy, especially when the destruction of that world would leave one cowering, a guilty wretch, before such a judge as Cousin Penelope, with her serene, high forehead.

“A—a lady taught me,” Caroline told a half-truth.

“She must have been quite a good teacher.”

Caroline nodded. The tears were near her eyelids.

“Folks called her a very good teacher,” she whispered. “She’s dead now.”

“Loyal and affectionate,” thought Penelope. “That’s the Gildersleeve blood in her.” Aloud she went on, with a change of subject, to Caroline’s great relief: “There’s a Polish lady spending the summer here in Longmeadow. She’s a really exceptional pianist. I believe if I asked her——How would you like to have some lessons from her this summer?”

Caroline clasped her hands upon the toothbrush.

“Oh, I’d love it like anything—but I—I couldn’t—it—it would cost—lots.”

Penelope lifted her brows slightly, but she smiled.

“That sounds like Great-uncle Thaddeus Gildersleeve, who was the most cautious man in Longmeadow,” she said. “Don’t fret about the bills! This will be my treat, Jacqueline, to my Cousin Jack’s little daughter.”

She did not offer to kiss Caroline, but she put her hand on her shoulder, and smiled down at her quite kindly.

“Run along to bed now,” she said. “We’ll go together and call on Madame Woleski to-morrow.”

A little later, when Caroline was settled between the fresh, cool sheets in the green and golden room, she told it all to Mildred.

“I’m to take lessons from a Polish lady,” she whispered. “Oh, I think Cousin Penelope likes me, or she wouldn’t have offered. It’s like Heaven here, isn’t it, Mildred? If only we could stay forever!”

And while she whispered the words, Caroline was aware that she meant to stay just as long as ever she could. Any vague scruple of conscience which might have driven her to confess to the deluded Gildersleeves, was now quite done away with. Jacqueline, inventor of the deed, had told her to keep still, and as long as the reward of silence was to live in this wonderful house with a piano, and take lessons from an exceptional Polish lady, she would keep still. She only hoped and prayed that Jacqueline might not find it too terrible with the cows and half-aunt Martha, and so be moved to come at once and claim her rightful place.

CHAPTER X
THE CAPTURE OF A HALF-AUNT

When Caroline walked out of the drawing-room on the train, in the wake of the black porter, you will remember that she left Jacqueline in the patched brown and white gingham (Caroline’s dress!) restrapping the shabby suitcase (Caroline’s suitcase!).

Jacqueline was not in the least flustered. Through the open door of the drawing-room she could see that a stout man with a bag, and several other passengers were making their way toward the open vestibule. She had a couple of minutes to spare. And she fully meant to be the last person to leave the train at Baring Junction. She wasn’t going to cloud the issue and spoil her little plot by having the groups of waiting relatives see two little brown-eyed girls, with bobbed brown hair, descend in a procession from the train.

Jacqueline felt pretty sure—and the event justified her—that when a nicely dressed little girl, with J. G. on her smart suitcase and her hatbox, came timidly down the steps of the car, the Gildersleeve relatives would pounce upon her and bear her away. Then later, when Caroline’s shabby little substitute appeared, she would naturally fall to the share of half-aunt Martha.

So at the latest moment she dared to risk, Jacqueline took the red sweater over her arm and the big suitcase in her hand, and trailed along at the end of the line that was leaving the car. She felt very jubilant, for she loved to play-act—and this was the most perfect piece of play-acting that she had ever invented. She wasn’t in the least afraid for, if she found half-aunt Martha horrid and her house impossible, she would simply go to her Gildersleeve relatives and explain who she was, and ask Caroline to back up her story, and then she would have back her own clothes and her own rightful place, and everything would be just as it was before.

A little hard on Caroline, perhaps, but still, she would be no worse off than she would have been, if she hadn’t met Jacqueline in the first place. At least she would have had the society of the piano—why should any one yearn for a piano?—for several days.

You see, Jacqueline was a selfish little girl, and a thoughtless little girl. But perhaps young Aunt Edith Delane, who now was Edith Knowlton, hadn’t been the wisest of foster-mothers. In some things she had indulged Jacqueline foolishly, and in others she had checked her with equal folly. Jacqueline had had lovely clothes and toys and all manner of semi grown-up pleasures, but she had not been allowed to make friends when and where she pleased, nor do the foolish “rowdy” things, as Aunt Edith called them, that she had seen other children do—such as riding their bicycles through the streets to public school or flying hazardously down hill on rollerskates. Of course Jacqueline had longed to do the very things that she was forbidden to do. And now she could. She was rid of Aunt Edith, and governesses, and teachers, and chaperons. She was just Caroline Tait, and she was going to have the free, untrammeled time of her young life—always with the Gildersleeves to shield her in the background!

Staggering under her suitcase, Jacqueline reached the head of the steps. In the distance she caught just a glimpse of Caroline in the henna-colored frock being hurried off to a tiresome old limousine by a prim-looking lady in a mauve silk sweater. Thank goodness, she wasn’t Caroline! She knew just the sort of dull old poky house they’d take her to.

Then Jacqueline gave her attention to getting herself and the suitcase, with the porter’s help, down the steps of the car. She landed in a little knot of people who were kissing their friends and sorting out their hand-luggage, and she saw a woman hurrying toward her, a solidly-built woman with a weather-beaten face, who wore an old black skirt and a white shirt-waist, and a black straw sailor-hat, a little askew. The woman began to smile as soon as her eyes met Jacqueline’s.

Jacqueline play-acted all over the place. She dropped the suitcase and fairly flew to meet the stranger.

“Oh, half-aunt Martha,” she cried loudly, and cast herself into the woman’s arms.

“My goodness, child,” said Mrs. Martha Conway. “Don’t knock the breath out of a body!”

She kissed Jacqueline soundly on the cheek.

“I kind of suspect you’re Caroline,” she said, with a twinkle in her gray eyes. “Give me hold of that suitcase. I’d have had one of the boys here to help us—they were all crazy to come meet their cousin—but I wanted room in the car so as to get your trunk, and I just brought Nellie along.”

All the while she talked, half-aunt Martha had been hurrying along the station platform, and hurrying Jacqueline and the suitcase with her, much as the Red Queen hurried Alice in the Looking Glass Country, you will remember. They now turned a corner of the station, and there in the shade opposite the open door of the baggage room stood a dingy-looking Ford. In the Ford was a sun-browned little girl of six in a stiffly starched gingham dress, who smiled and waved her hand to them.

“You keep on sitting, Nellie,” called Aunt Martha. “Where’s your trunk-check, Caroline?”

“Gee! I forgot all about it,” said Jacqueline ruefully.

“You can’t have,” Aunt Martha told her, patiently but firmly. “Look in your pockets—in your sweater pocket.”

“It isn’t there,” Jacqueline confessed. She hardly knew whether to laugh at herself or be annoyed. She looked at Aunt Martha’s anxious face, and decided she wouldn’t laugh.

“We’ll unstrap the suitcase,” said Aunt Martha, as she placed the suitcase on a packing-box. “Don’t worry, Caroline. It must be somewhere. I knew a woman once that always kept her trunk-check in the toe of her bedshoe when she went on a long train trip. And even if we don’t find it, we can prove property and claim your trunk. What kind of a trunk was it?”

“I—I don’t know,” said Jacqueline feebly. She could feel her cheeks burning, and the tears of vexation rising to her eyes. For she fully believed that everything was going to be spoiled right at the outset. And somehow, as she looked at Aunt Martha’s weather-beaten anxious face and steady gray eyes, she felt that it would not be what she would call a picnic to explain to Aunt Martha why she didn’t know what her own trunk looked like, and how she came to stand here in the soiled white shoes of Caroline Tait.

But Martha Conway saw in Jacqueline’s confusion only the natural distress of a child, who was tired with a long journey and frightened at the prospect of losing all her little possessions.

“Don’t cry!” she bade briskly. “’Twon’t help matters. Nothing’s lost, if you know where ’tis, as the sea-cook said when he dropped the tea-kettle overboard, and that check must just be in this suitcase somewheres.”

She had the straps unfastened by this time and the lid lifted.

“My, what a hoorah’s nest!” she murmured, and indeed Jacqueline’s hasty incursion into the suitcase, in search of Mildred’s wardrobe, had utterly disarranged Caroline’s neat garments.

Aunt Martha turned over the pink and white soiled gingham and the discarded underwear. She felt in the toe of each of the worn bedshoes, and looked disappointed at finding nothing in them. She shook out the nightgown. But though she looked more and more anxious, and though her silence made Jacqueline feel more and more what a real disaster to Caroline and to Caroline’s people the loss of a mere trunk would be, she did not once scold.

At the bottom of the suitcase were Caroline’s comb and brush, in a chintz case with the initials F. T. worked on it in cross-stitch, and a little chintz handkerchief-case, with the same initials. Aunt Martha opened the handkerchief-case and smiled with relief as she saw on top of the handkerchiefs the clumsy oblong of the pasteboard trunk-check.

“Well, now,” she said, “you were a good girl to put it away so carefully, only next time don’t go and forget where you put it. Now I’ll go right and get the baggage man to put the trunk into the Ford. I suppose there’ll be room. Or did you bring a Saratoga, Caroline?”

“The trunk isn’t exactly what you might call big,” murmured Jacqueline non-committally. She certainly hoped it wasn’t. What mightn’t it be like, this unknown trunk of Caroline’s that was now her trunk?

While she waited for Aunt Martha to return with the trunk, Jacqueline started to restrap the suitcase, but before she did so, she cast a hurried glance about, in search of the trunk-key. She was pretty sure that Aunt Martha would be asking for that, next. To her great relief, she found underneath the comb and brush case a shabby little red purse (Caroline’s purse!) and in it were the trunk-key, two pennies, and a fifty-cent piece. She pocketed the purse and its contents joyfully. Fair exchange was no robbery, and even after the porter had his fee, there were left a couple of dollars in the vanity bag (Jacqueline’s bag!) that Caroline had carried away.

By the time the suitcase was strapped, Aunt Martha came back with a man in shirt-sleeves who carried a trunk on his shoulder. Not at all a large trunk, praise be! but a little battered steamer-trunk, which went quite easily between the back and front seats of the Ford, with room enough besides for the suitcase, and Jacqueline’s red sweater, and some brown paper bundles and bags that were half-aunt Martha’s. One didn’t come to Baring Junction every day, it seemed, and one profited by the occasion to do a little shopping.

After the baggage was safely placed, Aunt Martha and Jacqueline settled themselves on the front seat, with the six-year-old girl between them.

“This is Nellie,” said Aunt Martha, “and this is your Cousin Caroline, Nellie.”

The little girl hung her head and smiled. She had a pointed chin and thick golden brown eyelashes. She seemed to Jacqueline rather a baby.

After a little rebellion on the part of the Ford, which Aunt Martha subdued in a capable manner, the car got under way. Jacqueline watched the process with interest. She knew a lot of funny stories about Fords, but she had never ridden in one before. Uncle Jimmie had a Locomobile, and Aunt Edie swore by her Marmon.

Rather spasmodically, as they got up speed, they rolled across the worn asphalt of the station park and into the one wide street of Baring Junction. Along the street were two-story buildings of brick, fruit shops and hardware shops and drygoods shops, as the wares that overflowed on the sidewalk bore witness, and drug shops. At sight of the large advertisements that shouted the joys of sundaes and cool drinks, Jacqueline remembered that she was thirsty. She remembered also the fifty cents in Caroline’s shabby red purse. She never dreamed that the gift of fifty cents, because Caroline must not go on a journey penniless, meant real generosity on Cousin Delia’s part.

“Let’s stop and get a drink,” begged Jacqueline. “My treat, of course. I’ve got fifty cents—enough for three fifteen-cent sodas.”

Aunt Martha turned her head and looked at her.

“Forty-five cents just for drinks?” she said. “You hang on to that half-dollar, Caroline. You’ll be needing it, like as not, for hair-ribbons.”

Jacqueline started to say, very rudely: “It’s my money!” But she recollected that it was really Caroline’s. She also caught herself wondering if it were advisable to be rude to half-aunt Martha. A lady who could squelch a Ford might be able to squelch a supposed half-niece.

Then she was glad that she hadn’t been rude, for Aunt Martha smiled. She seemed to guess what it was like to be ten years old, and just off the train on a hot June afternoon.

“I’ll get you and Nellie each an ice-cream cone,” she said.

Nellie smiled. She couldn’t have looked more blissfully happy if somebody had promised her a beautiful fifty-cent special, with a plate of petit fours.

“There’s a nice-looking place,” suggested Jacqueline eagerly, “the big one with the little fountain of water in the window.”

“Donovan’s?” said Aunt Martha. “That’s a big place, all right, and prices to match. They’ll charge you fifteen cents for an ice-cream cone if you go in there. We’ll stop at the little Greek place.”

Just at the end of the street of brick buildings they stopped accordingly at a tiny shop, wedged in between two pompous neighbors. Aunt Martha bought two ice-cream cones for seven cents apiece. Only two cones. Perhaps she didn’t like ice-cream herself.

“Eat ’em up before they melt, and don’t spill any more than you can help,” she advised.

Nellie’s little pink tongue was deep in the custardy contents of the pasteboard-like cone before Aunt Martha had regained her seat. Jacqueline clutched her cone and followed suit joyously. Never before had she been encouraged to eat dubious ice-cream, publicly, shamelessly, in a moving car, on an open road. She licked the cool drops that dribbled from the melting mound, and thought them delicious.

“Thank you, half-aunt Martha,” she said, with a sticky smile.

Aunt Martha chuckled.

“My land, child,” she said. “Don’t call me half-aunt. Makes me feel like I was cut in two.”

CHAPTER XI
ON THE ROAD TO LONGMEADOW

Along the country road, through pastures and farms and meadows, where the limousine had smoothly, swiftly glided, Aunt Martha’s Ford bounced sturdily. Soon the ice-cream cones were demolished, even to the last gritty crumb of the cornucopias. Jacqueline wiped her hands and her face on her handkerchief (Caroline’s handkerchief!).

“Wipe off your mouth, Nellie,” bade Aunt Martha. “Let Caroline do it for you. I haven’t a hand to spare.”

Jacqueline scrubbed Nellie vigorously with Nellie’s own pocket handkerchief which had a rabbit worked in one corner.

“That’s my best hanky,” said Nellie, and with the ice thus broken between them, began to ask Jacqueline questions.

Did she sleep in the train? Did she have a real bed? Was she scared all alone like that?

“Of course not,” said Jacqueline, rather showily.

She stuffed her mussy handkerchief back into her pocket, and there were the chocolates, salvage of the satin box. She decided to share them with this new acquaintance.

“Here, Nellie,” she said. “Don’t you like chocolates?”

Nellie seized upon the proffered sweet.

“Only one, Nellie,” struck in Aunt Martha, who seemed to know without looking what went on among the children round her.

“I’ve got a pocketful,” Jacqueline urged generously.

“No need to be piggy on that account. Where did you get ’em, Caroline? I hope you don’t spend money foolishly.”

“There was a little girl on the train had a whole box of chocolates.” Jacqueline spoke truthful words, but with untruthful intent. “These are some of them.”

Aunt Martha looked at her disapprovingly.

“It’s just as well not to pick up acquaintances on trains,” she said. “But I don’t need to lay down the law, for you won’t be taking another such journey for one while.”

“Not unless you send me to an Institution,” thought Jacqueline. What would it be like to go to an Institution, she wondered? Perhaps she would be really bad, and let Aunt Martha send her there. The Gildersleeves could always come and get her out.

