BUT for some reason which Johnnie could not fathom, Cis suddenly began to show a great deal of interest in the flat. Indeed, she was by way of making his life miserable, what with her constant warnings and instructions about keeping the rooms neat and clean. And she proved that her concern was genuine by continuing to rise early each day in order to help him with the housework.

In her own tiny closet she brought about a really magnificent improvement. This took place mainly on Decoration Day, a day which, just because of its name, Johnnie regarded as particularly suitable for the happy task in hand. Cis's ceiling and walls had never been papered (she explained this by pointing out that paper would only have made the little cubby-hole just that much smaller, and there was not even a mite of room to spare). By dint of extra violet-making, she bought a can of paint and a brush. Then borrowing a ladder from the janitress, she first cleared her bedroom of its contents, and next wiped every inch of plaster—sides and top—by means of a rag tied over the end of the broom. After that, in her oldest dress, with her head wrapped up, she tinted her retreat, the mop-boards included, a delicate blue.

Now, however, she was far from done. The paint dry, she restored her two pieces of furniture to their rightful places. The dressing-table box she skirted with cheesecloth dipped in blued starch; and covered the top of it with a roll of crinkly, flower-sprinkled tissue paper. To the general effect, her cretonne-encased pillow gave the final touch. It was Johnnie's opinion that the pillow was one of the most beautiful things in New York. When it was stood up stiffly against the wall at the end of the narrow bed shelf; when the picture of Colonel Roosevelt was again in its place of honor beside the bit of mirror, with the handsome Edwarda leaned negligently just beneath; and when Cis had lavished upon her bed and box the delicious scent of a whole nickel's-worth of orris root, Johnnie, wildly enthused, signaled the flat above.

"I'll bet there ain't any room that's nicer'n this in the whole Waldorf 'Storia!" he vowed to the little Jewish lady when she came rocking down to marvel over the transformation, hands uplifted, head wagging. "Don't you think it's fine, Mrs. Kukor? and don't it smell 'zac'ly like Mrs. Reisenberger?"

"Pos-i-tivvle!" agreed Mrs. Kukor.

Next, in her housewifely zeal, Cis started in to improve the kitchen. Keeping the ladder an extra day by special permission she climbed it to wash the eight small panes of the window, after which she hung at either side of them a strip of the blue-tinted cheesecloth. But when Barber saw the curtains, he called them "tomfoolery," and tore them down. So nothing happened to the rest of the flat.

That rebuke of Barber's seemed to deflect Cis's interest from the rooms to herself. For now upon her own person she wrought improvements. These did not escape Johnnie, who accepted them as a part of the general upheaval—an upheaval which she informed him was "Spring cleaning." Each night before retiring she pressed her one dress, and freshened its washable collar; she also brushed her hair a full hundred times, conscientiously counting the strokes. As for her teeth, Johnnie warned her that she would wear out both them and the ivory-handled brush in no time, since, night and morning, she used the brush tirelessly. Also she wasted valuable hours (in his opinion) by manicuring her fingernails when she might better have been threading a kitchen jungle all beast-infested.

Next, another, and the most startling change in her. She came out of her blue room one morning looking very tall, and odd. At first Johnnie did not see what was wrong, and stared, puzzled and bewildered.

But Barber saw. "What's the idea?" he wanted to know, and none too pleasantly.

"I'm almost seventeen," Cis answered.

Almost seventeen! Johnnie looked at her closer, and discovered the thing that made her different. It was her hair. Usually she wore it braided, and tied at the nape of her neck. But now that shining braid was pinned in a coil on the back of her head!

"Y' look foolish!" went on Barber. "And y' can't waste any more money 'round here, buyin' pins and combs and such stuff. Y' can jus' wear it down your back for another year or so."

"All the other girls have their hair up," she argued. "And I've got to have mine out of the way."

She did not take that coil down. Yet she was by no means indifferent to the attitude of Big Tom. Johnnie, who understood so well her every expression, noticed how, when the longshoreman sometimes entered unexpectedly, Cis would go whiter than usual, as if frightened; she would start at the mere sound of his voice, and drop whatever happened to be in her hand.

When Big Tom was out she would walk about aimlessly and restlessly; would halt absentmindedly with her face to a wall and not seem to see it. She did not want to talk; she preferred to be let completely alone. She was irritable, or she sighed a good deal. She took to watching the clock, and wishing it were to-morrow morning. And if, giving in to Johnnie's entreaties, she consented to take part in a think, all she cared to do was bury the unhappy Cora, or watch lovely, and love-smitten, Elaine breathe her last.

