THE PINK DRESS

Mrs. Porter was Miss Barry's prop and stay in matters regarding her niece, and she turned to her when succeeding days revealed the fact that Linda had set out deliberately to spoil the "help."

The mistress of the house left the kitchen one morning after her plans were perfected for dinner and sought Mrs. Porter. She could hear the faint buzzing of the sewing machine which lived by the front window in the hall upstairs.

She ascended with a firm tread. "This is a shame," she announced warmly, as she stood beside her friend, viewing the lengths of silky soft pink stuff which were running beneath the swift needle.

"What's a shame?" asked Mrs. Porter, without stopping her work.

Miss Barry sat down in a chair opposite her.

"That you should be penned up in the house this beautiful morning stitching away hour after hour. You were doing the same thing yesterday."

"It's fun," returned Mrs. Porter.

"Oh, fun!" scornfully. "You always say everything's fun—walking to the village when Blanche Aurora has carelessly forgotten something, going out in the rain to take in the towels she's overlooked—everything's fun with you."

Mrs. Porter smiled without raising her eyes from her fine seam.

"I don't believe you ever taught music eight hours a day," she said.

"Where's Linda?" demanded Miss Barry, but she lowered her voice. She still regarded her niece as an uncertain quantity, possibly dangerous.

"Gone to Portland."

"For the land's sake!" ejaculated Miss Barry, her tone no longer sotto voce. There was no danger of Linda's hearing from the trolley car. "What takes her there?"

"Sh!" warned Mrs. Porter, still with her gay smile. "Underclothes for the little girl, I think. I'm only guessing."

"Now, look here!" responded Miss Barry. "Where is this going to stop? I understand Blanche Aurora better than any one else does. Doesn't Linda suppose I take any care of her? She's high-headed enough by nature. She needs a strong hand, and I've held a tight rein over her on principle. She's a loud, stubborn, willful young one who thinks she knows it all."

"I'm not sure, I'm not sure," replied Mrs. Porter. "I kept her here nights while you were gone and I used to read to her in the evening—'Little Women' and 'Heidi,' and so on. She was very gentle and nice and seemed to enjoy it."

Miss Barry sighed.

"I've had her two summers with me. This makes the third. I've taught her quite a little about cooking and I've nearly lost my immortal soul doing it; and I've taught her to be neat. Yes, Blanche Aurora's neat. I ain't afraid to eat after her. I've taught her to take proper care of herself, to brush her teeth and to use plenty of soap. I give her plenty of soap; and such things are enough to give her. This!" Miss Barry picked up a fold of the soft pink and rubbed its thinness between her fingers. "Why, she'll catch it on a nail the first day and it'll be in slithers in no time, and her taste for good tough calico will be gone too."

"There's plenty of pink calico," suggested Mrs. Porter. "It's color that makes the difference to a child."

Miss Barry continued to regard the zephyr gingham gloomily. That frenzied defiance, "Pink's happiness," seemed to sound again in her ears.

"Linda's just going to fill the child's head full of notions and make her discontented," she declared.

"Perhaps she has been more discontented than you realized," suggested Mrs. Porter. "Anyway, Miss Barry," she added, stopping the machine and looking up, "I fancy we are more interested in Linda than in any one else just now. Aren't we?"

"Well, of course, we are," acknowledged Miss Barry grudgingly, realizing whither the admission tended.

"To provide her with a wholesome interest is no small matter."

Miss Barry sniffed. "I don't know how wholesome it is. Blanche Aurora's as insubordinate a young one as ever lived. I'd hate to have her think any more of herself than she does already. All these expensive clothes now, and then next winter, nothing. That ain't going to help her mother any."

"That black-and-white checked suit can be made warm," returned Mrs. Porter, beginning to stitch the hem of the pink dress.

"What started her on it, anyway?" asked Miss Barry. "'Taint a mite like anything I ever knew of Linda."

