CHAPTER IX

SOMETHING OF FAIRY IN IT

“You haven’t told me a word about how you like the orchard house!” Aunt Katherine said. “Did you go all over it? The study is really the nicest room. Did you like that? And did you see your mother’s old playroom?”

Kate hesitated to confess to her aunt that she had not been near the orchard house. It might involve Elsie too much. She remembered Elsie’s plea last night. So she hesitated, feeling her cheeks redden. But after an instant she said, “I think I shall save it for a day when there isn’t so much to do. It’s a darling house, but I haven’t been in.”

“After the party on Thursday I am hoping that all your days here will be full of things to do, yours and Elsie’s, too. She will begin to have the life of other girls again. For myself I have hardly cared a bit. I had rather grown away from my old friends, anyway, and larger interests, or at least more impersonal interests, have been absorbing me of late years. But now I’m pocketing my pride for Elsie’s sake, and going more than halfway toward reconciliations.... Madame Pearl, the woman to whom I am sending you to-morrow for frocks, is an artist in her way. You two girls must choose dresses that not only become yourselves but go well together.”

For Kate all the puzzling hints that ran through her aunt’s conversation were forgotten in this new subject. “But Mother and I thought my pink organdie would do for a party, if you gave one. You haven’t seen it. I shall wear it for dinner to-night.”

“No, I haven’t seen it, but I am sure it is very dainty and pretty. Even so, this is to be Elsie’s first real party, and her first real party frock. And it will be more appropriate for you to have dresses that match in a way, or contrast with each other artistically. You _will_ let me give you such a gift, won’t you, Kate?”

There was surprising entreaty in Aunt Katherine’s dark eyes, and fear, too. Would Kate be simply an echo of her mother? Would she rise up in pride and say, “No charity, thanks”?

Meanwhile, Kate was thinking rapidly. She had no idea whatever whether her mother would want her to accept a party frock from Aunt Katherine or not. But quickly she decided that her mother would want her to speak for herself now, that this was a matter between herself and her aunt.

“Of course I shall love to have a party dress,” she exclaimed. “Oh, but you are good to me, Aunt Katherine! And it will be my first as well as Elsie’s.”

Miss Frazier flushed, pleasure all out of proportion to the event, seemingly, shining from her eyes. She said “Thank you, my dear,” in as heartfelt accents as though Kate herself were the donor.

Kate laughed at that, her eyes crinkling, and after the laugh her mouth still stayed tilted up at the corners. “Oh, I’m so excited,” she exclaimed. “But aren’t you going to Boston with us, to Madame Pearl’s, to help us choose?”

“No, I think not. Bertha has excellent taste, and Madame Pearl herself would not make a mistake. And I think that the more I am out of it the better the chance is that you and Elsie will find each other. A day together, shopping, lunching at my club, and seeing ‘The Blue Bird’ afterward ought to give two girls all the opportunity they need to get over any strangeness.”

“‘The Blue Bird’! Well, it’s just as Mother said it would be, wonderful things galore! Oh, dear! I wish she could know this minute that I’m to see ‘The Blue Bird’! We’ve read it, of course. But to see it! I shall write her again to-night—and the boys, too.”

Kate was sitting with clasped hands, her hazel eyes narrowed and golden with light. She was almost little-girlish in her excitement and pleasure, and of course the corners of her mouth were uptilted at their most winged angle. Aunt Katherine, watching her, thought, “She is better than pretty, this grand-niece of mine. She is fascinating. Just to look at her stirs your imagination.”

But she said, “Eat your toast before it is cold, I advise you. And don’t neglect the marmalade. It is unusually good marmalade they serve here at the Green Shutter.”

And so Kate came to earth. “But such a nice earth!” she said to herself.

Before they had finished their tea, Aunt Katherine rose to a pitch of confidences that surprised herself. But it was just exactly as though in Kate she had found a friend, a friend to whom she was able to open her heart. At this moment in her life Miss Frazier needed this sort of a confidante badly. They were talking about Elsie again and her coldness and indifference to Kate.