Nellie interrupted Jacqueline’s train of thought. She had bitten into the plump chocolate she had chosen and found it not at all to her taste.

“This is a bad candy,” she protested. “It ought to be white sugar inside and instead it’s all gooey gum.”

“It’s nice jelly, you goop,” said Jacqueline. “Throw it away, and have another.”

“No!” Aunt Martha struck in. “You can’t waste good candy like that, Nellie. If you don’t like what Caroline gives you, leave it alone. But you can’t have another. Caroline may want to save a piece for each of the boys.”

It seemed to Jacqueline pathetic that mere candy should be so precious.

“Oh, let Nellie find one that she likes,” she pleaded, and added, without thinking: “I’ll get a whole box of candy to-morrow for the boys.”

Aunt Martha smiled rather quizzically.

“Not a box of that sort of candy, Caroline. It must have cost at least a dollar a pound. Does seem sort of wicked to throw money about that way, when times are so hard.”

Aunt Martha spoke seriously, and the gray eyes that she suddenly bent on Jacqueline were very grave, and even stern. Jacqueline suddenly reconsidered her plan to be naughty and get sent to an Institution. There might, she concluded, be unpleasantnesses before she got there. Not of course that she was afraid of Aunt Martha!

“I’ll keep what’s left of the chocolates for the boys,” she said quite meekly. “How many of ’em are there—the boys, I mean, not the chocolates. I’ve kind of forgotten.”

“No wonder, either,” Aunt Martha answered heartily. “You can’t have heard much about your Longmeadow relations. Your mother and I were only connected by marriage, and both of us busy women, so correspondence sort of languished after your father died. Can’t say you favor him in looks. You must take after your mother’s folks.”

Jacqueline blushed with embarrassment. What fibs might she not yet be forced to tell?

“There now,” said Aunt Martha. “I shouldn’t be personal, setting a bad example to you and Nellie. Let’s talk about the boys.”

“Let’s!” said Jacqueline, with heartfelt relief.

“Well, there’s my big boy, Ralph. He’s most sixteen, and he’ll go to High School over to Baring Center next winter, if we can get conveyance.” A worried look played for a moment on Aunt Martha’s steady face, and was gone as quickly as it came. “Ralph is my right hand on the farm,” she said with a little smile. “Like you must have been to your mother, Caroline.”

Jacqueline blushed again. She had played several parts in her life, but she had never adopted the rôle of right hand to any one. Did grown folk speak always of children who were right hands with the sort of smile that was on Aunt Martha’s firm lips, and that sort of shininess in the eyes?

“Then there’s Dick,” went on Aunt Martha. “He’s twelve now, and Neil is ten next month. You come just between ’em. And here’s Nellie. She’s a great help to us, too. She sets the table and puts away the clean dishes, and plays with the babies.”

Nellie smiled, and showed two engaging dimples.

“We’ve got nice babies,” she said eagerly. “We haven’t had ’em long, but they’re going to stay with us always, aren’t they, Mother?”

Aunt Martha nodded.

“They’re no blood-relation to you, Caroline,” she explained. “It’s on the other side of the family. My husband’s sister Grace married a poor fellow named Pearsall that was dreadful sort of unlucky. She took sick and died right after little Annie was born, and he couldn’t rightly seem to do for his children. So Mother and I—that’s my husband’s mother, Caroline—we just sent for the babies. Freddie’s three years old now, and Annie is nineteen months.”

“You’d ought to see her walk!” cried Nellie.

Aunt Martha smiled rather grimly.

“Next thing she’ll be walking into everything just like Freddie does,” she said. “Young ones and ducks are a good deal alike some ways.”

Jacqueline looked at Aunt Martha for a moment, while she thought rapidly. At Buena Vista she had heard her Aunt Edith and her friends sing the praises of one of their number, who had adopted a little French orphan. To give a child a home was a serious undertaking, even for a lady who, like Aunt Edith’s friend, had a great house and servants and cars and lovely gowns and jewels. But here was Aunt Martha, who had no car but a Ford, and wore tacky old clothes that Aunt Edith’s chambermaid would have scorned, who scrimped on the price of an ice-cream cone and thought a dollar a pound for chocolates (Jacqueline’s really had cost a dollar-fifty!) sinful waste. Aunt Martha was really poor—yet she was giving a home to two children—and now to a third.

“Aunt Martha,” Jacqueline burst out, in the small-boy way that she had when she was excited. “I think you’re awful good to give Caroline Tait a home.”

Aunt Martha stared at her, then smiled.

“Don’t talk about yourself as if you were in a legal document, you funny young one!” she said. “And as to giving you a home, why, there’s always room for one more. Besides,” she went on, and Jacqueline felt dimly the tact and kindness that impelled her, “we haven’t any big girl to make our family circle complete, and I know you’ll be a great help and comfort to us, Caroline.”

I’m glad to say that at this moment Jacqueline felt horribly ashamed of the trick she had played on Martha Conway.

“I—I guess so,” she mumbled blushingly. “I hope so. I’ll try, Aunt Martha.”

CHAPTER XII
NEW RELATIONS

Over the covered bridge and into Longmeadow Street the Ford panted, where the limousine some time before had silently and sumptuously rolled. But in Longmeadow Street Jacqueline’s way parted from Caroline’s. Before they reached the Gildersleeve place they turned to the left into a road of trodden dirt. Soon they had left the well-kept village houses, with their trim lawns and flower-beds, behind them. They drove now through vast level fields which were green with the tops of onions. In the distance were mountains, such as Caroline was studying from her north window. Overhead the blue sky was losing some of its hard brilliance, as the sun jogged downward toward the western hills.

Along the dirt road were strung a few farms, wide apart, with clusters of buildings, houses, barns, and sheds. Around each farmhouse grew trees, beeches and elms and nut-trees. But the road itself was shadeless, running straight as a builder’s line between the green and pungent-smelling fields of onions.

“My, but it’s hot!” panted Jacqueline.

“You just wait till winter,” boasted Nellie. “The wind comes just a-whooping down from the north, and the snow is that high. Last winter I got in a drift up to my waist, going to school. Ralph, he hauls me on my sled but——”

“Tell Caroline about the blizzard later,” Aunt Martha interrupted. “Here we are now, and she’s got other things to think about.”

They turned from the road into a dirt track. On the right was a square old white house, badly in need of paint, with huge bushes of lilac that hid its front door from the road, and elms that towered above the weather-worn dark roof. At the left was untidy grass where red hens scratched among rusty croquet wickets; poplar trees, with a shabby hammock hung between two of them; a swing that lacked a seat, drooping from a butternut tree. Then the car stopped in the irregular plot of trodden dirt at the side-door of the house. A great slab of granite was the doorstone, and round it grew bachelor’s buttons and phlox, fenced high with wire to keep out the chickens.

Jacqueline noticed that if they drove on, they would land in a barn, with a wide open door, and beside the barn was a lane, which ran off toward the western mountains, and there was an orchard, and sheds, and a fenced, small cow-yard. She didn’t have time for more than a fleeting glimpse.

“Here’s Grandma, Caroline,” Aunt Martha claimed her attention.

Jacqueline turned her head and saw an old lady come briskly out upon the doorstone. She was weather-brown and small and spry, as they say in New England. She had very dark eyes and a thin, delicate nose, and she was as neat as wax, in a gray alpaca dress, and a big white apron. A little tow-headed boy in blue overalls, who must be Freddie, came trotting at her side, but as soon as he saw Jacqueline, he clutched at Grandma’s skirts and hid his head in their folds.

Jacqueline opened the door of the Ford and jumped out.

“How do you do, Mrs. Conway,” she began.

“Guess you’d better say Grandma, and have it over with,” the old lady said, and kissed her. “My, but you’re a fine big girl for ten years old—not a bit spindle-legged like some city children. You come right in now and wash up while they’re getting the things out of the car. I got some water hot on the oil stove.”

At Grandma’s side, with Freddie peeping at her round Grandma’s skirts, Jacqueline went into the kitchen of the old Conway house. It was a long room, with many-paneled doors, and windows set with little lights of glass. On the well-scoured floor were mats of braided rags. At one side a huge fireplace had been bricked up, and projecting from what had been its hearth, stood a big cookstove, ornamented with polished nickel, which was quite cold. At the other side of the room, between the windows, was an iron sink with two pumps, and near it a big three-burner oil stove, on which a kettle gently simmered.

“Hard water in the right-hand pump,” Grandma rapidly explained to Jacqueline. “Cistern water in the left-hand. Cistern water is good for the complexion—but that will interest you more a few years later. There’s the hand basin—don’t ever take the tin one—it’s for the vegetables. Don’t touch that yellow soap—leave it for the dishes and such like. Here’s the white soap for your hands, and you’ll find the clean roller towel on the closet door.”

Why, this was roughing it, thought Jacqueline. She had known nothing like it since she went camping in the Yosemite. She washed her face and hands in a blue enamel basin, with a white lining—soft water from the left-hand pump, warm water from the kettle.

“Don’t waste none of it!” warned Grandma. “Martha and Nellie and the boys will want a lick before supper.”

She dried her face and hands on the clean, coarse roller towel, and then with great bumping and thumping her trunk (Caroline’s trunk!) was brought into the kitchen, and she met Caroline’s cousins, who had served as baggage smashers. Of course she knew them at once from their mother’s description. The tallest one, with the direct gray eyes like Aunt Martha’s and the cowlick, was Ralph, and the thin brown one with the big mouth was Dickie, and the red-head who grinned at her engagingly was Neil. Ralph wore long pants and shirt of khaki and heavy shoes and stockings, but Dickie and Neil were barelegged in sneakers, and their old shirts and knickers, like their hands, might have been cleaner. But they looked nice boys, and even if they hadn’t been, Jacqueline wasn’t in the least afraid of boys.

She shook hands all round, and then Nellie wished her to look at Annie, the wonderful baby. Off the kitchen was a little bedroom, which had been Grandma’s for years and years, and here in a little crib beside Grandma’s bed with its white dimity cover, sat Annie. She was a blue-eyed, serious person, in faded pink rompers, and she divided her attention between a string of empty spools and her own toes. Jacqueline felt sorry for her. Poor baby, with so little to play with! She sat down beside her and dangled the spools before her eyes. Then the serious Annie suddenly gurgled and clutched at them and clapped her hands and laughed, with adorable dimplings. She was more fun than a kitten. No, she wasn’t like a kitten. With her firm little body she was much more like a wriggling, happy, affectionate small puppy.

“Bring her along, Caroline,” called Grandma, from the kitchen. “Supper’s ready.”

Jacqueline didn’t know much about babies, but she wouldn’t admit her ignorance, especially before Nellie. She picked Annie up in her arms, and holding her tight—for to drop her would be more dreadful even than to drop a puppy—she followed Nellie to the supper table.

Jacqueline had rather expected that the Conways, being poor people, would eat in the kitchen, but she found the table laid in the big square room off the kitchen that looked into both the side-yard and the lilac bushes at the front of the house. It was a shabby room, with faded brown wall-paper and a painted floor. There was a well-worn couch in one corner, a wicker armchair, and a couple of rockers, a sewing machine by the side-window, and a whatnot in the farthest corner, filled with school books and farm papers. The table was spread with a checkered red and white cloth, and the dishes were of three or four different patterns. The silver was plated, and the glasses were thick. But the table was neatly set, Jacqueline realized, and everything was spotlessly clean.

Annie sat in a highchair beside Aunt Martha, and Freddie sat on a hassock placed on a chair at Grandma’s right hand. Jacqueline sat between Grandma and Dickie. It was Aunt Martha, of course, who brought in the supper. Such a supper Jacqueline had never heard tell of—a huge shortcake, made of two layers of biscuit-dough that must have been baked in the grandfather of all drip pans. Luscious red strawberries, crushed to a pulp and mixed with sugar, were between the layers and oozed their richness, as Aunt Martha cut great squares for her hungry family. Besides the shortcake there was milk for the children, and tea in thin white cups, adorned with jocund green dragons, for Grandma and Aunt Martha. That was all the supper.

Jacqueline looked questioningly round her. Was there nothing else to begin with—or to end with? But her cousins (Caroline’s cousins!) were wading into the shortcake, as if it were all that they asked or expected. She took a bite—a large one. Oh, but she found it good!

She looked sidewise at Dickie, and Dickie, with his mouth full, looked at her. She nodded toward the juicy piece of shortcake on the platter that was all ready and waiting for the first child who should ask for a second helping.

“Bet you I’ll beat you to it,” murmured Jacqueline. Instinct told her that invasions of decorum had best not be shouted aloud in Aunt Martha’s presence.

“G’on!” said Dickie softly.

CHAPTER XIII
“CALL ME JACKIE!”

Strawberry shortcake is a bond in common. By the time that supper was over Jacqueline was no longer a stranger to Caroline’s cousins, and when she had shared with them the rather squashy chocolates that still survived in her pockets, they were friends.

“I wish you’d call me Jackie,” she told them. “That’s what they always called me at school.”

“I don’t take much stock in nicknames,” said Aunt Martha. She had such an uncanny way of always being there, although you couldn’t say she snooped.

“I’d feel more at home if you called me Jackie,” Jacqueline suggested artfully.

To that plea Aunt Martha yielded, as Jacqueline had guessed she would.

“All right, then—Jackie. Now you can unpack your trunk. That’ll be chore enough for to-night.”

“But after this Jackie can do the dishes,” suggested Neil teazingly, “because she’s a girl.”

“No, sir,” said Aunt Martha promptly, “you can keep right on doing your share of dishes, because you’re a boy.”

Unpacking the trunk was really chore enough, Jacqueline decided, before she was through. To take even a steamer-trunk up the steep stairs that led from the kitchen was impossible. All Caroline’s possessions had to go in armsful (Jacqueline’s arms!) to the room that she was to share with Nellie.

It was a square room—Nellie thought it a large room—with a bricked up fireplace and a narrow white wood mantel, on which were a china dog, with a basket of matches in his mouth, and a little figure of a boy in a short tunic, kneeling at his prayers. On the walls was a paper strewn with baskets of roses. Unfortunately the paper had been hung upside down, which gave the room a somewhat rakish atmosphere. There were only two pictures, an engraving of a dog, after Landseer, and a resigned-looking Evangeline seated beside a grave. The floor was covered with matting, and there were rag rugs over the thinnest places where the boards showed through. The bed was high and old-fashioned, with a chintz valance. The bureau and the washstand were of black walnut, with marble tops. The chairs were of painted wood, with slatted backs.

Jacqueline could claim for her own two drawers of the bureau, and most of the hooks in the shallow closet, and as no one offered to arrange her things for her, she arranged them herself and took a certain pride in doing so. Only there were so few things in Caroline’s battered trunk; socks for summer and stockings for winter, faded and much darned; undergarments, thinned with frequent washing and set with neat patches; skimpy-looking gingham dresses; one dress of wool that had been dyed; a winter coat, with a collar of worn velvet.

“Try on that coat, Jackie,” bade Aunt Martha, as she turned from straining the milk.

Jacqueline tried it on, and felt that she looked indeed the part of poor child. Such a shabby, outgrown little coat it was. Wasn’t she glad that she was only playing at being Caroline?

“Tut, tut!” clucked Aunt Martha, and frowned. “You must have had that coat at least two seasons. Well, Nellie will grow to it in another year, and we’ve got to get you a new coat for winter, somehow. There’s an old ulster of mine perhaps I could dye and cut over for you. But winter’s some ways off, and we won’t go crossing bridges till we get to ’em.”

Near the bottom of the trunk Jacqueline discovered three pairs of Peggy Janes—overalls such as Aunt Edie would have shrieked aloud to see her wear. She made up her mind to wear them, here at the farm. Maybe she would go barefoot, too—or at least barelegged and in sneakers, like Dickie and Neil.

