CHAPTER XIII

“YOU THIEF!”

Kate was dressed and ready for the party half an hour before dinner that night. She stood surveying herself in the long door mirror. Anticipation had brought unusual colour that glowed even through the tan on her cheeks, and the corners of her lips were sharply uptilted.

“The cap is certainly a wonder worker,” she reflected. “It is magic; it makes me pretty. That’s even better than having a cap to make you invisible, much better!” And when she smiled at this idea the girl in the glass smiled, too, and was fascinatingly pretty. “Oh, if Mother could only see me! She’d hardly believe. If the picture telephone were perfected and Aunt had one I’d spend my last cent to call Mother up.”

All this was not so conceited as it sounds; for Kate knew perfectly well that ordinarily she could lay no claim to prettiness, that the charm of the person clothed in crocus-yellow satin in the mirror before her was due to Madame Pearl’s artistic genius and the pert, star-pointed silver cap. And when the idea came to her to go down to the kitchen and display herself to Julia in this enchantment it was wholly for Julia’s pleasure she intended it; she would be taking herself down in the same impersonal way she would take a doll down to turn it round. For finery of this sort and the kind of glamour that beautiful clothes give, she did not for a minute associate with herself, her _very_ self. Ever since Julia had appeared to her on the stairs, asked eager questions about her mother and bestowed the gingerbread man on Kate, she had wanted to see her again. It seemed so queer and unnatural to be eating the delicious meals she cooked and ignoring her presence in the house. Wasn’t she a friend of her mother’s? But until this minute Kate had been too shy or too strange in the ways of her aunt’s big smoothly running establishment to seek Julia out in the dim, distant servants’ apartments. Now, however, in her magic cap, looking and feeling like a young princess, and also disguised in a way, she had no hesitation about it. She felt sure that Julia would be interested and pleased, and that Katherine, if she were in Kate’s place, would do that very thing. But on second thought she decided to wait until just after dinner, for this hour would surely be about the busiest one in a cook’s day.

She crossed the room and sat down at her dressing table again, pulling out a drawer. She would reread a letter from Sam, a scrawl that had come in the afternoon’s mail when she was too much occupied to give it her full attention. She had merely glanced it down hastily and put it away in this drawer on top of the key to the orchard house. She read it now, bending her head and not bothering to pick it up.

“Don’t let her befool you, Kitty. Take our word, she’s just a silly snob. You’re worth millions of her any minute. What a figure she’d cut in that meadow—you know, with the King of the Fairies! She just wouldn’t be _anything_, would she? Teach her a lesson. We’d like to, Lee and I.” There was more of the same sort; but she did not pick it up to turn the page. There was an uneasy stirring in her heart. It hadn’t been very decent of her, writing like that about Elsie. She could not remember now just how she had done it, or why. She knew that both Sam and Lee must have struggled together over the composition of this letter in reply. They had evidently thought it a very important letter indeed, and spent their best efforts on it. She appreciated that, and she appreciated their hot partisanship, too. What she didn’t appreciate at this minute was her own motives in having so called out their sympathy. And she had better tear it up. It certainly wasn’t a letter meant for other eyes to see. With a strange little ache in her soul somewhere, probably in her conscience, she picked up the sheet. Then her heart stood still, and the fingers crumpling the paper turned cold. She went queerly sick. The key that should have lain there under the letter was gone. It was nowhere in the drawer. And whoever had taken the key could scarcely have failed to read the words staring there so blackly up at you, all in Sam’s print-like script!

Moreover—she saw it now—the thief had gone through the whole dressing table before hitting upon this particular drawer. Everything was a little out of place. The thief was Elsie, of course. No one else wanted the key. Well, serve her right, then, to have read about herself!