Mrs. Porter smiled at her work for a silent space.

"Linda has been born again in some ways," she said at last. "In the school of this world you must have noticed that if people's eyes are not opened by truths vital to right living, they have to learn by suffering. Linda has suffered greatly. It has softened her heart. In this little experience right here she shows she longs to do something for another: to make the lot of another happier. This humble little girl happens to be to her hand."

"Humble! Not so you'd notice it," commented Miss Barry.

"I feel as if we could just lend a helping hand and be thankful."

"Of course, I'm glad she's stopped moping," admitted Miss Barry; "but I don't yet see what started her out on this. It really isn't Linda's business." The speaker was still smarting under the invasion of what she considered her own private and particular territory.

"Oh, I'm not so sure. We are our brother's keeper after all and our little sister's too."

"It don't do them any good to make them vain," declared Miss Barry. "However," she added, "Blanche Aurora's as homely as a mud fence. I don't know as there's much danger."

"Sh! Sh!" warned Mrs. Porter.

"Oh, she's outdoors, she won't hear me."

"You ask what started it," said Mrs. Porter. "Linda's awakened observation and her desire to add to the sum of happiness might have done so, but it really was Blanche Aurora's own thoughtfulness that did it." And Mrs. Porter told the story of the daily wild rose.

"Of all things," remarked Miss Barry when she had finished. "Well, I certainly never would have thought that of that sharp little thing."

"We're none of us such sharp things as we seem," returned Mrs. Porter.

"I don't know how it is with you," said Miss Barry presently, "but I think a great deal about that poor Mr. King," and her long earrings swung in a challenge.

"I do, too," returned the other quietly.

"Linda's clothed now and in her right mind, as you might say. I think instead of dressing dolls it would be more to the point, if her heart's so soft, if she'd write that young man a letter with some human kindness in it."

Mrs. Porter looked out over the sea which seemed as ever ready to encroach on the cottage and carry it off in triumph.

"Perhaps she has done so," she replied.

"No, sir. I don't believe it," was the energetic response, earrings swinging in the strong head-shaking. "If she had, he'd have answered, and I've seen every letter that's come to her. I know his writing."

"No one sees it very often," said Mrs. Porter, stitching steadily. "I should feel much easier if he would write to me, yet I don't urge it because I won't add a straw to his burdens."

"Well, I don't see how Linda, with some of the memories she's got of her own actions, can have the heart to think of clothes instead of trying to atone for her injustice."

"We don't have to take care of that," said Mrs. Porter. "I love Bertram so dearly that I've had something to meet, to conquer resentment; but the last thing we need worry about is that people won't get sufficient punishment for their mistakes. The law is working all the time, and when we strike against it until we're sufficiently hurt we turn to the gospel: Love."

"H'm," grunted Miss Barry. "Lots o' folks don't seem to get hurt. They just go ahead and flourish like the green bay tree."

"You don't see far enough," returned Mrs. Porter, smiling, "that's all. Everything isn't finished when we're through with this world; but many times you can see the working right here."

"I'd like to," snapped Miss Barry sententiously.

Mrs. Porter finished her hem and drew the dress from the machine. It had a tucked skirt, and narrow fine embroidery edging the sailor collar and cuffs. She shook it out and held it before the other's eyes. "Pretty, isn't it?" she said.

Miss Barry made some inarticulate response, arose, and went into her own room. She had some calico in her lower drawer now, designed as a parting gift to her "help" when the summer should be over. It was stone gray with white spots.

A little color burned in her cheeks as she opened the drawer and looked at it.

"Sensible and suitable," she said to herself: "sensible and suitable. She'll be glad enough of it some day when those flimsy things are in ribbons."

It was supper time when Linda returned from the city, and as soon as Blanche Aurora had done the supper dishes she always went home.