In the last armful that Jacqueline carried upstairs was a box of Japanese lacquer, tied with an old hair-ribbon. Jacqueline had the curiosity to open it when she was in her room and Nellie’s. Then she wished that she hadn’t. She felt as if she had walked into a room without knocking. There were in the box a few letters, tied up with a bit of worsted, and slipped upon the worsted, and secured with a knot, was a plain gold ring. There were two little pins—not a child’s pins—and a slender chain of gold beads. There was a little pair of scissors, and a bag of crocheted purple silk, which held two spools of fine cotton. There was a tiny fine handkerchief, with the letter C half finished in the corner, and the threaded needle stuck in the place, just as some one had left it. Last of all, wrapped in a piece of white tissue paper, was a small photograph of a lady with gentle eyes and a sweet mouth, like Caroline’s.

Very soberly Jacqueline put back everything as she had found it, and tied up the box, and hid it away in the back of the drawer.

“Those were Caroline’s mother’s things,” she thought, “and she’s dead. I won’t touch ’em again, ever.”

By now it was dusky in the little room, as the long June day came to an end. Aunt Martha trudged up the stair, with a well-trimmed oil lamp in her hand. Behind her lagged Freddie and Nellie.

“I’ll get ’em to bed,” she told Jacqueline. “Freddie sleeps in my room, just across the hall. You go sit in the hammock with the boys. By the time I’m through up here the water will be ready for you to have a bath, and I guess after that long hot journey, you’ll be ready for it.”

So Jacqueline sat out in the shabby hammock under the poplars, in the warm, sweet dusk, and saw the great June stars come out and the distant mountains subside into rims of inky blackness round the silent meadows. She and Neil and Dickie poked and crowded each other fraternally, and Dickie boasted about his hunting trips on the mountain with Ralph, and Jacqueline raged inwardly because, in her part of Caroline, she couldn’t cap his stories with her account of the Yosemite.

At last Aunt Martha called her into the kitchen. There were two kettles on the oil stove, and a big bath towel, worn rather thin, lay over the back of a chair.

“There’s the washroom,” Aunt Martha told Jacqueline, and nodded toward a door at the farther end of the kitchen.

Jacqueline went in. Here were no nickel faucets and no porcelain bath, but just a stationary tub of shiny zinc, which drained into a pipe that led out of doors. A square, unglazed window, high in the wall, admitted the light from the kitchen, and the heat.

“Oh, what a funny bath!” cried Jacqueline.

“’Tisn’t much like what you’re used to in the city,” said Aunt Martha, as she bustled in with a kettle of steaming water. “But I tell you it seems like Heaven not to have to lug water both ways. I guess if them that say ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ had had to winter it once in New England with four young ones, they’d have said cleanliness was next thing to martyrdom.”

Two kettles full of hot water went into the tub, and a bucket of cold water that Jacqueline pumped.

“By Saturday night I guess you can do for yourself, same as Neil,” Aunt Martha told her approvingly.

Last of all, into the zinc tub one-third full of warm water, went Jacqueline, and soaped and splashed and chuckled and enjoyed herself. A funny bath, indeed! If she had to do it all her life, horrible! But just for two or three days—why, it was a lark.

It was not such a lark though, scrubbing that zinc tub afterward, with a rag and warm water and “Clean-o.” She hadn’t thought of doing it, till Aunt Martha came in and pointed out that cleaning the tub after you used it had something to do with the Golden Rule.

“I know you won’t need to be told twice,” said Aunt Martha.

“I guess I won’t be here to be told twice,” Jacqueline thought resentfully as she scrubbed.

She came out of the washroom, glowing and glowering, in Caroline’s nightgown and faded kimono and worn bedshoes.

“You can brush your teeth upstairs,” said Aunt Martha, who seemed to find endless last tasks to do in that kitchen, before she should join Grandma with the darning basket, under the big, hot lamp in the dining room. “The hard water for your teeth is in the little pitcher on the washstand.”

“I—I——” Jacqueline faced the same difficulty that at about this hour presented itself to Caroline. “You see—I haven’t got the toothbrush I had on the train. I must have—lost it.”

“Tut, tut!” Aunt Martha clucked again. Then she took heart. “It might have been worse. Better lose your toothbrush than your sweater or your head, for that matter. You’ll have to buy you a new one to-morrow. Lucky you didn’t spend that half-dollar on foolishness. I’ll mix some cooking salt and warm water, and you just rinse your mouth out good. It’s the best we can do for now.”

Left to herself, Jacqueline would probably have “forgotten” to use the tepid salt and water. But she was not left to herself. Aunt Martha went upstairs with her, and stood over her till the mouthwash was properly and thoroughly applied. Then she tucked her into bed beside Nellie, who grunted sleepily and grudgingly moved over to give the newcomer room.

Having tucked Jacqueline in, Aunt Martha kissed her in a businesslike and somewhat absent-minded way.

“Have a good sleep,” she bade, and took the lamp, and went creaking down the stair.

Jacqueline lay in the dark, beneath the sheet, in the room that was warm and breathless. She thought of the zinc tub that she had had to scrub, and the dishes that she should have to wash, and of Aunt Martha, who seemed to have as many rules and standards as if she had dressed in silk and ridden in a limousine, like Great-aunt Eunice.

“I don’t like it here,” thought Jacqueline. “First thing in the morning I’ll hunt up those Gildersleeves.”

Nellie beside her turned sleepily and cooed:

“That you, Jackie?”

“Sure!”

“Nice Jackie—kiss me goo’ night!”

Jacqueline did so. What a hot little thing Nellie was—but how cunning! That funny baby, too, was a darling, and Freddie, who gurgled when you tickled him. Neil had promised to show her a woodchuck’s hole in the morning, and Dickie had boasted about his rabbits.

“It might be worse,” Jacqueline reconsidered, “and if I back out, I’ll never get another chance to wear Peggy Janes, and cut on behind carts, and be poor and rowdy. I guess now I’m in, I’d better stick it out for a day or two.”

CHAPTER XIV
THE END OF A PERFECT DAY

When Caroline woke in the morning, she was surprised to find herself still in the green and golden room with the bookshelves. She had rather expected to find that the house with the dim, cool rooms, and the songful piano, the white and nickel bath and the ladies (not her relatives!) who were so kind and friendly, were all alike the fancies of a dream, and that she was back in Cousin Delia’s close little stuffy house, with the smell of frizzled breakfast ham wafting up from the kitchen, and the eldest baby clamoring to be dressed at once.

But the room, she found, was real, and the bath was real. She could almost believe that she was really Jacqueline. She only wished she were!

She dressed herself in the henna-colored frock, and she dressed Mildred very carefully, in a little white muslin with pink sprays, most becoming to Mildred’s blond beauty. Then she opened her bed to air, and sat down by the window, where she could watch the mountain. In the morning light it was quite different from the mountain of yesterday afternoon. The green of the trees and the red of the exposed sandstone were very sharp in the strong sunlight, and gave the huge pile a spick and span look, as if it had made itself fine for the summer day.

She had put on the little watch which was Jacqueline’s, though it seemed almost too nice to wear every day, and the little watch said that it was half past eight, when there came a knock at the door. Caroline flew to open it, and there stood Aunt Eunice, in a cool gray and white lawn.

“Good morning, Aunt Eunice!” cried Caroline. “Oh, how nice you look!”

She reflected then that perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything so personal, but Aunt Eunice didn’t at all mind. Instead she smiled one of her shining smiles, and there even came a little fleck of pink into her soft old cheeks. She bent to kiss Caroline, and suddenly, because she just couldn’t help it, Caroline put her arms round Aunt Eunice and hugged her, and Aunt Eunice hugged her back. You don’t know how good that seemed to Caroline. There had been no one to hug her since her mother died. Cousin Delia was a very busy woman, and then, too, alongside the four babies, Caroline doubtless seemed to her quite grown up, and too old to need cuddling.

Hand in hand Aunt Eunice and Caroline went down the long curved stair and through the stately hall into the dining room. Cousin Penelope was already there and the glass coffee machine, which Caroline found as fascinating as any mechanical toy, was distilling an amber-hued, fragrant liquid. They sat down at once to another of those well-ordered meals that filled Caroline with amazement—almost with awe. She hadn’t known that food could be so good.

There were great red strawberries, which still wore their green elf caps, and little glass dishes of powdered sugar, into which you dipped the berries daintily, after a swift glance to see how Cousin Penelope did it. Then there were bowls of crisp cereal, with rich cream, and bacon, so thin and so deftly cooked that it crumbled into savory slivers under your fork. There were thin slices of brown toast, piping hot, and there were wee muffins of bran, which came to the table in a silver dish, wrapped cozily in a fine white napkin. There were little balls of fresh butter, and in a bewitching jar, shaped like a beehive, there was strained honey. All the milk to drink, too, that one could want. And would Jacqueline like an egg for her breakfast?

“Thank you, no, please,” murmured Jacqueline’s understudy, and then, remembering the cold egg that she had lately eaten from the shoe box, she added: “I—I’m not extra fond of eggs.”

“Neither am I,” Cousin Penelope said heartily.

Funny, thought Caroline, that Cousin Penelope should be so pleased at every resemblance between them, but very nice of her. In time she thought she should like Cousin Penelope, though never so much as she loved Aunt Eunice.

After breakfast Aunt Eunice asked Caroline to come walk with her in the garden, and said, yes, she could bring Mildred. So Mildred, in her pink-sprayed frock and white bonnet, and Aunt Eunice and Caroline walked soberly in the shadiest parts of the garden. Aunt Eunice wore a broad hat, tied under her chin with wide streamers of lawn. She paused once to give directions to Frank, who was gardener as well as chauffeur, and much more human in khaki overalls than Caroline had thought him the day before in his imposing uniform.

Aunt Eunice showed Caroline all the special beauties of the garden—her new rosebushes and her old thrifty plot of perennials, the pear trees that later would furnish them fruit more delicious, Aunt Eunice believed, than any they could buy in the shops, and the row of gooseberry bushes, where the berries already were setting in tiny, reddish furry blobs.

At the farther side of the garden they sat down in a little rustic summer house, covered with woodbine. Caroline gazed with all her eyes at the scene before her—the garden with its bright flowers of early summer, blues and pinks and strong yellows, and its fruit trees, with gray-lined leaves of glossy green, its smooth white walks and dark edges of box, and beyond the garden the old white house, with its clustered chimnies, the elms that shaded it, the mountain far beyond, the blue sky over all. She thought it as breathlessly, chokingly lovely in its color and clear outline as the loveliest of the pictures in her room.

But Aunt Eunice looked nearer home. She took up Mildred, and carefully examined her clothes.

“What delicate fine stitches!” she said. “Did you make this dress yourself, Jacqueline?”

“No, Aunt Eunice. I can’t sew as well as that.” Indeed, thought Caroline with pride, not many people could sew as nicely as her mother, who had made that precious wardrobe of Mildred’s, every stitch.

“Do you like to sew?” went on Aunt Eunice, with a little, mysterious smile.

“Oh, yes,” said Caroline, truthfully.

There had been long hours in her life, when school was over and Mother away giving music lessons, when she must either run the streets or amuse herself in their room. Mother had beguiled her with handiwork to choose the room, and not the street. Caroline sewed really rather better than most little girls of her age, and she liked to sew. She wished that Aunt Eunice could see the pair of rompers she had made, all alone, for Cousin Delia’s youngest baby.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Aunt Eunice. “I’ll get out some pretty silk pieces, and you and I will make this dolly some new dresses. It’s years and years since I’ve had a doll to sew for. Would you like that, Jacqueline?”

Caroline smiled and patted Aunt Eunice’s plump white hand.

“I’d just love it, Aunt Eunice. Can we begin to-day? I don’t want to lose any time.”

Indeed she didn’t, the poor little impostor! She wanted to squeeze all that she could into every moment that she passed in this dream-house. For the moments, as she knew, might already be numbered.

But there was no doll’s dressmaking that morning, for just then Sallie came briskly through the garden with a message. Miss Jacqueline’s trunk had been sent up, and Miss Penelope wished her to come at once and see about unpacking.

Up in the golden green room, all fresh and ordered for the day, Caroline looked helplessly at the big trunk that was Jacqueline’s. When she had got the key from Jacqueline’s vanity bag, and Sallie had opened the trunk, and she saw that it opened like a closet, and glimpsed the frocks all hung on frames, she looked more helpless still. She was thankful when Cousin Penelope took charge of things.

“Sit down, Jacqueline,” Cousin Penelope bade with decision. “Sallie will unpack, and I’ll look things over. It’s the quickest way for me to find out what you have and what you haven’t, and if you are like most children, I shall need to know.”

So Caroline sat down in the rocker, with Mildred on her knee, and in an aloof, cool manner watched the taking out of what seemed to her the princess-like wardrobe that had been wished upon her. There were frocks of organdie and crêpe de chine, of muslin and fine gingham. There were jumpers of tricotine and of jersey, and delicate little frilled blouses of silk. (Privately Caroline wondered where the everyday frocks could be!) There were a dozen pairs of shoes and slippers and boots and sandals, all on nice little beribboned trees. There were little coats and sweaters of many colors and all sorts of texture. There were stacks of filmy undergarments, and lapsful of silken socks. There were garters and hair-ribbons and handkerchiefs and silk gloves. There was a lovely little blue leather writing-case, and a jewel-case, and a camera.

Everything in the trunk Caroline, sitting gravely silent, admired with all her heart, except the riding suit. When she saw the little white breeches and the sleeveless brown coat unfolded, her heart sank within her.

“Oh, Cousin Penelope!” she cried in despair. “Have I got to ride horseback?”

She was almost in tears. She had never been on a horse in her life. If they put her on one, they’d know in a minute she wasn’t Jacqueline, and the piano and the Polish lady would be lost to her forever.

Cousin Penelope came to her side. For the first time Caroline saw her protective and almost tender. She understood it all, did Penelope. That horsy Amazon, Edith Delane, had forced that sensitive, timid little girl, who was all Gildersleeve, as any one could see, into riding horseback and doing the athletic feats to which the Delane woman had referred in her letters. Well, the Delane woman was hundreds of miles away, and Penelope was here in charge.

“We arranged for a saddle-horse, as your aunt wished,” she told Caroline. “But you are not going to ride at all, my dear, unless you wish to.”

So the horrid specter of a ramping steed was laid at rest, and Caroline went happily through the hours of the day that was brimful of wonders. She played for an hour on the piano. She ate a luncheon that seemed to her grander than most dinners. Then she sat with Aunt Eunice in Aunt Eunice’s room, which was furnished with old dark pieces of polished wood, with glass knobs on the drawers. Aunt Eunice had the dearest of work tables, all unexpected drawers and cubbies, and she had a piecebox full of pretties that she could turn into trifles for bazaars—bits of silk and satin, velvet and brocade, quarter-yards of wide figured ribbon, bits of lace and silver tissue, flowers of silk.

Together Aunt Eunice and Caroline planned a sumptuous party frock for Mildred, and they even cut it out and gave her a first fitting, which Mildred endured with more patience than some young ladies display on such occasions.

They did not get beyond the fitting, though, for Cousin Penelope came strolling in, to say that Jacqueline had better dress now. They must be going along to Madame Woleski’s.

“Just stop at Miss Crevey’s, will you, and get me some thread,” bade Aunt Eunice. “I shall need eighty cotton and a spool of sixty, if Jacqueline and I are going into the dressmaking business.”