Kate tore the letter into shreds and dropped it back into the drawer. Then she strode through the bathroom, and stood in Elsie’s open door. Elsie was already decked in her fairy green frock, her curls tied loosely at her neck in a way that Madame Pearl had begged her to wear them. But quite regardless of her finery she was curled up in the window seat, her sandaled feet tucked under her, looking dreamily out toward the orchard house. She was lost in her thoughts for she did not hear or feel Kate when she came striding across the room to stand over her. Even in the temper she was in, Kate could not help thinking, “How unconcerned she is about that beautiful frock! It’s as though she was born in it. How delicate, how _fairy_ she looks!”

Elsie started out of her reverie at Kate’s voice.

“Give me my key,” she was saying huskily, her hand held out.

Elsie, in spite of the suddenness of the attack, did not stir except to turn her head.

“What key?”

“You know very well what key. You stole it.”

Red scorched Elsie’s cheeks at the word “stole.” Kate rejoiced at that. She would make it scorch even redder. “You are no better than a thief, to hunt through my things, to read my letters. To steal, to steal, to steal!”

Even as Kate stormed she knew, deep where knowing still had a foothold below the surface of her anger, that her greatest fury was at herself—fury that there had been such a letter for Elsie to read at all, that she had ever written the Hart boys as she had written them. But in spite of that knowing she seemed to have no control over the superficial Kate, the raging, furious Kate.

“You thief! You’re no better than a thief! Give me back my key.”

But Elsie’s response to this attack surprised Kate into a little calmness. She stood up, clenching her hands, and facing her accuser.

“Well, if I am a thief I am proud of it, proud, proud. So there! If you think I’m ashamed of it you’re wrong! Call me thief all you like. I like to be called thief. I like it. I am one. I’ve got your old key. I’ll give it to you to-night when we come up to bed, not before. I meant to all along. Then the orchard house will be yours, all yours. Go live in it! I won’t care. There’s the gong.”

But in spite of Kate’s growth in calmness her determination remained. “Aunt Katherine gave the key to me,” she said. “It belongs to me. Give it back this instant.”

“If I won’t, what will you do?”

Kate considered. “If you won’t, I’ll go right out there after dinner and climb in at a window and explore the whole house. I’ll discover your blessed secret whatever it is and not even wait till morning. That’s what I’ll do.”

Elsie stood looking at her. But something changed in her eyes. For a flash, or was it only Kate’s wild imagining, a comrade looked out through those clouded windows, making them in that instant clear as day, and then vanished. _Now Kate knew what would have been the expression on the face of the fairy in the wood that June day, eight years ago, if she had not flashed back into the sunlight too quickly for her to catch it. It would have been this sky-clear look of the golden comrade._

“Why don’t you say you’ll tell Aunt Katherine?”

Kate looked at Elsie, amazed. Such an idea had never entered her head. Her face said so. _Again the comrade flashed._ But it vanished quicker than before, and this time definitely. “Well, you told your wonderful friends, ‘The boys,’ on me. You _do_ tell, you see.”

Kate had no answer to that.

Elsie whirled about and went to her bed. From under her pillow she took the key, and returning, handed it to Kate, coolly. “Here it is,” she said, “and this is the last time I shall ever ask a favour of you, Kate Marshall. Please don’t use it to-night.”

Kate accepted the key. “All right,” she promised. “I won’t use it to-night. There won’t be time, anyway, with the party and everything.” She was not speaking to the Elsie who had asked the favour, however, but to the vanishing comrade, invisible now, whom she had seen clear enough in that one flash. Was that comrade within hearing, she wondered.

“Thanks,” Elsie said, as though she meant it, and in a relieved tone. Then she straightened. “But just the same, Kate Marshall, I shall never, never, never, never forgive you for calling me a thief, not so long as I live, I sha’n’t.”

“You said you were proud of it,” Kate rather cruelly retorted.

Elsie suddenly threw her arm across her eyes. To Kate’s dismay she was sobbing.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” she begged. “The gong rang minutes ago. Quick, wash your eyes. For Aunt Katherine’s sake! She’s been so good to us. Let’s go on pretending everything’s all right.”

