Peggy and Georgina sat on the piazza just outside one of the long French windows, where they could watch the gay scene inside. It seemed almost as gay outside, when one turned to look across the harbor filled with moving lights. Captain and Mrs. Burrell were outside also. They sat farther down the piazza, near the railing, talking to one of the officers who was not dancing. Once when the music stopped, Peggy turned to Georgina to say:

"Do you hear Daddy speaking Spanish to that officer from South America?

Doesn't he do it well? I can understand a little of what they say because we lived in South America a while last year. We join him whenever he is stationed at a port where officers can take their families. He says that children of the navy have to learn to be regular gypsies. I love going to new places. How many languages can your father speak?"

Georgina, thus suddenly questioned, felt that she would rather die than acknowledge that she knew so little of her father that she could not answer. She was saved the mortification of confessing it, however, by the music striking up again at that moment.

"Oh, I can play that!" she exclaimed. "That's the dance of the tarantula. Isn't it a weird sort of thing?"

The air of absorbed interest with which Georgina turned to listen to the music made Peggy forget her question, and listen in the same way. She wanted to do everything in the same way that Georgina did it, and from that moment that piece of music held special charm for her because Georgina called it weird.

The next time Georgina glanced down the piazza Mrs. Burrell was alone.

In her dimly-lighted corner, she looked like one of the pretty summer girls one sees sometimes on a magazine cover. She was all in white with a pale blue wrap of some kind about her that was so soft and fleecy it looked like a pale blue cloud. Georgina found herself looking down that way often, with admiring glances. She happened to have her eyes turned that way when the Captain came back and stood beside her chair. The blue wrap had slipped from her shoulders without her notice, and he stooped and picked it up. Then he drew the soft, warm thing up around her, and bending over, laid his cheek for just an instant against hers.

It was such a fleeting little caress that no one saw it but Georgina, and she turned her eyes away instantly, feeling that she had no right to look, yet glad that she had seen, because of the warm glow it sent through her. She couldn't tell why, but somehow the world seemed a happier sort of place for everybody because such things happened in it.

"I wonder," she thought wistfully, as her eyes followed the graceful steps of the foreign dancers and her thoughts stayed with what she had just witnessed, "I wonder if that had been Barby and my father, would _he_?"----

But she did not finish even to herself the question which rose up to worry her. It came back every time she recalled the little scene.

On the morning after her visit to the Gray Inn she climbed up on the piano stool when she had finished practising her scales. She wanted a closer view of the portrait which hung over it. It was an oil painting of her father at the age of five. He wore kilts and little socks with plaid tops, and he carried a white rabbit in his arms. Georgina knew every inch of the canvas, having admired it from the time she was first held up to it in someone's arms to "see the pretty bunny." Now she looked at it long and searchingly.

Then she opened the book-case and took out an old photograph alb.u.m.

There were several pictures of her father in that. One taken with his High School cla.s.s, and one with a group of young medical students, and one in the white service dress of an a.s.sistant surgeon of the navy. None of them corresponded with her dim memory of him.

Then she went upstairs to Barby's room, and stood before the bureau, studying the picture upon it in a large silver frame. It was taken in a standing position and had been carefully colored, so that she knew accurately every detail of the dress uniform of a naval surgeon from the stripes of gold lace and maroon velvet on the sleeves, to the eagle on the belt buckle and the sword knot dangling over the scabbard. There were various medals pinned on his breast which had always interested her.

But this morning it was not the uniform or the decorations which claimed her attention. It was the face itself. She was looking for something in the depths of those serious dark eyes, that she had seen in Captain Burrell's when he looked at Peggy; something more than a smile, something that made his whole face light up till you felt warm and happy just to look at him. She wondered if the closely-set lips she was studying could curve into a welcoming smile if anybody ran to meet him with happy outstretched arms. But the picture was baffling and disappointing, because it was a profile view.

Presently, she picked it up and carried it to her own room, placing it on the table where she always sat to write. She had screwed up her courage at last, to the point of writing the letter which long ago she had decided ought to be written by somebody.