It seemed to Caroline hardly necessary to change her frock. She thought the henna-colored crêpe good enough for almost any occasion. But of course she did not argue with Cousin Penelope. She was terribly afraid lest she might make herself too fine, but she took Cousin Penelope as a guide, just as she did at the table, and she decided that if Cousin Penelope wore a cool muslin, she would wear muslin, too. So she put on a pretty muslin, with small yellow roses on a white ground and yellow flowers of organdie at the ribbon girdle. Her socks were of white silk and her sandals of white kid. From the hatbox she selected a white leghorn, with stalks of yellow wheat and some wee blue flowers round the crown.

She was in two minds about opening the jewel-case. She had the key in Jacqueline’s vanity bag, tied fast to the trunk key, but it seemed rather horrid to make free with Jacqueline’s jewelry. Still if she didn’t wear any, people might suspect she wasn’t Jacqueline. So she unlocked the leather case, and marveled at all the pretty pins and chains that she found laid in the little velvet lined drawers. She selected a chain of queer small beads, with flecks of yellow and blue and green in them that would go nicely with the colors in her dress and her hat.

It seemed that she had by chance selected very wisely, for when Cousin Penelope came to look her over, she fairly flushed with pleasure.

“So you put on the beads I sent you,” she cried. “That’s a very pretty tribute, Jacqueline.”

“I—I like them,” stammered Caroline.

“So do I!” said Cousin Penelope, quite merrily. “How many things we have in common!”

This made Caroline feel at home with Cousin Penelope, and they chattered together, quite volubly for two people so shy and self-contained, while they drove through Longmeadow Street to Madame Woleski’s.

The house that the Polish lady had taken for the summer was quite at the farther end of the Street, right under the shadow of the mountain. It was a little, irregular house which had been an artist’s. The living room had a big window on the north side, and the piano was drawn across it. The furniture was old and dingy, and nothing matched with anything else, thought Caroline. There were dark, rich-looking small rugs on the floor, and on the walls were unframed sketches, which seemed to Caroline to look like not much of anything, unless it were the drawings that Cousin Delia’s eldest baby made. But Caroline didn’t know as much about pictures as she knew about music.

Madame Woleski was thin and dark, with an intense face and untidy hair, and long, nervous hands. She smiled at Caroline vaguely and sent her to play in the garden, while she talked with Cousin Penelope.

Caroline didn’t like the garden. She was afraid of hurting Jacqueline’s pretty clothes. But she found a clean bench where she could sit in safety, and then along came a great fluffy cat, the color of an orange, and he was friendly, after a condescending fashion, so she was able to get through the time until she was called into the house.

Madame Woleski wanted Caroline to play for her, and Caroline did so, quite simply. Mother had taught her long ago that when you were asked to play, you either declined with all courtesy, or you sat down and played. There was no excuse for shilly-shallying and waiting to be urged.

Caroline played, and Madame listened, and when the playing was over, a maid brought in a silver tea-service, and they had some crumbly dark fruit cookies, and fragrant strong tea, and tiny slim glasses of cordial. Caroline of course only had cookies. She said, no thanks! to the tea and the cordial, and Madame smiled at her, and offered her some crystallized fruit in a silver box.

“Next time you come, I have milk for you to drink, little one,” she said. “Because you come again. But before you come, you do every day two hours thees exercise.”

She went herself to the piano and showed what “thees exercise” should be, and she told Caroline she might come and play for her in the morning, three days later.

Then the call was ended, and Caroline and Cousin Penelope were rolling away in the limousine from the funny little house, while Madame Woleski, with the orange cat carelessly tucked under her arm, like a piece of fur, nodded them a good-by from her sunken doorstone.

“My dear!” said Cousin Penelope, with real enthusiasm. “Do you realize that you are now a pupil of Woleski’s?”

Caroline nodded solemnly. She was too happy to chatter as she had done on the way to the little house. But she was no happier than Cousin Penelope. For Penelope had loved her cousin, Jack Gildersleeve, and now she had his child, who in spite of everything was like her, here beside her in the car, and she was going to give her what her coarse and stupid Delane relatives, with all their wealth, had failed to give her—the music that she loved and craved!

So completely was Penelope carried away with her vision of Jacqueline some day a great musician, and turning to her—not to the Delanes!—for understanding and sympathy, that they had driven past the shops before she realized it. Then she smiled at her own preoccupation, and told Frank to turn back.

There were only four shops on Longmeadow Street. They stood in the very center of the village, in the shadow of the Orthodox church, and just across the street from the little inn. There was a general store, and the Post Office, where you bought hardware and sundries, and a meat market, which was open only twice a week, and Miss Crevey’s little shop, where you could buy talcum and tape, peppermints and pins, and altogether the funniest mixture of drygoods and druggist’s supplies, confectionery and notions that ever was seen outside the shop that the old sheep kept in the Looking Glass Country.

“Eighty cotton and sixty cotton,” said Cousin Penelope, as she and Caroline, in their cool pretty frocks, stepped out of the limousine. “I’ll get a cube of black pins, too, and some laces for my walking shoes. One ought to encourage the little local shops—they’re a great convenience.”

Caroline smiled, but not at Cousin Penelope’s words. She was smiling at the world. Because she had on a party frock, and was going home to dinner with dear Aunt Eunice, and she was a pupil of Woleski’s.

Smilingly, Caroline tripped up the steps at Cousin Penelope’s side, and into the little crowded shop, and then the smile left her face just the way figures leave a slate when you draw a wet sponge across it. For she saw two children standing at the counter, where the cheap candies were displayed. One was a boy in old knickers and a shabby shirt, the other was a girl in faded Peggy Janes, and Caroline had recognized those Peggy Janes and knew what was coming, even before the girl turned her bobbed brown head and showed the face of Jacqueline Gildersleeve.

CHAPTER XV
TWO PENNIES TO SPEND

Jacqueline waked early on her first morning at the Conway farm. With a rooster crowing under your window, you need no alarm clock, and with a cozy six-year-old at your side, inclined to snuggle on a warm morning, you have no inducements to lie abed.

So Jacqueline jumped up and dressed herself. She put on the Peggy Janes that she had marked with approval the night before, and she slipped her bare feet into Caroline’s old sneakers. She washed her face and hands at the marble-topped washstand. The washbasin had a green landscape in the bottom, very pleasant to look at through the clear water, but the pitcher belonged to a different set and was ornamented with purple bands.

Nellie chattered in a lively manner all through the hasty dressing process, mostly about some new kittens and a rooster named General Pershing. She dressed herself very handily, but she didn’t scorn Jacqueline’s help when it came to the back buttons of her underwaist and overalls.

Early as the children were, they found, when they climbed down the funny steep stairs into the kitchen, that Grandma and Aunt Martha and the babies were up before them.

“That’s a nice rig for the country, Jackie,” Aunt Martha said approvingly, as she spied the Peggy Janes. “I’m glad you didn’t bring any starched up city notions to the farm. There’s time and place for everything, of course,” she added tolerantly, “but high heeled shoes and frilly dresses don’t go with the soil.”

Freddie had remembered Jacqueline over night, perhaps because of the piece of shapeless chocolate that she had popped into his mouth. He threw himself upon her with gurgles of greeting.

“He takes to you all right,” said Grandma, as she paused with a pan of biscuits in her hand, midway from stove to table. “I wonder now if a smart girl like you couldn’t take it on herself to dress him mornings. Every minute counts this time o’ day, and your Aunt Martha has her hands full.”

“Sure I will,” Jacqueline promised airily. She was promising only for a few days—just as few as she chose to make them. And she really did like Freddie. He was more fun than a puppy dog.

“Just pump that pitcher full of water, Jackie, and fill the glasses at the table,” Aunt Martha struck in briskly. “Ring the bell, Nellie. Breakfast’s about ready.”

Nellie sprang on a chair, and took down a big dinner bell from the shelf above the stove. But she didn’t ring it at the foot of the stairs to rouse her sleepy brothers—oh, no! She went out on the doorstone in the soft clear morning air, and she clanged that bell as if all Longmeadow Street were burning up.

Very quickly the three boys came scuffling in from the barn and sheds where they had been doing the first chores of the day. They washed hurriedly at the sink—so hurriedly that Aunt Martha sent Neil back to do it all over again. Then they sat down to breakfast in the shabby, homely dining room, that wasn’t a bit like the rural interiors that Jacqueline had seen on the stage and in the movies.

There were no frills about that breakfast any more than there had been about the supper. On the table was a big plate of hot raised biscuits, fluffy and light, and a platter of freshly cooked hash, meat and potatoes (more potatoes than meat!) warmed on the stove in what Aunt Martha called a “spider,” crisp and brown on the outside, soft and savory within. There was milk for the children, and coffee in a shiny tin pot for Aunt Martha and Grandma. Freddie and Annie had porridge. Aunt Martha fed Annie spoonsful with one hand, and ate her own breakfast with the other.

Both at Buena Vista and at school, fried things and hot breads had been considered unhygienic. Being forbidden, they had always seemed to Jacqueline desirable. She ate two helpings of hash and three biscuits and a half. She wanted to eat four, the same as Dickie did, but she had to give up, beaten. She could chew still, but she couldn’t swallow.

“Now you and Nellie see how nice you can clear the table and wash the dishes, and then put the dining room to rights,” said Aunt Martha, as if she asked the most natural thing in the world. “Grandma’ll be here to oversee. I’ve got to go down to the ten acre, and see if that Polack is on the job, or just getting over the christening party they had last night at the Corners.”

Aunt Martha tied on a straw hat, nodded to her family, and went her competent way. The boys went, too, quite like men of business. In these days of high wages, when Polish farm-hands expected fifty cents an hour, you either let your youngsters work in the fields, or closed up shop and went “on the town,” Grandma told Jacqueline, as one who endured what could not be cured. Ralph was as good as a man on the place, she added proudly. He’d be weeding onions now until the sun got too hot. Dickie and Neil would be working in the vegetable garden, which supplied the family table and a few good paying customers on Longmeadow Street.

“They’ll be hungry as horses by noon,” said Grandma. “I guess I’ll flax round and stir ’em up some gingerbread.”

Grandma seemed chief cook of the establishment. Already she had baked a batch of bread since she got up, and had dried-apple pies to pop into the oven, and a piece of meat—to Jacqueline it looked mostly bone and gristle—simmering on the back of the stove, lest it spoil in the hot weather. She now mixed gingerbread, as spry as you please, and meantime gave directions about putting Annie outside in the baby pen, and taking the table-leavings to the hens, and setting another kettle of hot water to boil.

“You’ll need some rinsing water or your dishes will be streaked,” she told Jacqueline. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, even dishes, and it’s just as easy to do it right as wrong.” Jacqueline didn’t mind, for one day only. She thought dish washing rather a game. She and Nellie brought the things out from the dining room.

“Take the tray,” said Grandma, “and bring a lot at a time. Always made your head save your heels.”

Then they rinsed the milky glasses, and they scraped the plates. Jacqueline was going to add to the scraps for the hens the bit of hash that was on the platter, but Grandma stopped her with a gesture of positive horror.

“Mercy, child! Don’t throw away good clean victuals, even if the war is over. Put it in that clean little cracked dish. It’ll warm up nice and tasty for somebody’s supper. The butter goes in that stone jar. Let those biscuits cool before you put ’em into the bread box. Never shut up hot bread in a close box, or it’ll spoil on you.”

What a lot of things to remember, thought Jacqueline! This was more exciting than mental arithmetic.

She washed the dishes just as Grandma told her, and Nellie wiped them painstakingly. First they did the glasses, then “the silver”—poor plated ware that it was!

“Be sure to get the tines of the forks clean,” cautioned Grandma. “And remember, when we have eggs, not to plump your silver and your dishes into hot water, or you’ll cook the egg right to ’em. Wash eggy things first in cold water, always.” After the silver, came the plates and the cups, and last of all “the calicoes,” as Grandma called the cooking dishes. Then the dish pan must be scalded, and the dish towels set to boil upon the stove, and while they were boiling, Jacqueline brushed up the dining room, rather an amateurish job, but Grandma said she took hold handily. Then Jacqueline and Nellie, each with a big square of soft cloth, dusted the dining room furniture, and last of all, they hung their dish towels out in the warm sun to dry.

By that time Jacqueline had had enough of housework. She was ready to say so, and to quit right then and there. But Grandma said:

“You’re a big help, Jackie. Your aunt’s awful busy outside, and I’m not as quick on my feet as I was. Some days it seems like I’d never get through step-stepping.”

Well, when a little old lady says a thing like that to you, of course you can’t flop down on the dining-room couch with a story paper and leave her to work all alone. So while Nellie kept an eye on Freddie and Annie, Jacqueline went upstairs with Grandma and did the chamber work and had her first lesson in bed-making. As there were four beds, besides Freddie’s crib, she had had quite a lot of practice by the time they finished.

“Make a handsome bed, you’ll get a handsome husband, they used to tell me when I was a girl,” chuckled Grandma. “You want to do your best, Jackie, unless you aim to be one o’ these new women that get along without men folks.”

After the beds were made, Jacqueline and Nellie each had a piece of gingerbread, and they took two big pieces for Dickie and Neil, and went out to them in the garden. It was quite a big garden, with poles of beans and rows of peas, trained up on dry bushes, tomato plants and cucumber vines, beets and lettuce, squash and pumpkins. But there were no onions. You got onions by the peck out of the great fields that spread all round the farm. For the Conways, like their neighbors, put all their land into onions, and on the price of onions their fortunes hung.

They dined at noon at the Conway farm, and dinner was all of cold things, so as not to heat the kitchen in the middle of the day. There was ready cooked cereal, and a pitcher of milk. There were great slices of home-made bread, with home-made plum jam. (Jacqueline had gone down with Grandma into the deep cold cellar where the food was kept, and she had seen the shelves where the jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables lived. Next time she could go down herself and save Grandma’s old legs.) There was cottage cheese, and lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. There was gingerbread—all the gingerbread that any one could wish to eat.

After the dinner dishes were cleared away and left to be washed at night when it was cooler, Aunt Martha and Grandma sat down to sew and mend for their big family.

“We’ll have to count on you to do your own mending,” Aunt Martha told Jacqueline. “But you just run out to the barn now, and play.”

Jacqueline went. She wanted to see those kittens. She also wanted to try some hazardous stunts that she had thought up, as soon as she had seen the beams and ladders in the barn. Neil and Nellie came with her, and Dickie presently joined them. Of course Dickie could do acrobatic feats that none of them could equal. But Jacqueline felt she did pretty well at balancing on her hands for the first time, and she could put her ankle behind her neck as well as any of them.

She thought they had been playing only the least little while, but really it was in the middle of the afternoon when the big bell rang. They scampered at once to the house. That was the law of the farm: always run when you hear the bell, or you may miss something you wouldn’t like to miss.

Aunt Martha was on the doorstone, talking to a bearded man in a muddy Ford.

“Hurry up!” she called, as soon as the children came within earshot. “Here’s Mr. Griswold driving up to town and he has room for two. Get your purse, Jackie. Here’s a chance to buy you that toothbrush. Neil, you can go with her and show her the way home. You’ll have to hoof it back, unless you find somebody coming down to the Meadows that will give you a lift.”

Adventure beckoned! Jacqueline thought nothing of the walk through the dust in the heat. She flew upstairs and got Caroline’s shabby purse, and flew down again. Perhaps where they were going, she could get a soda, one for herself and one, of course, for Neil.

Aunt Martha must have read her thoughts.

“Now don’t you go wasting that money,” she ordered. “You ought to get you a brush for fifteen cents at Miss Crevey’s. You bring back thirty-five cents.”