“There is one obvious explanation for it,” Aunt Katherine said. “I can think of no other. She may be jealous. She may have been jealous from the first minute of your arrival.”

Kate was too surprised to think at all. “Jealous—_of me_? Why?”

“That you might take her place with me, cheat her somehow of what she apparently considers hers. She sees, as you have guessed, that I do not like her. May she not be all the more jealous of you just because of that?”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Kate was thinking clearly again. “She isn’t horrid like that. I know it. She’s too beautiful and lovely. There’s something about her that makes any such idea just impossible. She mayn’t like me, and I may be cross with her, but for all that—for all that I know she’s not a _mean_ person, Aunt Katherine.”

Kate was amazed herself at having so suddenly become Elsie’s champion. Loyalty to that strange girl had apparently been born in her all in a second. Or was it loyalty only to the comrade she had glimpsed flashingly, once in the mirror last night, and once in sunshine this morning? Whatever it was to, it was very real and staunch.

Aunt Katherine’s face lightened remarkably. “You may be right, and I earnestly hope you are,” she said. “For if Elsie were unfriendly toward you for any such reason—well, it would be the last straw, the very last.”

As they spun along toward home through the cooling air, Miss Frazier’s expression grew happier and happier. Kate had done for her what she could not do for herself: lightened real suspicions, and eased her heart.

It was almost dinner time when they arrived. If Kate was to don her pink organdie she would have to hurry. She raced up the stairs and found Bertha in her room waiting for her.

“You have only ten minutes, Miss Kate,” she warned. “Your bath is set.”

A glance showed Kate the pink organdie freshly pressed, crisp and cool, hung over a chair back, and the white slip to go under it on the bed. Her pumps were set down by the dressing table and some fresh stockings near on a stool. Two baths a day! How comfortable! Kate, still aglow with her afternoon, had quite forgotten her self-consciousness with this lady’s maid.

“Has Miss Elsie dressed?” she asked.

Bertha answered rather worriedly: “No, and none of us have seen her all afternoon. I do wish she would come up. I can’t think how she’s been amusing herself, or where.”

Kate herself began to wonder, when she had had her bath and was freshly dressed. “There’s the gong!” she exclaimed.

But simultaneously with the note of the gong Elsie’s door slammed and there she was in the bathroom door.

“I’m late,” she called, but not at all ruefully. “No time to dress, Bertha. Hello, Kate.”

“You’ll have to wash your face, whether there’s time or not,” Bertha assured her. “And your hair, it’s a sight! Where did you get like that?”

Elsie laughed, elfin laughter. “Never mind where. And you aren’t my nurse. You’re my tiring-woman. Bear that in mind, Mrs. Bertha.”

Bertha’s worried face changed into a beaming one. Elsie in such good spirits! That was the best that Bertha asked of life, Kate intuitively felt.

But it was true enough. Elsie very much needed washing and brushing. Her nose and forehead were beaded with little drops of perspiration, her cheeks were a burning red, as though she had been sitting over a fire, or perhaps long in the sun, and there were smudges of what looked like flour on chin and arms. As for her hair, it was all in little damp curls across her brow and over her ears: one side had come completely undone, and showered down on to her shoulder.

“I can’t for the life of me see how you ever got in such a mess,” Bertha murmured happily as she officiated in Elsie’s hurried cleaning up. “You might just as well be a cook in a kitchen! But, oh, dear! What’s that burn?”

“It is horrid, isn’t it?” Elsie agreed.

“Well, I think you need a nurse more than a lady’s maid! Did Julia let you get near the stove on this broiling day? Here’s some olive oil.”

After another minute of scurrying Elsie appeared in Kate’s door. “It was nice of you to wait for me,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’ve made you late.”