Once Barby said, "When you can't think of anything to put in a letter, look at the person's picture, and pretend you're talking to it."

Georgina followed that advice now. But one cannot talk enthusiastically to a listener who continues to show you only his profile.

Suddenly, her resentment flamed hot against this handsome, averted face which was all she knew of a father. She thought bitterly that he had no business to be such a stranger to her that she didn't even know what he looked like when he smiled. Something of the sternness of her old Pilgrim forbears crept into her soul as she sat there judging him and biting the end of her pen. She glanced down at the sheet of paper on which she had painstakingly written "Dear Father." Then she scratched out the words, feeling she could not honestly call him that when he was such a stranger. Taking a clean sheet of paper, she wrote even more painstakingly:

"Dear Sir: There are two reesons----"

Then she looked up in doubt about the spelling of that last word. She might have gone downstairs and consulted the dictionary but her experience had proved that a dictionary is an unsatisfactory book when one does not know how to spell a word. It is by mere chance that what one is looking for can be found. After thinking a moment she put her head out of the window and called softly down to Belle, who was sewing on the side porch. She called softly so that Tippy could not hear and answer and maybe add the remark, "But why do you ask? Are you writing to your mother?"

Belle spelled the word for her, and taking another sheet of paper Georgina made a fresh start. This time she did not hesitate over the spelling, but scribbled recklessly on until all that was crowding up to be said was on the paper.

"Dear Sir: There are two reasons for writing this. One is about your wife. Cousin Mehitable says something is eating her heart out, and I thought you ought to know. Maybe as you can cure so many strange diseeses you can do something for her. The other is to ask you to send us another picture of yourself. The only ones we have of you are looking off sideways, and I can't feel as well acquainted with you as if I could look into your eyes.

"There is a lovely father staying at the Gray Inn. He is Peggy Burrell's. He is a naval officer, too. It makes me feel like an orfan when I see him going down the street holding her hand. He asked me to tell him all about where you are and what you are doing, because you cured him once on a hospital ship, and I was ashamed to tell him that I didn't know because Barby has not had a letter from you for over four months. Please don't let on to her that I wrote this. She doesn't know that I was under the bed when Cousin Mehitable was talking about you, and saying that everybody thinks it is queer you never come home. If you can do only one of the things I asked, please do the first one. Yours truly, Georgina Huntingdon."

Having blotted the letter, Georgina read it over carefully, finding two words that did not look quite right, although she did not know what was the matter with them. So she called softly out of the window again to Belle:

"How do you spell diseases?"

Belle told her but added the question, "Why do you ask a word like that?

Whose diseases can you be writing about?"

Georgina drew in her head without answering. She could not seek help in that quarter again, especially for such a word as "orfan." After studying over it a moment she remembered there was a poem in "Songs for the Little Ones at Home," called "The Orphan Nosegay Girl."

A trip downstairs for the tattered volume gave her the word she wanted, and soon the misspelled one was scratched out and rewritten. There were now three unsightly blots on the letter and she hovered over them a moment, her pride demanding that she should make a clean, fair copy. But it seemed such an endless task to rewrite it from beginning to end, that she finally decided to send it as it stood.

Addressed, stamped and sealed, it was ready at last and she dropped it into the mail-box. Then she had a moment of panic. It was actually started on its way to Hong-Kong and nothing in her power could stop it or bring it back. She wondered if she hadn't done exactly the wrong thing, and made a bad matter worse.

CHAPTER XXVI

PEGGY JOINS THE RAINBOW-MAKERS

ONLY one more thing happened before Barby's return that is worth recording. Georgina went to spend the day at the Gray Inn. Captain Burrell, himself, came to ask her. Peggy had to be put back into her brace again he said. He was afraid it had been taken off too soon. She was very uncomfortable and unhappy on account of it. They would be leaving in the morning, much earlier than they had intended, because it was necessary for her physician to see her at once, and quite probable that she would have to go back to the sanitarium for a while. She didn't want to leave Provincetown, because she did not want to go away from Georgina.