“Oh, Aunt Martha!” protested Jacqueline.

“Don’t you forget what I say.” Aunt Martha fixed Jacqueline with gray eyes that looked her through and through. “Jump in now. Mr. Griswold’s waiting.”

Jacqueline didn’t stop to argue. She jumped in, and Neil jumped in beside her, and away they rattled with the friendly neighboring farmer, through the hot-smelling fields of green onions. As they rattled along, a heartening thought came to Jacqueline. She had fifty cents in her purse, and two pennies. Aunt Martha had said nothing about the pennies. She could spend them. She didn’t quite know what you could get for two cents, that was good, but there must be something.

Mr. Griswold put down his little passengers at the Orthodox church in Longmeadow Street. He was going on to Northford himself to get a young pig in a crate.

“Now show me the shop,” Jacqueline bade Neil. She had taken command of him, much as she had taken command of Caroline. “And I’ve got two pennies to spend as I please.”

“Gee!” said Neil. “That’s great.”

He meant it, too. Jacqueline looked at him in wonder. She counted her spending money usually, when she troubled herself to count it at all, in dimes and quarters, never in copper pennies.

They went into Miss Crevey’s shop. A funny little shop Jacqueline thought it, and she thought Miss Crevey with her false front, and her ill-fitted false teeth, and her alpaca sleeves, was like a character in a story book. They got the toothbrush readily enough—that part of the shopping was simple and uninteresting. But to spend the precious two pennies was different. There was such a choice of things for a penny—a tiny glass measure of hard red and white candies—or a stick of gum—or two large white peppermints—or a stick of striped candy. Jacqueline wanted the gum very much, for at home she had never been allowed to chew it. But Neil, she could see, hungered for a dreadful confection of molasses, imperfectly covered with chocolate.

“We’ll get both,” suggested Jacqueline.

“Well—you see——” Neil hesitated. “If we get all those little jiggers for a penny, we’ll have something to take home to the kids.”

Jacqueline looked at him and slowly reddened. She hadn’t thought of the kids. Indeed she had thought two pennies hardly big enough to divide between two children, let alone five. But Neil had thought of the younger ones.

“We’ll have that chocolate stick, please,” Jacqueline told Miss Crevey with sudden generous resolve, “and a glass dingus of the little jigs. After all, I don’t care for gum.”

And just as she said the words, she heard the door creak open behind her and she turned her head. There on the threshold stood a prim lady in a white summer frock, and with her a little girl in a posy-strewn muslin (Jacqueline’s muslin!) who looked as scared as if she had seen a ghost, and the little girl, of course, was Caroline!

CHAPTER XVI
A FAIR ENCOUNTER

For poor little Caroline the moment was tragic.

Quite sincerely she expected Jacqueline to step up to her and say in a loud voice:

“I am Jacqueline, and you are Caroline. Take off that dress of mine, and go away with this horrid little staring red-haired boy. I shall go home with Cousin Penelope in the limousine.”

What else could Caroline expect? Why should any living child continue to wear clumsy, hateful Peggy Janes, with patches, too, when she could have a beautiful muslin, with yellow roses? No, Jacqueline surely would never go on with the deception, now that she saw with her own eyes the glories of which she had deprived herself!

But to Jacqueline the encounter that to Caroline was tragic seemed downright funny. To think of her, standing there in Caroline’s Peggy Janes, and Caroline in her muslin, and that prim-looking Cousin Penelope (whom Jacqueline disliked at sight!) innocently lavishing attention on the wrong child. So good a joke it was that Jacqueline wanted it to last a little longer, and she was afraid that Caroline, with her shocked face, was going to give it all away.

So the moment Cousin Penelope spoke to Miss Crevey—and she spoke to her almost instantly, for the two children had taken stock of each other in far less time than it has taken to tell—Jacqueline edged up alongside Caroline.

“Hello!” she spoke softly, like a child who wanted to scrape acquaintance.

Caroline stared at her dumbly. Her lips quivered. If she should begin to bawl, she certainly would spill the beans, thought Jacqueline, and acted with a wisdom that was almost inspired.

“My name is Caroline Tait,” said Jacqueline, slowly and emphatically. Like the Ancient Mariner, she held Caroline with a glittering eye.

Caroline drew a fluttering breath—the first she had drawn since her eyes fell on the Peggy Janes. If Jacqueline said that, why, perhaps Jacqueline meant still to keep on being Caroline!

“I live at my aunt’s farm, down to the Meadows,” went on Jacqueline calmly. “What’s your name?”

“C-C——” clucked Caroline helplessly, and quailed before Jacqueline’s furious eye. “C—Jacqueline,” she achieved the name with something like a sneeze.

Cousin Penelope suddenly became aware of the by-play going on at her elbow. She turned and looked coldly at the dusty little girl in the uncouth, shabby clothes, who had been so rude as to address her darling. Caroline trembled, just as she had trembled when she first saw Cousin Penelope. But Jacqueline looked up at Cousin Penelope coolly and without terror, and even with her chin slightly tilted.

“Hello!” she addressed the august lady.

Cousin Penelope’s violet eyes looked through Jacqueline, quite as if she hadn’t been there. Then she turned with a smile to Caroline.

“Come, Jacqueline,” she addressed Jacqueline’s substitute. “You must help me buy this thread.”

Deliberately she turned her back on Jacqueline, and made Caroline turn with her, as if she snatched her little charge from contamination.

Jacqueline laughed outright. It was rude and horrid of her, although Cousin Penelope had herself been rude. But Jacqueline really hadn’t meant to laugh. Only Cousin Penelope struck her as funny, and the whole situation, too, was funny.

A slight flush rose to Cousin Penelope’s cheeks. Of course it was foolish to let one’s self be annoyed by the bad manners of a country child.

“Who is that bold little girl?” she asked Miss Crevey.

Her voice was louder than she meant it to be, or Jacqueline’s ears were sharper. Jacqueline overheard, and hugged herself for joy, the naughty thing!

“It’s one of the Conway children from down in the Meadows,” lisped Miss Crevey, as she tied up the little parcel of thread and pins. “Call again, Miss Gildersleeve. Sorry I didn’t have no shoelaces, but people buy ’em off me so fast I jes’ give up keepin’ ’em.”

Cousin Penelope nodded graciously, and with the parcel in one hand and Caroline’s limp fingers clasped in the other, walked out of the shop. When they were once more shut in the limousine, away from the vulgar herd, she turned to Caroline and saw that she was quite pale and trembling.

“You don’t like strangers, do you, any more than I,” Cousin Penelope said sympathetically.

Caroline nodded. She really didn’t know what else to do.

“That was a very rude, coarse, pushing little girl,” Cousin Penelope spoke with more heat than she realized. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with such people. She belongs to a quite ordinary family down in the Meadows—and blood, you know, will always tell.”

She smiled as she said the words. How blood had told in this charming little quiet girl beside her, who was all Gildersleeve! Cousin Penelope smiled and was glad when she saw Caroline smile at last in answer.

“You know there are some nice little girls, here in town,” said Cousin Penelope. “As soon as you feel at home with us, I’ll give a little party for you and ask them to meet you.”

“Oh-h!” cried Caroline softly, a real little trill of rapture. She had never had a party in her life, nor expected to have one. How good Cousin Penelope was to her, and Jacqueline, too, who was going to keep on with this precious play! The world was beautiful once more, as beautiful as it had been when she went into Miss Crevey’s shop. All the way home she chattered again, almost volubly, with kind Cousin Penelope.

While Caroline was rolling homeward to The Chimnies in the limousine, Jacqueline was trudging along the same road on foot. She and Neil had made their purchases. The little red and white candies, in the bag that Jacqueline had insisted upon having, in spite of Miss Crevey’s grumbling, were in the breast pocket of the Peggy Janes. The stick of candy was in the stomachs of Jacqueline and Neil, all except that portion of the moist chocolate that was round their mouths. Neil went in manful silence, lost in pleasant memories of the departed sweet. But Jacqueline now and again chuckled to herself.

“What you snickering at?” Neil challenged at last.

“Aw, nothing,” said Jacqueline.

“Only fools laugh at nothing.”

“Well,” said Jacqueline unabashed, “I was laughing at a fool. Where does she live?”

“Who?”

“That stuck up old thing, Miss Gildersleeve, that we saw in the shop. Gee! I’d hate to have her bossing me.”

“She’s an old hen,” said Neil. “You’d ought to ’a’ heard her bawl me out, time I run acrost her old lawn with the cream Mother forgot to leave. Mother won’t like it though if you sass her.”

“I will if I like,” Jacqueline answered calmly. “Where does she hang out?”

“We’re most there now,” said Neil. “It’s that big white house with the hedge.”

“Shucks!” said Jacqueline. (She had added to her vocabulary already at the farm.) “That isn’t half as big as Buena Vista.”

“What’s Boona Vister?”

To herself Jacqueline said: “You most put your foot in it that time!” Aloud she told Neil airily: “Oh, it’s a place where I was once.”

“Is it like the amusement park at the Pines with the puzzle-house?” Neil asked hopefully. “I was there once.”

“Something like, I guess,” Jacqueline answered vaguely.

She was busy staring at the Gildersleeve place, as they skirted the tall hedge. The sort of place where you mustn’t step on the lawn or pick the flowers. The sort of house where there wouldn’t be enough sunshine, and you must walk softly. She thought of Cousin Penelope, who had snubbed her, and she made the sort of face she was going to practice now for Cousin Penelope’s benefit. Then she thought of Caroline, the dear little silly, and she chuckled again.

“Aw, say,” said Neil, “you got bats in your belfry?”

“I’ll say I have—not,” Jacqueline threw off, with cheerful unconcern.

Wasn’t it funny that Caroline should have put on the muslin with the yellow roses? Jacqueline hated that dress above all dresses. She had only brought it in her trunk because Aunt Edith, who had selected the dress, had made her. She hated the floppy hat, too, and those nasty old green and blue and yellow beads of Cousin Penelope’s that it always made her feel seasick just to look at. If she had claimed her rightful place that Caroline was filling, she might have had to wear those odious clothes. Hateful clothes and bossy old Cousin Penelope, against dish washing and bed making. On the whole she preferred the latter—for a time.

“Hey! Hey!” Neil suddenly broke in upon her reverie with a mighty yell.

A bronzed raggedy man in a little truck, which was creeping past them on a flat tire in a scuff of dust, heard the call and checked his clumsy vehicle.

“Come on!” Neil cried to Jacqueline.

She didn’t pause to ask any questions. She flew at his heels across the wide green sward that skirted the sidewalk, and into the dust of the road. She swarmed after him in the accommodating Peggy Janes, up into the body of the truck. Here was a heap of dusty sacks on which she dropped herself at his side.

“Gee! This is luck,” Neil panted. “It’s John Zabriski that used to work for Father. He’s got the farm the other side of ours. He’ll take us all the way home.”

Jacqueline stretched herself upon the dirty sacks. The dust was rising round them in a golden cloud as the truck rolled down Longmeadow Street. The branches of the elms met overhead, and through them, as she lay on her back, she gazed into the unfathomable cobalt of the sky. There would be creamed codfish for supper, and Johnny-cake, and dried-apple pie. She had heard Grandma and Aunt Martha planning the meal. She could scuffle in the hammock with Neil and Dickie, in the warm, star-set evening, and tomorrow she meant to walk the highest beam in the barn. No one to forbid her—no one to remind her to be a lady—no starched and stuck up Cousin Penelope to give her orders.

“Gee!” murmured Jacqueline. “This sure is the life!”

CHAPTER XVII
OVER THE TEACUPS

Caroline and Aunt Eunice sat in the summer house, making doll clothes. The weather, like the Little Bear’s porridge, was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. A little breeze made the flowers in the garden curtsy like so many tall belles, arrayed in bright hues for a merrymaking at the court of the fairies. That was what Caroline told Aunt Eunice. She found it easy to tell Aunt Eunice all sorts of things.

Aunt Eunice sat in a cushioned wicker armchair, which Frank had brought out for her, and Caroline sat in a low rocker. Mildred sat on the bench at their elbow, lightly clad in a lace-edged camisole and snowy French drawers. She bore herself with the fine dignity and indifference that a queen of the ancient régime surrounded by her ladies in waiting would have shown in the like circumstances.

Aunt Eunice was frilling lace into a tiny sleeve. Caroline was setting her finest stitches in the hem of a silken skirt of peacock blue.

“When her new clothes are made, Aunt Eunice,” said Caroline, in her sweet, serious little voice, “I think we should let her go on a long journey to wonderful places.”

“I think so, too,” Aunt Eunice assented.

“Where should you like to go, Mildred?” asked Caroline. “To the Snow Queen’s palace in the cold, blue, frozen north? We are going to make you a cunning cape of black velvet with a white fur collar, and I’m sure it would be greatly admired by the snow elves. Only there are great silvery bears at the North Pole and they might fancy you for a tit-bit, my poor darling. I suppose, Aunt Eunice, they must get tired of eating just seals and Esquimaux and so on.”

“I’m sure I shouldn’t relish an Esquimau,” said Aunt Eunice.

“Then you shall go south, Mildred,” said Caroline. “After all, most of your clothes are of silk and muslin, and better for a warm climate. You can go to the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sang.”

Aunt Eunice looked up from the tiny sleeve, and lifted her brows, never so slightly.

“Where did you ever hear of Sappho, child?”

“It was in my reader at school,” Caroline explained, “and long before that, when I was little, I had a gray kitten and her name was Sappho. Were you ever in the Isles of Greece, Aunt Eunice?”

“No, dear.”

“Oh!” said Caroline, disappointed. “You’ve been most everywhere else. Well, let’s send Mildred to Italy, where the citrons are, and bandits, and beggars, and Pompeii. Oh, Aunt Eunice, won’t you tell Mildred and me how you went to Pompeii on your wedding journey?”

The little smile brightened on Aunt Eunice’s soft old face.

“Why, Jacqueline, dear, you must be sick of the story of my wedding journey. In the fortnight you’ve been here, you’ve heard it thirteen times at least.”

“Fourteen times would be one for every day in the week,” Caroline suggested, with a twinkle in her brown eyes that were usually so grave. “Oh, do tell me again, Aunt Eunice! I love to hear about strange, beautiful places. When I shut my eyes at night I see them just as you tell them, and I go to sleep and dream I am there.”

Aunt Eunice looked at the glowing little face of her companion.

“You’d like to go to Italy, Jacqueline?”

Caroline nodded.

“I want to ride in a gondola on a blue lagoon,” she said, “and see the Alpine glow, and a castle on the Rhine, and walk in those streets of old ancient houses in Paris where Notre Dame is that you tell about.”

Aunt Eunice paid close attention to her stitches.

“Of course,” she said, after a pause, “you’ll go abroad some day soon with your Aunt Edith.”

Caroline gave a quick little sigh. Oh, if only she need not be made to remember, every now and then, that she was not—could not be—Jacqueline!

“I suppose perhaps I shall,” she said, since she must say something.

To herself Aunt Eunice said indignantly that it was clear enough that Edith Delane had starved the soul of this sensitive, beauty-loving child.

“If only I could show her Venice!” thought Aunt Eunice, and then, in her turn, she gave a quick little sigh. She had waited ten years to have Jack’s little daughter with her for a summer. She might have to wait another ten years, before the boon was granted her a second time. In ten years more Aunt Eunice would be eighty-one. Too old for long journeys. No use for her to plan!