At other times she laughed as she had never laughed before in all the five years or more that Johnnie had lived in the Barber flat; and broke out in jolly choruses. If Big Tom came in, she did not stop singing until he bade her to, and the moment he was gone, she was at it again, with a few dance steps thrown in, the blue eyes sparkling mischievously, and dimples showing in cheeks that were pink.

She also had dreamy spells; and if left undisturbed would sit at the window by the hour, her eyes on the sky, her slender hands clasped, a smile, sweet and gentle, fixing her young mouth. And Johnnie knew by that smile that she was thinking thinks—that the kitchen was occupied by people whom he did not see. He guessed that one of these was of Royal blood; and came to harbor hostile thoughts toward a certain young Prince, since never before had Cis failed to share her visions with Johnnie. For the first time he found himself shut out.

Once he caught her talking out loud. "I wish," she murmured, "I wish, I wish—"

"Who're you talkin' to?" he asked.

She started, and blushed. "Why—why, I'm talking to you," she declared.

"Well, then, what is it y' wish?" he persisted. "Go ahead. I'm listenin'."

But it had slipped her mind, she said crossly. Yet the next moment, in an excess of regret and affection, "Oh, Johnnie, you're so dear! So dear!" she told him, and gave him a good hug.

He worried about her not a little those days; and though from a natural delicacy he did not discuss her with Mr. Perkins, he did ask the leader an anxious question: "Could a girl be hurt by pinnin' a hot wad of braid right against the back of her brain?"

Mr. Perkins looked surprised. "They all do it," he pointed out. (Evidently he did not surmise whom Johnnie had in mind.)

"But s'pose a girl ain't used to it," pressed Johnnie.

"They get used to it," assured Mr. Perkins.

But Cis got worse and worse. One day soon after this, Johnnie came upon Edwarda, face down on the blue-room floor, and in a harrowing state of dishevelment—Edwarda, the costly, the precious, the not-to-be-touched! And when, on Cis's return, he tested her affection for the new doll by swinging it unceremoniously by one leg in Letitia fashion, "Don't break her," Cis cautioned indifferently; "because I'm going to give her away one of these days to some poor little girl."

He gasped. She was going to give away His namesake!

Then his eyes were opened, and he found out the whole sad truth—this one Sunday afternoon. Big Tom was out, and Cis was more restless than usual. She would not hunt in goat skins with Johnnie and Crusoe, nor capture the drifting Hispaniola along with Jim Hawkins. She had no taste even for a lively massacre. And as Johnnie was equally determined neither to bury Cora again nor float upon a death barge with the Maid of Astolat, they compromised upon Aladdin and the Princess Buddir al Buddoor.

The occasion selected was that certain momentous visit to the bath, with Aladdin and Johnnie placed behind a door in order to catch a glimpse of the royal lady's face as she came by. Cis was in attendance upon the Princess, the dismantled blue cotton curtains trailing grandly behind her and getting trodden upon by the Grand Vizier (in a wheel chair). A great crowd of ladies and slaves surrounded these celebrities as they wound through silent streets, between shops filled with silks and jewels and luscious fruits. The air was heavy with perfume. David, Goliath and Buckle bore aloft palms with which they stirred this scented breeze. Going on before, were the four millionaires, likewise a band dispensing music——

It happened—even as the Princess lifted the mist of her veil to display her sweet, pale beauty. Cis came short unexpectedly. A strange, sorrowful, and almost frightened look was in her blue eyes. She held out helpless, trembling hands to Johnnie. "Oh, what's the use of my trying to pretend?" she cried. "Johnnie, I can't see them any more! I can't see them! I can't see them!"

Then, a burst of weeping. Old Grandpa also began to weep. At that Cis stumbled toward the door of her room, colliding on the way with the end of the cookstove, since one slender arm was across her eyes, and shut herself from sight. For some minutes after that the sound of her muffled sobbing came from that closet over which she had so recently been proudly happy.

Johnnie first quieted the little old soldier by rolling him to and fro between Albany and Pittsburgh. Then he went to stand at Cis's door, where he listened, his head bent, his heart full of tender concern. Very wisely he said nothing, asked no questions. It was not till the sobbing ceased that he strove to comfort her by his loving, awkward, boyish attentions.

"Cis, can't I fetch y' a cup of nice, sugared cold tea?" he called in. "'R a saucer with some hot beans?"

"Oh, no," she quavered.

Now he knew what had brought about all those differences in her; he understood what her grief was about. It was indeed the hair. Yet the hair was only an outward sign of the hidden tragedy—which was that, for good and all, for ever and ever, she was to be shut out from all wonderful, living, thrilling thinks.

"She's gittin' grown-up," he told himself sorrowfully.