"You have no idea how she admires you," the Captain added, "or how she tries to copy you. Her dream of perfect happiness is to look and act just like you. Yesterday she made her mother tie a big pink bow on her poor little cropped head because you pa.s.sed by wearing one on your curls. You can cheer her up more than anyone else in the world."

So Georgina, touched both by the Captain's evident distress over Peggy's returning lameness, and Peggy's fondness for her, went gladly. The knowledge that everything she said and did was admired, made it easy for her to entertain the child, and the pity that welled up in her heart every time she watched the thin little body move around in the tiresome brace, made her long to do something that would really ease the burden of such a misfortune.

Mrs. Burrell was busy packing all morning, and in the afternoon went down the street to do some shopping that their hurried departure made necessary. Peggy brought out her post-card alb.u.m, in which to fasten all the postals she had added to her collection while on the Cape. Among them was one of the Figurehead House, showing "Hope" perched over the portico.

"Bailey says that's a sea-cook," Peggy explained gravely. "A sea-cook who was such a wooden-head that when he made doughnuts they turned green. He's got one in his hand that he's about to heave into the sea."

"Oh, horrors! No!" exclaimed Georgina, as scandalized as if some false report had been circulated about one of her family.

"That is Hope with a wreath in her hand, looking up with her head held high, just as she did when she was on the prow of a gallant ship.

Whenever I have any trouble or disappointment I think of her, and she helps me to bear up and be brave, and go on as if nothing had happened."

"How?" asked Peggy, gazing with wondering eyes at the picture of the figurehead, which was too small on the postal to be very distinct.

Anything that Georgina respected and admired so deeply, Peggy wanted to respect and admire in the same way, but it was puzzling to understand just what it was that Georgina saw in that wooden figure to make her feel so. Accustomed to thinking of it in Bailey's way, as a sea-cook with a doughnut, it was hard to switch around to a point of view that showed it as Hope with a wreath, or to understand how it could help one to be brave about anything.

Something of her bewilderment crept into the wondering "why," and Georgina hesitated, a bit puzzled herself. It was hard to explain to a child two years younger what had been taught to her by the old Towncrier.

"You wait till I run home and get my prism," she answered. "Then I can show you right away, and we can play a new kind of tag game with it."

Before Peggy could protest that she would rather have her question unanswered than be left alone, Georgina was off and running up the beach as fast as her little white shoes could carry her. Her cheeks were as red as the coral necklace she wore, when she came back breathless from her flying trip.

There followed a few moments of rapture for Peggy, when the beautiful crystal pendant was placed in her own hands, and she looked through it into a world transformed by the magic of its coloring. She saw the room changed in a twinkling, as when a fairy wand transforms a mantle of homespun to cloth-of-gold. Through the open window she saw an enchanted harbor filled with a fleet of rainbows. Every sail was outlined with one, every mast edged with lines of red and gold and blue. And while she looked, and at the same time listened, Georgina's explanation caught some of the same glamor, and sank deep into her tender little heart.

That was the way that _she_ could change the world for people she loved--put a rainbow around their troubles by being so cheery and hopeful that everything would be brighter just because she was there. To keep Hope at the prow simply meant that she mustn't get discouraged about her knee. No matter how much it hurt her or the brace bothered her, she must bear up and steer right on. To do that bravely, without any fretting, was the surest way in the world to put a rainbow around her father's troubles.

Thus Georgina mixed her "line to live by" and her prism philosophy, but it was clear enough to the child who listened with heart as well as ears. And clear enough to the man who sat just outside the open window on the upper porch, with his pipe, listening also as he gazed off to sea.

"The poor little lamb," he said to himself. "To think of that baby trying to bear up and be brave on _my_ account! It breaks me all up."

A few minutes later as he started across the hall, Peggy, seeing him pa.s.s her door, called to him.