So Aunt Eunice and Caroline, each for good reasons of her own, lapsed into a silence as deep as Mildred’s, and not so sunny. It was fortunate perhaps that just at that moment Cousin Penelope joined them. She carried a shallow, woven basket in which were three cups and saucers of egg-shell thinness, and silver spoons, worn smooth with age, a glass dish of wafer-like slices of lemon, stuck with whole cloves, and another dish of crystallized dates. Behind her came Sallie, with the teapot in its queer wadded Japanese basket, like an old lady church-ward borne in Colonial days, and a light wicker stand of three baskets, each with its own brand of goodies wrapped in a white napkin—crisp buttered toast, wee sandwiches of orange marmalade and of cream cheese, and tiny nut-cakes, coated with caramel frosting.

Caroline sprang up to help Sallie place the folding table, and spread the embroidered white cloth that she carried on her arm, and set out the tea. Aunt Eunice folded her work neatly. Cousin Penelope drew up a chair. Only Mildred was idle, but she wore her idleness like a grace, and no one ever thought of rebuking her.

In the oblique light that filtered through the leaves of woodbine into the summer house, Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope and Caroline took their tea. It would have been just like every tea they had taken in the last fortnight, if Caroline had not ventured on a crystallized date. A moment later there rippled across her face a little wave of discomfort, which did not escape Cousin Penelope. Strange how quick Cousin Penelope was—even quicker than Aunt Eunice—to note any change in Caroline!

“What’s the matter, Jacqueline?” she asked promptly.

“Nothing, Cousin Penelope.”

“You surely don’t make faces for the fun of it?”

“Don’t tease the child, Penelope,” struck in Aunt Eunice.

“Mother, please! I want to know. These involuntary twitchings in a child mean something, always. I’ve been reading Stanley Hall.”

“Very recently, Penelope?”

“In the last week, Mother. Tell me, Jacqueline. There! Your face twitched again.”

“It isn’t anything really, Cousin Penelope,” pleaded Caroline. “I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry. It was the sugar on the date—and my tooth——”

“Which tooth?”

Caroline almost jumped, so peremptory was Cousin Penelope’s voice.

“The one with the hole in it,” she faltered, “but it’s been there ever so long.”

“Well!” said Cousin Penelope.

Further words failed her. She looked at Aunt Eunice. Aunt Eunice looked at her. Volumes of accusation of Edith Delane were in those looks. A woman, according to the Gildersleeve code, might as well neglect a child’s immortal soul as neglect its teeth.

“We won’t waste time with any of these local dentists,” Cousin Penelope broke the silence in which Caroline sat quaking. “I shall take Jacqueline down to Boston early in the morning. It promises to be a fine day. We’ll take the car. I’ll have Dr. Stoddard look her over. If he won’t take her himself, he can tell me of some dentist who makes a specialty of children.”

But this was awful, thought Caroline. Dentistry was fearfully expensive. Cousin Delia had said so, when Caroline’s tooth had first begun to trouble her. And now here was Caroline letting Jacqueline’s relatives give her dentistry that was meant for Jacqueline. There were tears in the little girl’s voice as she pleaded hopelessly:

“But I don’t want to go to a dentist—don’t make me, please! My tooth doesn’t hurt much—I’m used to it and——”

“That means the nerve is dying,” said Cousin Penelope, in a solemn voice. “Of all the criminal neglect!”

“Hush, hush!” warned Aunt Eunice.

Caroline took out her handkerchief (Jacqueline’s handkerchief!) and wiped her eyes.

“Jacqueline, dear,” said Cousin Penelope awkwardly. She moved closer to Caroline and actually put her hand on her shoulder. “I wasn’t angry with you. I was thinking of something else, if I spoke sharply.”

“Must I go to the dentist?” persisted Caroline.

“But we’ll do more than go to the dentist,” urged Cousin Penelope. “Listen, dear, we’ll go shopping. We’ll buy all the things for the party I promised you—invitations, and favors, and prizes. We’ll select the candies and the ices. Why, we’ll plan the whole party on this trip, and shop for it.”

Caroline looked at her, with wet eyes. One word of the truth, and she would save herself from being dentistried under false pretenses. But she would say farewell to the piano, and Madame Woleski, and the party. Caroline was going on eleven, and she had never had a party.

“I d-don’t mind the dentist,” she assured Cousin Penelope, with a watery smile. “You’re very good about the party. I shall love to go to Boston with you.”

Cousin Penelope smiled at Aunt Eunice, who smiled back. They wouldn’t have admitted, even to their own consciences, that they smiled a little for triumph over Edith Delane, as well as for pleasure at the pleasure they gave the supposed Jacqueline. And Caroline smiled to herself, as she dried her eyes, because she thought of her party. Mildred, you see, with her fixed, calm smile was the only one of the four who knew the situation upside down and inside out and roundabout, and who was able therefore to smile tolerantly and perhaps a little compassionately at them all.

CHAPTER XVIII
OVER THE DARNING BASKET

On that fine summer afternoon, neither too hot nor too cold but just right, when Caroline sewed her silken seam and dreamed of foreign lands, Jacqueline sat in the shabby hammock in the Conways’ scuffed-up side-yard, and darned stockings.

“I know now,” murmured Jacqueline, “why the worst thing you can say of anything is ‘darn it!’”

There were not a great many stockings, for the little Conways, and Jacqueline, too, went barelegged as much as possible, but every stocking had at least one hole, and often the holes came in places that had been darned before. Then you must be most particularly careful not to do the dull work hurriedly and leave rough places that would blister tender heels and little toes.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” said Grandma Conway, as she pulled out the threads that Jacqueline in her haste had drawn all puckery. “It’s as easy to do it right as wrong.”

Jacqueline pouted a little as she took back the ugly brown stocking, with her work all undone, but none the less she wove her needle carefully in and out of the frayed threads, as Grandma expected her to do. For Jacqueline, you see, liked Grandma, as she had never liked the teachers or the governesses that she had always managed to “get round.” You couldn’t “get round” Grandma, any more than you could “get round” a bas-relief. And if she made you do your work just so, she treated the boys in the same fashion. There was no partiality at the Conway farm.

So Jacqueline darned stockings on that sunny afternoon, and Grandma, in the worn rocker that Jacqueline had dragged out for her, patched garments already so often patched that you had to hunt to find the original fabric. Great wafts of warm, odorous air came from the acres of onions. The bees were murmurous about their squat, white hives. A woodpecker tapped in the tree above Jacqueline’s head. Then with a great clatter an ancient Ford came bounding along the dirt road and vanished ultimately in a cloud of silvery dust.

“My land,” chuckled Grandma, and her old eyes twinkled behind her steel-bowed spectacles. “Wouldn’t our great-grandfathers have had a conniption fit, if they’d seen a thing like that go rattlety-banging through the Meadows? They’d have jailed somebody for witchcraft, sure enough. ‘Carriages without horses’, same as old Mother Shipton prophesied.”

“Weren’t they cruel and stupid in those old times?” said Jacqueline, with her mind still full of the slaughterous doings and inhuman punishments of “The Prince and the Pauper.” “Think of anybody being silly enough to think some poor old woman was a witch!”

“Well, perhaps we wouldn’t have done much better, if we’d been living then,” said Grandma tolerantly. “You’ve got to judge folks according to their circumstances. Now take those old, ancient folks, living here on the edge of what was then a howling wilderness, and not knowing what might pop out on ’em any minute—a catamount, maybe, or like as not a painted Indian, with a scalping knife. You can’t blame ’em if their nerves got kind of raw, and they began to see things that weren’t there and believe things that weren’t so, and then raise the cry of ‘Witch!’ and go persecuting some poor neighbor.”

“Were there really ever any Indians here in Longmeadow?” asked Jacqueline, round-eyed. That there should have been Indians in the wild California canyons and in the somber deserts she could easily believe, but this New England village, with its orderly meadows and its well-trained elms, seemed the last place where gruesome tragedy could ever have been staged.

“Well, I guess there was a few, off and on,” said Grandma placidly. “Didn’t your Pa, and he a Longmeadow boy, ever tell you ’bout old Aunt Hetty Tait, that was your ever so many times great-grandmother?”

With conviction Jacqueline shook her head. How should she ever have heard of Caroline’s ancestresses?

“Well, now!” said Grandma pityingly, and wiped her spectacles.

“Tell me, please—please!” cried Jacqueline, bouncing up and down in the aged hammock.

“Land sakes, child, it’s lucky that hammock is strung up good and strong, or you’d come down ker-flummocks! Just you go on with your darning, whilst I tell you what there is to tell. ’Taint much. Hetty Tait wasn’t aunt to anybody then, nor was she old. She was a young, blooming girl from down river, born in Allingham, that Nathan Tait fetched here a bride, when first this settlement was made. Their farm was up to the north end of town, and the woods ran right down into their pasture land. One day Hetty was making soft soap at the big fireplace in the kitchen, with her two babies asleep in the cradle right at hand.”

“Grandma! Don’t say anything happened to the babies!” cried Jacqueline, with a swift thought of Annie’s golden head.

Sphinx-like, Grandma went on:

“It was a balmy day in spring, and the door stood wide open. Nathan Tait had gone into town. Hetty was alone on the place. All at once, though she hadn’t heard a sound, she sensed she wasn’t alone. She whirled round quick as scat, and lo and behold you! there was a great big six-foot savage, with a scalp tied to his belt and a knife in his hand, just stepping cat-footed into her kitchen, and his eyes on her babies.”

“Go on, Grandma! Go on, or I’ll scream!”

“That’s just what Hetty didn’t waste time a-doing, Jackie. Quicker ’n you can say Jack Robinson, she scooped up the scalding hot soap in the great huge ladle she had in her hand, and let drive fair and square at the Indian’s face. He didn’t linger after that. He took out at the door, and Hetty bestowed another ladleful upon his naked back, to speed his footsteps. Then she double barred the door and took down her husband’s fowling piece and kept watch till her husband’s return, not knowing, of course, whether he would return, or whether he’d be ambushed on the road from town, as many a man was in those old days. You can’t blame those folks, Jackie, if they were sort of hard. Life wasn’t what you might call soft with them.”

“I’ll play that game to-morrow,” Jacqueline announced with snapping eyes. “I’ll be Hetty, and Freddie and Annie can be the babies, and Neil shall be the Injun—only of course I’ll throw cold water on him, not hot soap. It won’t hurt him really, Grandma.”

“I’ll trust Neil to take care of himself,” chuckled Grandma.

The peace of the hot afternoon, murmurous with bees, descended again upon the side-yard. Jacqueline’s eyes were thoughtful.

“And did that all happen really right here in Longmeadow?”

“Just as sure as you’re a-sitting in that hammock, Jackie.”

“Tell me some more about those old times—ah, please do!”

“Not now, Jackie. Sun’s getting low and I must mix up a batch of Johnny-cake for supper.”

With a sigh Grandma began to fold away the little overalls that she had not yet finished patching.

“Let me make the Johnny-cake,” Jacqueline offered suddenly. “I did it day before yesterday, and you telling me what to do. Let me try it alone! Please!”

Grandma considered for a second.

“The receipt is all written out in the brown book back of the clock,” she said. “Mind you flour the pan after you’ve greased it, and don’t be too lavish with the sugar.”

“I will—I won’t,” Jacqueline made two promises almost in one breath.

In her worn sneakers (Caroline’s sneakers!) she flashed away into the big, tidy kitchen. Corn-meal in the big tin, eggs and butter from the cool cellar. Milk in the blue and white pitcher. Sugar in the brown crock. She was going to cook! At school, in cooking class, in a neat ruffled apron, with aluminum and white-enamel bowls, and spoons of approved pattern, she had made apricot-whip and fudge. But now in the Conway kitchen, with a yellow mixing bowl and an iron spoon, she really made something that her family would like to eat, and she sang joyously as she measured and stirred.

She had two big pans of Johnny-cake in the oven that she had craftily heated, and she wasn’t looking at them more than twice every five minutes, when the family began to gather. First came Nellie, leading Freddie, and asking if supper wasn’t most ready, and Jacqueline, quite as if she ran the house, so important she now felt, told Nellie to wash her hands and Freddie’s, too, before she thought of supper. Then came Grandma, to take up Annie and freshen her against mealtime, and then the family Ford came gallantly into the yard, and here were Aunt Martha and Neil, back from Baring Junction, with three sacks of grain.

“Oh, Aunt Martha!” Jacqueline bounded to meet her. “Supper’s ready, and I made the Johnny-cake all alone, and fixed the oven by myself.”

And do you know, Caroline with her party in prospect, felt no happier than Jacqueline felt, when tired, dusty Aunt Martha (who wasn’t her aunt!) smiled at her and said:

“Well, of all things! You got the supper yourself? You spelled Grandma? I guess my bones were all right, Jackie, when they said you were the sort that would be a real little helper in the house.”

CHAPTER XIX
THE PRICE OF TEMPER

But all the days at the Conway farm were not like the day that ended in a blaze of glory, with praises and hot Johnny-cake. No more than a week later there came a day when everything went crooked.

Perhaps Jacqueline got out of bed on the wrong foot. Perhaps she was thinking too much of a pile of story papers, which she had unearthed in the shed chamber, and too little of her work. Perhaps it was simply that she had grown tired of the rôle of Caroline—even of a virtuous Caroline, who was a help and comfort in the house, and bossed the younger children.

At any rate Jacqueline dawdled and shuffled through her work, and complained constantly of the heat. It was a hot day, true enough, but as Grandma said, talking about the weather only made a bad matter ten times worse. Let it alone, and likely it would let you alone!

But Jacqueline groaned and grumbled, and finally lay down on the dining room couch (with a story paper!) and gave herself up to being uncomfortable. Presently she fell to thinking of the Gildersleeve place, and the big, cool, dim rooms that she knew such a roof must cover, and the white porcelain tub, with lots of hot water, and a maid to wash the tub when you stepped out of it. She began to think that she had treated Caroline very generously, and treated herself very badly.

Dinner was a horrid meal—pickled codfish in white sauce, cold peas from last night’s supper, slabs of home-made bread, molasses cookies, and cottage cheese. The room was hot, and the boys were sweaty and tired. Freddie upset a mug of milk, and Neil fussed about the heat, and said his head ached. Jacqueline was quite disgusted that he should be so babyish.

After dinner Aunt Martha insisted upon Grandma’s lying down in her room. Grandma looked “tuckered out,” and no wonder, for she had been step-stepping all the morning, while Jacqueline loafed. Of course, Jacqueline told her uneasy conscience, she would have helped, if Grandma had asked her. But you know, it is easier sometimes for a tired old woman to do things herself than to ask a sulky and unwilling little girl to do them for her.

Aunt Martha sent Nellie off into the barn with the babies. She was to be sure that they did not disturb Grandma. Ralph and Dickie went back to the fields, and Aunt Martha herself drove off to Northford, to see a man who owed her money that she very much needed. Jacqueline was left face to face with the dinner dishes.

“Come on, Neil,” she said bossily. “I’m not going to wrassle these alone.”

“I gotta headache,” Neil answered, from the couch that Jacqueline coveted. “I don’t have to work this afternoon. Mother said so.”

“She meant work in the fields. She didn’t mean the dishes.”

“She did, too.”

“She didn’t, neither. Get up, you great, lazy boy, and help me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such a fuss about the weather. You let it alone, and likely it’ll let you alone. Come on now!”

“Won’t!” said Neil.

Jacqueline’s face flamed.

“Then the dishes will stay right there till Aunt Martha comes,” she said. “I won’t touch ’em.”

“Don’t!” mocked Neil, and settled himself more comfortably.

Well, Jacqueline didn’t touch those dishes! If you’ll believe it, she took her story papers and went out and read in the hammock for two mortal hours, while the dinner table stood just as the family had left it, and the stockings in Grandma’s basket cried: “Come darn me!” and patient little Nellie struggled all alone to keep two hot and fussy babies amused and quiet.