Aunt Katherine lifted her brows when she saw Elsie still in her blue and white morning dress. But the fact that the girls had come in together, actually arm-in-arm, made up for much. In fact, it put Aunt Katherine into a light and gay mood. Things were beginning to go as she had planned now. At dinner she told Elsie about the party set for Friday night. And Elsie, who herself was in a gay spirit, thanked her aunt prettily for everything—the coming party, the promised frock, and the seats for “The Blue Bird.”

“Why, she is a human being, after all,” Kate admitted. “This morning and last night seems like some dream I had about her.” And Kate opened her hazel eyes a little wider now as she looked at Elsie across the table. She was on the watch for the reappearance of the vanishing comrade.

That evening again Miss Frazier sent the girls to walk in the garden. She herself settled down in the big winged chair under her especial reading lamp and picked up “The King of the Fairies,” which Kate had not forgotten to place there.

The orchard drew all Kate’s attention once they were out in the growing starlight. She looked toward it often as they paced back and forth on the garden paths. At first she talked to Elsie about her afternoon, the ride, and the Green Shutter Tea Room. But Elsie, though she listened with interest, and even took pains to ask questions, in return gave Kate no information as to how _she_ had spent the hours. Even so, Elsie was so completely changed that finally Kate had the hardihood to tell her laughingly about the light she had seen in the orchard house last night before falling to sleep.

“I am sure I saw the light. But of course I couldn’t have heard the door,” she finished. “That must have been imagination, for sound doesn’t carry like that.”

But at this mention of the orchard house Elsie’s new manner fell from her as though she had dropped a cloak. She stiffened as they walked and her voice took on restraint.

“If you imagined the sound of the door, why wasn’t the light imagination, too?” she asked reasonably. “Or it may have been fireflies in the trees. See them now.”

It was true enough. Over in the orchard fireflies were twinkling, almost in clouds.

“It wasn’t like firefly light, just the same.”

“Well, you were almost asleep, weren’t you? It was probably fireflies and sleepiness all mixed up.”

Kate did not acknowledge that she was impressed by this reasoning. But deep in her mind she was.

“And you’re not to tell Aunt Katherine about the light. Promise me that. She would go investigating then. You’ve got to promise.”

Kate’s quick temper flashed up and ruined the new relation between them at Elsie’s brusque command.

“I haven’t got to promise. Why do you think you can boss me like that?”

Elsie’s answer to that was a tossed head. “I’m going in,” she said shortly.

“_I’m_ not.” Kate sat down abruptly in a garden chair they were passing. When Elsie had gone on Kate bit her lip, hard, hard to keep back the tears. “Now I’ve spoiled everything,” she accused herself bitterly. “Why did I have to go talking about the orchard house at all? Everything was so jolly, so right at last! Elsie was beginning to be more than decent. What an idiot I am!”

She leaned her head down upon the arm of the chair. Then the inner, more tranquil Kate came forward. “Think about the King of the Fairies,” she said. “Look as he looked, see as he saw. Perhaps if you do, all this trouble will dissolve in light. Get above the quarrel.”

And as she sat curled up there, she tried hard to follow the inner Kate’s directions. She tried to look at the orchard with the different seeing. If she followed the King of the Fairies’ directions, mightn’t she see the _all_ of things as the girl and boy on the fence had seen the all? She stayed very still, and watched, expectantly.

Elsie came back to her, silent as a shadow. It was almost as though she could read Kate’s thoughts; for she knelt down by her on the dewy grass, and putting her face quite close to Kate’s said in a low voice, but earnestly: “I’ll tell you this much, Kate Marshall, _there is something fairyish about that little orchard house_. If things fairyish show to you around it or in it, it is because they _are there_. This is no lie. I cross my heart. But you aren’t wanted there. And unless you are very mean you will keep your promise to me and not go near.”

Then Elsie floated away, and was lost to Kate in the garden shadows, like a fairyish thing herself.

Kate started up. Had she dreamed Elsie’s coming back, and her words? She had been in such a _different_ state of mind trying to see as the King of the Fairies saw, that she hardly knew. Anyway, big girl of fifteen that she was, she began looking again toward the orchard house with deepened expectancy.