She kept her eyes on Linda, while she was waiting at table to-night, as nearly all the time as possible; and this evening there was no change in her expression; but she too had been listening for several days to the delectable music of the sewing machine. She had even been fitted to the pink and blue dresses and she saw them in a heavenly mirage floating above dishes, washtubs, and scrubbing-pails.

To do Miss Barry justice she never allowed the child to do any heavy work, and the latter's laundry efforts were limited to the dishtowels.

From three to five every day Blanche Aurora had two hours to herself; but she was expected to remain within call and to answer the door.

She had enjoyed the high happiness, therefore, of doing some of the ripping on these gowns of a millionaire's daughter which were designed to clothe her own slight form.

The way her ears listened for Linda's call now at three o'clock of an afternoon, and the celerity with which she obeyed the voice and fled up the back stairs, every freckle on her expectant face seeming to radiate, was observed by her mistress.

All the morning of the day following Linda's visit to Portland she received rebukes from Miss Barry for slap-dashing, as that lady called it.

Blanche Aurora felt, in every one of her small but evident bones, that the pink dress must be finished. Mrs. Porter had promised her that it should be the first one in hand. She panted for three o'clock to arrive while Miss Barry gave her sundry dissertations on the wear and tear on solid silver when whacked together and the sinfulness of chipping goldbanded china.

"You know I told you," she warned, "that I bought a stock set on purpose this summer, so that I could replace everything you break and take it out of your wages. You have fair warning."

"Yes'm," replied Blanche Aurora with the loud pedal down. She was possessed by a recklessness of anticipation. What did she care for wages! What had they ever brought her comparable to the treasures, unearned, which had descended upon her from a paradise named Chicago where a Cape boy had been able to pick up a million dollars in the golden streets!

It was her experience that three o'clock did finally come every afternoon; but this day was evidently going to be an exception.

At dinner, the weather being unusually warm, Linda looked like a dark-haired angel in a plain gown of white crÊpe de chine. Blanche Aurora was faintly disappointed because her quiet manner was just as usual. Surely, if her dream was to come true, and to-day was the day, Linda and Mrs. Porter couldn't behave as if nothing had happened.

Wandering about within sight of the cottage, those vacation hours were the ones during which the little girl found the perfect wild rose designed for Mr. Barry's picture. She carried it always to the room at the back of the house which was hers, and where she slept when Miss Barry wished her to stay all night.

There was a closet there, curtained off, where her waterproof and rubbers and umbrella reposed in bad weather, and a dark calico dress also hung there in case she got wet and had to change. Three hooks in the middle of the closet had lately attained significance. No human being could be cruel enough to ask another to be separated from the new dresses all day by leaving them at home. Besides, her sister Letty was almost as tall as herself. She would be sure to try on those sacred habiliments and wear them all around the neighborhood. The thought was paralyzing.

Although Blanche Aurora was quite certain several times between one-thirty and three that the clock had stopped, it did finally laboriously drag its hands around until they looked like the legs of a ballet-dancer she had once seen on a circus poster. It was actually three o'clock. She tiptoed toward the stairs. No sound.

"If I don't get the rose I'm afraid I'll forgit it," she soliloquized. So she went out the back door and around to the front of the house to a great rock under whose lee some rosebushes cuddled out of the wind. The minute she felt herself out of sight of Linda's window, however, she panted back for fear by some tragic mischance her fairy godmother might call, and receiving no answer imagine that she had gone home for an hour as Miss Barry sometimes gave her permission to do.

Finally, after much darting back and forth, Blanche Aurora secured the rose, and returning to the house, placed it as usual in a glass in her own room to wait for the morning.

As she emerged she heard her name called at the head of the back stairs.

She landed on the lower step in two leaps.

"Yes, Miss Linda," she answered, the heart under the outgrown gingham going like a triphammer.

"I want you now."

It was as the voice of an angel in the yearning ears.

"Yes, ma'am," and Blanche Aurora ascended, two steps at a time. Her dingy sneakers would not have bent daisies had they been growing upon the staircase.