In the old papers Jacqueline found a continued story of the sort she liked, about a girl who went to a boarding school, where most of the teachers were mean and malicious and incredibly stupid; about the pranks that she and her friends played, and the mystery of a buried treasure that she solved. Jacqueline was so deep in the mystery that she scarcely heeded when Aunt Martha drove into the yard. She came out of the treasure vault with a jump, only when she heard her name called. Then she looked, and saw Aunt Martha standing in the kitchen doorway.

Full of the spirit of her heroine, who put tyrannical teachers in their place, Jacqueline rose and went into the kitchen. She was almost eager for “a scene.”

“Why aren’t those dishes done?” Aunt Martha asked directly. Her shrewd gray eyes went right through Jacqueline.

This was drama with a vengeance. Jacqueline’s heart began to beat fast.

“There were so many of ’em, and the day was so hot, and I had a headache, and Neil wouldn’t help,” she poured out all her reasons glibly.

“You leave Neil out. I’ll attend to him. It was your job to clear up the dining room, and wash those dishes. Go about it now.”

Jacqueline turned slowly toward the dining room door, but as she turned she said aloud, with a toss of her head:

“I don’t have to!”

She looked round to make sure that Aunt Martha heard her, for Aunt Martha had a way of not always hearing saucy and hateful speeches.

“If you stay in this house,” said Aunt Martha, as she unpinned her cheap hat, “you’ll have to do your share, like all the rest of us.”

“Well, maybe I won’t stay in your old house,” Jacqueline told her superbly. “There are better places I can go to.”

“All right,” said Aunt Martha easily. “Trot along—only get those dishes done before you start.”

That was too bad of Aunt Martha, for in the rôle of tyrant, which Jacqueline had thoughtfully assigned her, she ought to have lost her temper at Jacqueline’s threat, instead of turning it into a kind of joke. Since Aunt Martha kept her temper, Jacqueline lost hers. She snatched the tray from its shelf with unnecessary clatter, and she went into the dining room, and banged it down hard on the table. She began to pile the soiled dishes upon it, helter-skelter, with as much noise as if she were a raw Polish girl, just out of the onion fields.

Neil turned a flushed face toward her, where he lay on the couch.

“Tell-tale!” he softly sang.

The justice of the taunt made it sting.

“You’re a slacker,” Jacqueline retorted promptly. “Everybody hates a slacker. I was going to give you a birthday present, and something perfectly scrumptious at Christmas, but I never will now—never—never!”

To emphasize the threat, she banged down the heavy milk pitcher on the tray, without noticing that the tray overhung the edge of the table perilously. There was a tilt—a sickening slide and crash—then plates, glasses, broken food, spilled milk lay all in a mess at Jacqueline’s feet, and among the débris, shattered to bits, were the two green-dragon cups and saucers of thin china.

Jacqueline felt the anger ooze out of her. She stared at the wreckage, conscience-smitten. Neil sat up and looked at her.

“You’ve done it now!” he said.

“I don’t care!” Jacqueline flung at him the first words that came. She had to say something, or she would have burst out crying.

“Caroline!” spoke Aunt Martha’s voice. She stood there in the room, with her tanned face really white round the lips. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and broken Grandma’s cups!”

“Nothing but two old cups!” Jacqueline almost sobbed.

Aunt Martha did not seem to hear her. She went down on her knees and groped among the fragments for bits of the shattered green-dragon china. Her hands fairly shook as she gathered them up.

“They are all that was left of her wedding china,” she said, more to herself than to the startled children. “We ought not to have used them common—but she didn’t relish her tea in a thick cup—and she wouldn’t drink from china while I drank out of kitchen ware. No, I can’t mend ’em, ever. They’re smashed to smithereens.”

“I don’t care—I don’t care!” Jacqueline screamed across the awful lump in her throat that was choking her. “I hate this house—and I hate you all—and I’m never coming back again!”

She called back the last words from the kitchen doorway, and next moment she was out in the yard, headed for the road, and running, as if for her very life, to the Gildersleeve place, and the Gildersleeve relations, and the identity of Jacqueline that now, with all her heart, she wanted to get back again.

CHAPTER XX
ACCORDING TO AGREEMENT

By the time that Jacqueline had had her cry out, she was nearly a mile on her way to Longmeadow Street. Her eyes were smarting, and her nose was sore, and her throat felt hot like a furnace. When she came to the boundary brook between Kaplinsky’s lease and Deacon Whitcomb’s field, she was glad to stop and bathe her face and quiet the jumping pulses in her wrists with cool water. She smoothed her hair, too, with her wet fingers, and she even took off her shabby sneakers and washed her dusty feet and ankles. After all, she didn’t want to arrive at the Gildersleeve place looking worse than she had to.

Now that she was refreshed, she trudged on more slowly. She realized that she was tired out with the wild pace at which she had run, and with the scene in Aunt Martha’s dining room, which she winced to remember. Wasn’t she thankful that she really wasn’t Caroline, and that she needn’t ever go back to the Conway farm? How could she have faced them—Aunt Martha, and Neil, and Grandma? Poor Grandma, whose precious cups she had broken!

Again the tears started to Jacqueline’s eyes. She brushed them angrily away. She didn’t need to cry. Wasn’t she going to send Grandma some new cups—the thinnest cups she could buy in Boston—a dozen cups—a whole dinner set? That would make everything all right again.

By the time she came in sight of the first outlying houses of the village, she had added to the dinner set for Grandma an embroidered cap for Annie, a doll with real hair for Nellie, a belt with a silver buckle for Ralph, a camera for Dickie, and a choo-choo train for Freddie.

With great effort, as she entered the village, she finally added to the collection a big, soft, luscious rug for Aunt Martha’s car, and a magic-lantern for Neil—not one of the little dinky toys that get out of order, but the real thing.

When the people at the farm got all those gifts, she rather guessed they’d change their minds about her. Perhaps they’d be sorry then that they hadn’t been more considerate. How they would regret her—and admire her! Maybe she’d go out there once more—just once more—in her wine-colored jumper dress that she liked, and take a big box of sweets to the children. She fairly swelled out her chest, in her dusty Peggy Janes, as she pictured herself playing Lady Bountiful. But when she thought of Grandma, her chest flattened again, just like a toy balloon when you prick it and the air runs out. Oh, she did want to get that dinner set right away! Her eyes filled every time when she thought of Grandma, sitting down to supper, and drinking her tea patiently from the thick, ugly, crockery cup.

The sun had just dipped behind the western hills across the river, when Jacqueline came to a halt outside the box-hedge that enclosed the Gildersleeve place. She had thought all along that she would walk right up to the front door, and knock, and ask for Mrs. Gildersleeve, and simply say to her:

“Aunt Eunice, I am Jacqueline. Call the little girl who’s staying here, and she’ll tell you it’s just so.”

But now that the moment for action had come, she hesitated. To do it that way seemed not quite fair to Caroline. Like stealing a march on her. Really she must see Caroline, and tell her what was up, before she gave away the trick that they had played upon the Gildersleeves and the Conways.

“Not that Caroline won’t be as glad as me to have it over with,” Jacqueline tried to quiet an uneasy something within her. “She must be fed up by this time on that old piano.”

A little path, as narrow as a cat track, ran between the Gildersleeve hedge and the rose tangle that bounded the Trowbridge lawn. Jacqueline knew all about that path, and a few others. She hadn’t come into the village with that born rover, Neil, for nothing. She slipped up this path in the shadows that were cool and dark, and she quickly found the gap in the hedge for which she was looking. She wriggled through it, with some damage to the Peggy Janes (Caroline’s Peggy Janes!) and there she was in the garden, among the flowers that were already half asleep. She peered about her eagerly. If only Caroline would come that way! Then she spied the summer house, and stole to the doorway that gaped beneath the over-hanging vines, and peered in.

The summer house was empty. The tea table was folded up, and the wicker chairs set trimly in place against another day. Under one of the chairs a bit of clear orange color caught Jacqueline’s eye. She pounced upon it, and found it was a little doll-smock of orange, cross-stitched in dark blue. This must belong to Mildred, and no doubt Mildred’s careful little mother (“fussy,” Jacqueline called her) would find it missing and come to look for it. Why, things couldn’t have fallen out better for her!

Jacqueline sat down on the bench that ran round the wall inside the summer house, and waited with what patience she could scare up. She could see a bit of the house through the elms that stood round it—a gleam of white clapboards, that caught the last light of the afterglow, a green shutter, a window like an anxious eye. She wondered if that were the window of the room that should be hers.

Then she saw a little girl in a leaf brown dress come from behind a clump of shrubbery and head toward the summer house, with eyes bent upon the path, as if she looked for something. Caroline, in the name of all that was lucky! Gurgling with mischief, Jacqueline drew back and waited in the shadows that now were quite thick in the summer house. She didn’t have to wait long. Framed in the doorway, Caroline stood before her, dainty in Jacqueline’s leaf brown smock with orange stitching, and Jacqueline’s amber beads, and with a soft sparkle in her face, which came from thoughts of pleasant things that had happened and pleasant things to come.

“Boo!” cried Jacqueline.

Caroline gave a little squeak, and clutched the side of the door.

“Don’t be scared, goose!” bade Jacqueline, stepping forward. “It’s only me.”

Caroline’s pale little hands fluttered to her throat as if she wanted to push off something that choked her.

“Y-yes,” she stammered. “H-hello, Jackie.”

That was all Caroline said. She didn’t help Jacqueline one bit, though she must have known that Jacqueline hadn’t come there simply to say: “Hello!” She just clung to the side of the door and stared like somebody who expects to be hit.

“I’m not a ghost,” said Jacqueline, impatiently. “Don’t look at me like that. I just came over to say I’ve had enough of the farm, and if you don’t mind, we’ll swap back.”

Caroline nodded.

“Yes,” she agreed, in a dry little whisper. “All r-right, Jackie.” Then she slid into the seat by the door, just as if her legs had folded up under her, and she hid her face in her hands and began to cry.

CHAPTER XXI
AN HOUR TO TRY THE SOUL

What do you suppose Prince Edward would have done, if Tom Canty hadn’t wished to be Tom Canty any more? Suppose that Tom, instead of being a well-mannered little English boy, willing to keep his proper station, had cried out at the mere thought of going back to the foulness and cruelty of Offal Court, and insisted, not unnaturally, perhaps, that he preferred to be comfortable in a palace?

Jacqueline had never thought of this possibility, when she read “The Prince and the Pauper,” nor when she tried to translate the story into modern terms. But she faced it now in deep dismay, as she looked at Caroline, sobbing her heart out, there in the dusk of the summer house.

For a moment Jacqueline shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and hardly knew what to do. But she was not in the habit of being turned from a purpose, once her mind was made up, and her mind was very much made up to sleep that night at the Gildersleeve place. So down she sat beside the weeping Caroline, and laid a hard little sunburnt hand upon her shoulder.

“Don’t be a baby, Carol,” she said, quite fiercely, because she didn’t want to let herself pity Caroline. “You know you said you’d change, the minute I wanted to.”

Caroline nodded the little dark head that was bowed desolately upon her hands.

“Well, then!” said Jacqueline, in an injured tone. “What are you crying about?”

(What, indeed?)

Caroline lifted her face and smeared her eyes with her hands.

“When—when shall we—change?” she faltered.

“Now,” said Jacqueline bluntly.

Then Jacqueline remembered something that all her life she had wanted to forget—the look in the eyes of Aunt Edie’s little lap dog, when she had struck him. Of course Jacqueline had been just a tiny thing—only four years old. It was right after her father died. And she had been jealous of the wee dog, because he had sat on Aunt Edie’s knee sometimes when she wanted that place herself. So one day when she found him alone and he turned to her for a caress, she had slapped him—hard. She gave him sugar afterward, and the cushions from her best doll-buggy, and velvet-soft caresses, and tears of penitence. But she had never forgotten the look in his eyes when she struck him, and she saw that look now in the tear-drenched eyes that Caroline turned upon her.

“Oh, Jackie! No! Not now!”

“Well, I’ll be dished,” said Jacqueline. The words don’t do justice to the disgust in her tone. There was no doubt that she did hate a quitter!

But Caroline was past heeding even Jacqueline’s scorn.

“Oh, Jackie!” she pleaded, and suddenly she caught Jacqueline’s hands and clung to them. “Can’t you wait just a little longer—only till to-morrow night? I won’t ask anything more, Jackie—I won’t even ask God for anything more—and I’ll give up the piano—and your lovely clothes—I haven’t hurt ’em, I’ve been awful careful—and I won’t cry one little bit, even if there are cows at the farm—and I’ve been so happy here—I didn’t know things could be so lovely—I didn’t know people could be so happy—oh, it will be like a beautiful dream, all the rest of my life—only let me have to-morrow, Jackie—please, please let me have to-morrow!”

“Ouch!” said Jacqueline. “Stop digging your finger nails into my hands!”

Caroline didn’t seem to hear her. She clung like a limpet.

“Only wait till to-morrow!” she sobbed.

“Now you needn’t think,” snapped Jacqueline, “that I’m going to hoof it three miles back to that nasty old farm, and sleep in that hot, stuffy room. What’s the dif. anyway between to-night and to-morrow, I should like to know?”

“But it’s my party,” wailed Caroline. “To-morrow is my party.”

Jacqueline snorted. Don’t blame her too much! She had had a birthday party every year of her life, and a Hallowe’en party, and an Easter-egg rolling, and a Washington’s Birthday party, besides always a group of children to eat ice-cream and see the fireworks at Buena Vista on the Fourth.

“What’s a party?” she said, with contempt that was quite sincere. No party, she felt, could give Caroline sufficient pleasure to counterbalance the discomfort she herself must suffer, if she had to go back to the farm now—with her tail between her legs, as she put it!—and face Aunt Martha.

“There are seven girls coming,” Caroline panted out the details between her sobs. “I almost know Eleanor Trowbridge next door—we smile at each other always—and the table is to be out here in the garden—and the ice-cream is coming from Boston on the train. Oh, Jackie, shapes of ice-cream like flowers—the sort you see sometimes in windows—red roses and green leaves and everything—I picked ’em out myself! And there are little cakes, like frogs and white m-mice—with almonds for ears! And we’re going to have a peanut-hunt—and prizes—such scrumptious prizes—silver bangles, and the cunningest little bottles of perfume, and dear little carved Italian boxes with pictures in the covers. Oh, Jackie, it’s like ten Christmases all come together—and I—I never had a party before in all my life.”

She let go of Jacqueline then. She had to use her hands to hide her face.

Jacqueline sat quite still. She was very angry with Caroline for being such a baby. She was too angry to speak to her. At least she supposed that was the reason she kept silent.

“Muzzy and I used to plan how I’d have a party,” Caroline quavered in the dusk that was now thickening fast in the summer house. “It’s the next best fun to having things. I almost had a party once. But the Stetson twins’ father lost his money and they didn’t pay Muzzy for the music lessons—weeks and weeks of lessons—so she couldn’t afford a party—and I said I didn’t care, but oh! I did. And now I was going to have a party—like in a book—and I’ll never have another chance the longest day I live. Oh, Jackie—Jackie! Couldn’t you——”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She just let it trail off hopelessly into the dusk.

Jacqueline felt a queer tingling in her palms, and a hot smarting behind her eyes. She was mad—mad at Caroline—mad at herself—mad at something in herself that was going to make her do what Caroline wanted, and hate herself afterward for doing it.