Masterfully, but very wretched in her heart because of this bitter weeping of which she was the cause, Kate hurried Elsie into the bathroom, ran some cold water into the bowl, and put a wash cloth into her hands. “Quick, wash your eyes. For Aunt Katherine’s sake!” Kate commanded again, and Elsie obeyed.

Then Kate took her hand and hurried with her out through the twisted passageways to the main front hall and down the stairs. Dinner had been announced some time ago, and Aunt Katherine was waiting, standing and impatient, in the drawing-room. But when she saw them hurrying and hand-in-hand she smiled. When you have dressed for your first real party in your first real party frock you may be expected to be a little late!

“How lovely you are, Aunt Katherine.” Elsie gave her tribute spontaneously in as cool a way as though the scene upstairs had never taken place; and Kate echoed “Lovely, Aunt Katherine.”

Miss Frazier was touched. “Thank you, my dears,” she said. “And I can return the compliment. In fact, Madame Pearl has outdone herself!”

Miss Frazier deserved their tribute. She was both handsome and distinguished looking, with her graying hair done high and topped with a jewelled comb that sent out shivers of light whenever she moved, gowned in softest lilac-coloured silk draped with black lace, and wearing a long black lace scarf in a most regal manner. The lilac, the green, and the crocus-yellow figures that passed into the dining-room arm-in-arm caused the waitress Effie the most wide-eyed admiration.

“And they were as friendly, just as friendly as could be,” she told the kitchen when she removed the service plates. “You’d think Miss Frazier was their mother, she’s that affectionate. Why, it’s like a regular family to-night!”

Julia, handing out hot dishes, beamed. “Perhaps everything’s coming right, after all,” she said. “Katherine’s child will shed sunshine all about just as Katherine did.”

Bertha, sitting at a distant table playing cards with Timothy and the gardener, sniffed at that. “Miss Elsie is as capable of shedding sunshine as anybody,” she said, defensively. “She’s just made of it herself. I’m always telling you.”

“Yes, you’re always telling. But we’re never seeing,” Julia retorted. “Touched with melancholy, she seems to me, but as nice as you please. Only not cheerful to have about. It’s probably her poor mother’s awful death. Her heart’s broke.”

Bertha shook her head. “I don’t think her heart’s broken. She’s as gay as anything alone with me sometimes! And she’s the most generous child living.”

“She does funny things, though,” Timothy offered his bit. “Carrying groceries up to her room, buying eggs and bread and stuff and paying for ’em herself. Holt told me.”

Bertha looked at him, unbelieving. “Groceries in her room? No such thing. Who takes care of her room, do you think? I never saw such a thing in it. What do you mean?”

Then Timothy related how for a week past Elsie had bought foodstuffs every time she went to the village, and refused to give them to him to carry around to the kitchen afterward. Julia had assured him they were never ordered by her; so of course Miss Elsie took them to her room. Where else could she keep them?

Bertha would have nothing to do with that idea. Indeed, it was impossible there could be any such food supply as Timothy described in Elsie’s room, for Bertha knew every inch of that dainty apartment, and kept it in order. Still, she had respect for Timothy, and could not doubt his word when he insisted that Elsie actually had bought bread and eggs, lettuce, oil, and nuts and brought them home with her in the car. “What she does with ’em’s none of our business, that I can see,” she volunteered. “Feeds the birds in the gardens and orchard perhaps. She’s that unselfish! She’s probably even kinder to the birds than to human beings.”

But every one laughed at this explanation. You don’t feed birds eggs and oil and nuts! No, there was some mystery about it. Julia had felt mystery in the air for a week past, and not just because of Elsie’s queer purchases and the puzzle of what became of them, either. Mystery was simply “in the air.” Julia “_felt_” it.

Timothy nodded his head knowingly. Timothy was Irish and very romantic. “What can you expect?” he asked. “In a house with two young things like that! Why, they’ve just come out of the Fairyland of their childhood, they’re standing now on the edges of life. What can you expect but mystery? They’re all mystery.”

“I don’t mean that kind of mystery, Timothy,” Julia protested. “I mean regular down-and-out _mystery_. I feel it in my bones. You wait and see if I’m not right.”