“Like taking candy off a kid!” That was her new Uncle Jimmie’s phrase for something that was too contemptible for a regular fellow to do. That was what it would be to take Caroline’s party away from her. Let her have her old party! But drat Caroline—and double-drat Prince Edward, whose silly story had let her in for this! Trouble! He didn’t know the name of trouble!

Jacqueline drew a deep breath, which was rather like a sniffle.

“Aw shucks!” she said disgustedly. “Cut out the sob-stuff, Carol. One day is as good as another, far as I’m concerned. You can have your party.”

Caroline, all moist and crumpled, fell upon her in the dusk.

“Oh, Jackie! You mean it—really? You are the dearest——”

“Oh, dumb-bells!” scoffed Jacqueline. “Stop bawling now. You’ll look like a squashed egg. I tell you, it’s all right, and you can have your party. So long, now! I’ve got to beat it home.”

She rose, and with a lofty air, patterned on what she thought Uncle Jimmie would do in similar circumstances, she strode toward the gap in the hedge. Honestly she tried to whistle as she went. But just as she reached the gap, Caroline came pattering out of the dusk and clutched her.

“Now don’t go and begin all over again!” Jacqueline scolded.

“Please, Jackie!” Caroline’s teeth fairly chattered. “I shan’t let you—it isn’t fair—it’s your party really—it’s you Cousin Penelope meant it for—and I—I didn’t tell you all about it. I was afraid you couldn’t give it up—if I told you everything. There’ll be little satin boxes of candy on the table, one for each of us—and darling little dolls, with baskets of nuts—one apiece—to keep—and birds that hold the place-cards—and oh, Jackie, a pie full of presents! You pull a string, each of you, and then——”

“Oh, g’on!” said Jacqueline. “A Jack Horner Pie. I’m fed up on ’em—had ’em since I was knee-high to a hopper toad.”

“Oh!” gasped Caroline, softly, incredulously.

All in a minute, a self-revealing minute such as she had seldom known, there flooded over Jacqueline the realization of all that she had had and taken for granted—all that this other little girl had never known, and valued all the more. She was not angry with Caroline any longer. She felt that she was sorrier for her than she had ever been for anybody, and then suddenly she knew that she loved Caroline, poor, little, sobbing Caroline, whom she had it in her power to lift into a heaven of happiness.

“Don’t go and eat too much at your old party,” Jacqueline bade gruffly. “Now don’t hang on to me like that. I gotta go. And I guess I won’t come back for quite a while.”

“But to-morrow——” Caroline hesitated. A hope that she was ashamed of trembled in her voice.

“I was fooling when I said we’d swap,” snapped Jacqueline. “I’m not coming to-morrow. I’m not coming near this mean old place till I have to. You hear me? I like it at the farm. I’m going to stay there till Aunt Edie comes, if she doesn’t come till next Christmas. And you can just stay here till you’re dead sick of it—the old piano—and starched people—and prunes and prisms and——”

“Oh, oh! Do you mean that?” Caroline’s cry was sheer rapture. “But I couldn’t let——”

Perhaps her honest protest would have moved Jacqueline to recall the promise she had so rashly made. But just at that moment a clear, imperious voice called: “Jacqueline!” and when both little girls pivoted at that name, they saw a figure, in soft white summer clothes, come into the dusky garden. It was Cousin Penelope, and by the way in which she headed straight down the path toward the spot where they stood, they knew that she had spied them.

CHAPTER XXII
PENELOPE TAKES ALARM

Like the hero of the old music hall song, Jacqueline felt that “now was the time for disappearing.” I wish I could say to her credit that she fled, simply because she was afraid that if she came face to face with Cousin Penelope, she would be tempted beyond her strength and withdraw the promise she had so impulsively made to Caroline. As a matter of fact, I suspect that she ran away, because she had had enough drama with Aunt Martha and Caroline to satisfy even her drama-loving soul for at least one day. At any rate, she dove out of the garden through the narrow gap in the hedge, like a scared and nimble rabbit, and Caroline was left to face alone the onslaught of Cousin Penelope.

Of course Caroline ought to have been just as noble as Jacqueline. She ought to have called Jacqueline back, and presented her to Cousin Penelope as her really, truly little kinswoman, and then for her own part subsided gracefully into the company of the cows and the awful boy-cousins, just as Tom Canty was willing to go back to rags and dirt and misery.

But Caroline thought of the party, and the darling little doll-favors. Sweet little Watteau gowns they wore, of figured silk, with their powdered hair piled high and topped with wee, beribboned hats of straw that would have turned a fairy green with envy. Caroline thought, too, of the look that would come into Cousin Penelope’s pale, stern face, when she knew that it was upon a little cheat that she had wasted kindness, and music lessons, and dentistry! No, Caroline hadn’t the courage to tell the truth. She just stood there, dumb and trembling, while Cousin Penelope bore down upon her.

“Jacqueline!” Cousin Penelope’s voice, as she spoke to Caroline, was sharp with what an older person would have recognized as anxiety. “Who was that child you were talking with?”

Mercy, what a chance to tell the truth—the whole dramatic truth—in a dramatic manner! But Caroline, like Jacqueline on several occasions, told half a truth which, like many a half-truth, was as deceptive as a good, big whopper.

“A—a little girl,” she stammered. “She lives down in the Meadows.”

Through the dusk she could almost feel Cousin Penelope bristle, like a lady-dog when rough strangers come too near her precious young.

“That bold, forward Conway child? Of all the audacity! What brought her prowling into our garden?”

“She—she wanted to—see me,” faltered Caroline.

“To see you!” echoed Cousin Penelope. “Why should she dream of associating with you, Jacqueline?”

Bewildered and badgered, Caroline knew that she must say something.

“We—we were on the train—coming from Chicago,” she said in a voice that see-sawed, though she tried hard to keep it steady. “We played together—with Mildred. Oh, she’s a nice little girl, Cousin Penelope, honest, she is—you’d like her—she’s nicer than me—ever so much so!”

She had thought she hadn’t a tear left in her, but now she began to cry again, not noisily, but in soft little tired gasps. Oh, how was it that clinging heroines in books always managed to swoon? She wished that she could swoon, then and there, and so escape from everything. She couldn’t bear to have Cousin Penelope ask her even one more question.

But Cousin Penelope stopped questioning. Amazingly she put her arm round Caroline’s tense little shoulders, and dabbed her eyes gently with her filmy handkerchief, which smelt like a breeze over beds of violets.

“There, there!” she said. “You mustn’t make your eyes red, on the night before your party. You must have forgotten the party.”

Forgotten the party! If only Cousin Penelope guessed!

They went back together through the dusky, fragrant garden. Cousin Penelope urged Caroline to look at the little pale stars, which were coming out now almost as fast as you could count them in the sky, that was the color of tarnished old silver.

“It will be a fine day to-morrow,” Penelope told Caroline. “You don’t realize, you little Californian, how we have to study the sky, here in New England, when we plan to give a garden-party.”

Then she talked about the dress that Caroline should wear at the party, and the way in which the flowers should be arranged on the table. She was talking to take Caroline’s mind off the scene with the rude little girl from the Conway farm. Caroline saw through her strategy, but she was grateful to her, just the same. She only hoped that Aunt Eunice wouldn’t see her red eyes, and have to be told about what had happened in the garden.

Better than Caroline had dared to hope, they found Aunt Eunice seated on the wide, cool porch, where it was now too dark for features to be distinguished.

“This little girl is running up to bed,” said Cousin Penelope blithely. “We must get our beauty sleep before the party.”

Thankful for this way of escape, Caroline kissed Aunt Eunice good-night and trotted upstairs, to bathe her face and her smarting eyes. How good it was that Aunt Eunice didn’t suspect!

At that moment Aunt Eunice, on the dim, cool porch, was saying in a troubled voice:

“What’s wrong, Penelope? The little thing had been crying. Her cheeks were quite wet. She isn’t—homesick?”

“Not in the least!” replied Penelope, in a crisp voice that defied the whole tribe of Delanes and the entire state of California. “Why should she be homesick, here with us?”

“What was she crying about?”

“Such an annoying little incident, Mother. A child that is staying at the Conways’ scraped acquaintance with Jacqueline on the train and has been trying to force herself upon her ever since. I found her just now with Jacqueline in the garden. She ran away, you may be sure, as soon as I appeared.”

“A child from the Meadows?” exclaimed Aunt Eunice. “Why, she is ever so far from home, and it’s dark.”

Penelope didn’t seem to think that fact of any importance.

“Poor little Jacqueline is too young to know how to handle such an awkward situation,” she went on. “She’s Gildersleeve through and through, Mother. Loyal and affectionate. You should have heard her stand up for the horrid little pushing creature, because she thought her a friend. I must find some way myself to put a stop to such intrusions. I wonder if I’d better speak to the Conway woman? She seems very sensible.”

“Martha Conway is the salt of the earth,” said Aunt Eunice, with conviction. “You ought to know, Penelope. You went to public school with her once upon a time. After all, why shouldn’t this child come play with Jacqueline?”

Penelope spoke loftily, as she occasionally did speak to her mother.

“Now, Mother dearest, just for the sake of your democratic theories we can’t let Jack’s daughter associate with every common child that pushes itself forward. Blood will tell, you know.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Eunice, with mild persistence, “but what’s wrong with the Conway blood, Penelope? Conways and Gildersleeves and Holdens and Taits and Trowbridges, they all came here together in the old days—God-fearing farmer-folk, the lot of them, and not much to choose among them, though some have prospered lately more than others.”

Penelope became indulgent. There wasn’t much else for her to do, if she was to retire gracefully from the argument.

“You’re a darling old radical, Mother,” she said. “It’s fortunate that I am here to protect Jacqueline.”

Aunt Eunice sighed. She frequently did sigh at the end of one of her conversations with Penelope that never seemed to get them anywhere. She rose to her feet and gathered up her thin scarf of silk.

“I think I’ll go up to my room,” she said. “I’ve a telephone call to send.”

So Penelope was left alone, victorious, if you please to call it so. She wasn’t quite sure. Indeed, to herself she said:

“Mother is provoking. If she really is going to take that view of the case, I must act with decision. For, mother or no mother, I’m going to head off any acquaintance between Jacqueline and that rough child from the Meadows, even if I have to alter all our summer plans to do it.”

CHAPTER XXIII
THROUGH THE DARKNESS

All unconscious of Cousin Penelope’s musings, Caroline stretched herself in the fresh cool bed, in her pretty room. She thought of the party next day, and all the lovely days, brimful of music and happiness, that were to follow. For Jackie had promised that she should stay there undisturbed at The Chimnies, until Aunt Edie came at the end of summer.

How kind Jackie was, and how good, and how brave! She wasn’t afraid of cows, or Cousin Penelope, or boys, or the dark. Caroline, for instance, would have been frightened to death to go the three miles in the black night down into the Meadows. But Jackie had just whistled and walked away, as unconcerned as anything. No, there was no one in the world so good or so brave as Jackie. With that worshiping thought uppermost in her mind, Caroline fell asleep, as safe and sheltered as care and love could make her.

Meantime the brave Jackie, with her heart in her throat, was making the best of her way through the vast blackness of the onion fields, back to the Conway farm.

The first of the walk wasn’t so bad. On Longmeadow Street she met people, by ones and twos and threes, on their way to prayer meeting or to the Post Office. She could see, too, the light from house windows that streamed across the broad, well-tended lawns. She enjoyed the luxury of pitying herself, all alone in the dark, with no one to care, while other children, in those lighted houses, were being tucked up in bed.

But after she left the last houses of the village, Jacqueline stopped enjoying the drama of the situation which she had chosen. The fields stretched round her endlessly. The sky was black as despair, and all stuck with stars that were sharp as screams of rage. The edges of the sky were tucked in behind the coal black mountains, from which the Indians in old days used to swoop down upon the settlement.

Jacqueline caught her breath, and looked hurriedly over her shoulder. Of course there were no Indians nowadays. They couldn’t be lurking that moment in the fields. The onions grew too low to hide an ambuscade. It was only the wind that made their tops rustle in a queer way that pumped the blood out of her heart and set it throbbing against her ear-drums.

No one could hide in the onion fields, she knew. But in the little gullies where the brooks flowed that drained the fields—that was a different matter. Every time she drew near a culvert, she ran as fast as she could upon her tired legs, through the heavy dust, until the danger point was passed. Even if there weren’t any Indians, there were Polish field-hands. Good, honest men, most of them, Aunt Martha maintained. But some of them were worthless and drunken. There was a half-witted Kaplinsky boy, too, who sometimes chased younger children, with horrid, half-articulate threats.

Jacqueline sheered into the middle of the dark gray road to avoid the patch of inky shadow that a solitary elm tree threw halfway across it. She wasn’t crying, as Caroline would have cried. Jacqueline cried, as you may have discovered, only when she was angry. Now her breath came thick and strangling, and her legs felt weak, and there were hot prickles of sweat on her temples, and cold prickles on the back of her neck. But she didn’t cry!

Some one was coming along the road behind her. No mistake! She could hear voices—men’s voices. On instinct she did what a moment before she couldn’t have been hired to do. She scuttled off the road and hid in the damp bed of the brook that bounded the Whitcomb acres. There she crouched with her head on her knees, until she heard steps shuffle along the culvert. She peeped up fearfully. Three figures of men were silhouetted against the sky. They paused on the side of the culvert (fortunately!) that was farthest from her, and spat into the brook, and spoke to one another in a foreign tongue, and laughed—ogreishly, as it seemed to Jacqueline—and then walked on.

They had actually gone. She could breathe again. But she wouldn’t dare walk on for hours and hours. They might loiter. She might overtake them.

For what seemed to her half the night, she crouched in the clammy bed of the brook. Oh, she thought to herself in those long, dreary minutes, what a silly she had been! Why hadn’t she stepped right up and told Cousin Penelope who she was? Well, she couldn’t, because she had gone and promised Caroline—a crazy promise—she hated herself because she had made it—she knew she was going to hate herself when she made it—just the same a promise was a promise, and you kept it, even though the sky fell.

But why had she ever promised? It would be dreadful at the farm now—but there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Perhaps Aunt Martha would send her to an Institution. She didn’t think any longer that an Institution would be fun. She thought of the workhouse boys in “Oliver Twist,” who never had enough to eat—and she hadn’t eaten herself now for ages and ages. She knew what hunger was! Oh, she didn’t want to go to an Institution—and she didn’t want to go to the farm—and she couldn’t go to the Gildersleeves’, because she had promised Caroline! Perhaps she’d better stay right there in the ditch and die—and then wouldn’t everybody be sorry!

Just then she heard something rustling near her. She didn’t stop to find out whether it was a harmless field mouse, or a snake, equally harmless, though perhaps less attractive. She didn’t stop for anything. She scrambled out of that ditch and started on a sore-footed run for the Conway farm. Aunt Martha—Neil—anything rather than the loneliness of the ditch upon a pitiless, black, Pole-infested night!

She was stumbling along the road, as she felt that she had been stumbling for a lifetime, panting and coughing as the dust that she kicked up got into her nose, when she heard from before her the chug and chatter of a laboring Ford. Nearer and clearer, she caught the gleam of headlights that lit up a fan-shaped space of dust and dark green onion tops.

For a second she halted in her tracks. Then she reflected that people in cars can be as undesirable as people on foot, and once more she plunged off the road. This time she found no friendly ditch to hide her. She just plumped down flat among the onion tops and lay gasping.

The Ford trundled past the spot where she had left the road—stopped—began to back. Jacqueline “froze,” like a scared little animal. Oh, why couldn’t she wake up, and find that this was just a horrible nightmare?

Some one leaned out of the Ford.