Effie had returned from the dining-room again. “Miss Frazier’s telling them about Rome now,” she said. “She says she’ll take them both there together sometime, if Miss Kate’s mother’ll let her go. She said ‘Katherine’ just as easy as though it didn’t hurt a bit and as though it might be any name. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind our speaking it now. Things are changing.”

It was true. Things were changing with Miss Frazier. She sat at the head of her table to-night a light-hearted, spirited person. And she was more than that. She was intensely interesting. She said she meant soon to begin to travel, really to travel and see the world. Arabia attracted her, and all Asia. A book by a man named Ferdinand Ossendowski had lately stimulated her roving instincts and enthralled her imagination. Why should she not explore a totally different civilization from the one she had been born into! She recounted some of Ossendowski’s exploits, adventures, and escapes, and his stories of the “King of the World.” As she talked a panorama entirely new to her listeners unrolled before their minds’ visions. What a place this world was, what a place to be alive in, and what a time to be alive! How the importance of personal affairs evaporated in the face of such contemplation! The girls were as stirred as Miss Frazier herself apparently had been stirred; they were lifted out of themselves. They felt that the world was a challenge, that life was a challenge—a glorious one. For the time the party, drawing so near now, sank into insignificance.

But Miss Frazier, looking at their eager faces, suddenly remembered. She said, “Katherine wouldn’t let me take you to such out-of-the-way places yet, Kate, and of course I wouldn’t want to. But when we go to Rome——” Then she had talked about Rome and places nearer home. But in speaking of them she touched them with a new light and interest. Kate’s dream, as most girls’ dreams, had often been of some day going “abroad.” Such an adventure in contemplation had always seemed the very height of happiness to her. But now, Miss Frazier’s conversation lent travel new glamour, for Miss Frazier was steeped in history, the history of nations and religions and art, and her idea of travel was not simply of adventure into lands, but into realms of imagination, and into the past.

“Would you girls like to travel with me for a summer—perhaps next summer?” she asked.

Kate’s joy at such a prospect was too great to allow of words. She simply glowed at Aunt Katherine. But Elsie suddenly turned away her head. Somehow then, in that instant, the spell was broken. The dinner table with the diners floated back to Miss Frazier’s house in Oakdale, Massachusetts, and there they sat, consuming “cottage pudding” with lemon sauce, dressed and ready for a party.

After dinner Miss Frazier settled down, expecting to finish “The King of the Fairies” before the guests began to arrive, leaving the girls to amuse themselves in their own way. Elsie wandered out on to the star-lighted terrace, looking exactly like a dreamy fairy. Kate went with her, not speaking, and soon leaving her, to find her way around to the kitchen door.

The servants in their own attractive dining-room were just beginning dinner. Kate had forgotten how many of them there would be, and was almost overcome with embarrassment, when they all leapt to their feet and the maids walked around her in a circle, exclaiming admiringly. “I just wanted to show Julia the new frock Aunt Katherine gave me,” Kate was explaining a little breathlessly. “I never seem to see you, Julia,” she added, catching her eye at last in the group, “and I never really thanked you for the gingerbread man and your kind inquiries about Mother.”

“To think,” exclaimed Julia, “of my giving you a gingerbread man! Where were my wits? Why, you’re a young lady. But your mother liked gingerbread even after she was a young lady.”

“You’ll have a fine time at your party in that gown,” Isadora affirmed. “You couldn’t help it. There’ll be nothing half so beautiful.”

Meanwhile Bertha beamed. In a way she felt responsible for this young vision of splendour. Hadn’t she helped choose the dress, and hadn’t she finally put Kate into it! She was certainly involved in the display.

Then Julia said, feelingly, “We’re all grateful to you, Miss Kate, for bringing a party to this house again, for getting things natural. Miss Frazier’s acting like herself now, and it’s on account of you.”

“Why, I haven’t done anything,” Kate denied.

But she liked their praise and their warmth, and she felt now entirely in the mood for the party to begin.