"Yes, in a stylish, sporty kind of way. But I don't know--" She hesitated a moment, then concluded: "Missy doesn't like him."

At that Aunt Nettie laughed with genuine mirth. "What on earth do you think a child would know about it?" she ridiculed.

Meanwhile the child, whose departure had thus loosed free speech, was leagues distant from the gossip and the unrest which was its source. Her pink hair bows, even the second-best ones, lifted her to a state which made it much pleasanter to idle in her window, sniffing at the honey-suckle, than to hurry down to the piano. She longed to make up something which, like a tune of water rippling over pink pebbles, was running through her head. But faithfully, at last, she toiled through her hour, and then was called on to mind the Baby.

This last duty was a real pleasure. For she could wheel the perambulator off to the summerhouse, in a secluded, sweet-smelling corner of the yard, and there recite poetry aloud. To reinforce those verses she knew by heart, she carried along the big Anthology which, in its old-blue binding, contrasted so satisfyingly with the mahogany table in the sitting-room. The first thing she read was "Before the Beginning of Years" from "Atalanta in Calydon;" Missy especially adored Swinburne--so liltingly incomprehensible.

The performance, as ever, was highly successful all around. Baby really enjoyed it and Poppylinda as well, both of them blinking in placid appreciation. And as for Missy, the liquid sound of the metres rolling off her own lips, the phrases so beautiful and so "deep," seemed to lift a choking something right up into her throat until she could have wept with the sweet pain of it. She did, as a matter of fact, happy tears, about which her two auditors asked no embarra.s.sing question. Baby merely gurgled, and Poppylinda essayed to climb the declaimer's skirts.

"Sit down, sad Soul!" Missy's mood could no longer even attempt to mate with prose. She turned through the pages of the Anthology until she came to another favourite:

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like young Lochinvar.

This she read through, with a fine, swinging rhythm. "I think that last stanza's perfectly exquisite--don't you?" Missy enquired of her mute audience. And she repeated it, as unctuously as though she were the poet herself. Then, quite naturally, this romance recalled to her the romance next door, so deliciously absorbing her waking and dreaming hours--the romance of her own Miss Princess. Miss Princess--Missy's more formal adaptation of Young Doc's soubriquet for Helen Greenleaf in the days of his romance--was the most beautiful heroine imaginable. And the Wedding was next week, and Missy was to walk first of all the six flower-girls, and the Pink Dress was all but done, and the Pink Stockings--silk!--were upstairs in the third drawer of the high-boy! Oh, it was a golden world, radiant with joy. Of course--it's only earth, after all, and not heaven--she'd rather the bridegroom was going to be young Doc. But Miss Princess had arranged it this other way--her bridegroom had come out of the East. And the Wedding was almost here!... There never was morning so fair, nor gra.s.s so vivid and shiny, nor air so soft. Above her head the cherry-buds were swelling, almost ready to burst. From the open windows of the house, down the street, sounds from a patient piano, flattered by distance, betokened that Kitty Allen was struggling with "Perpetual Motion"; Missy, who had finished her struggles with that abomination-to-beginners a month previously felt her sense of beat.i.tude deepen.

Presently into this Elysium floated her mother's voice, summoning her to the house. Rounding the corner of the back walk with the perambulator, she collided with the grocer-boy. He was a nice-mannered boy, picking up the Anthology and Baby's doll from the ground, and handing them to her with a charming smile. Besides, he had very bright, sparkling eyes.

Missy fancied he must be some lost Prince, and inwardly resolved to make up, as soon as alone, a story to this effect.

In the house, mother told her it was time to go to Miss Martin's to try on the Pink Dress.

Down the street, she encountered Mr. Hackett, the rich bridegroom come out of the East, a striking figure, on that quiet street, in the natty white flannels suggesting Cleveland, Atlantic City, and other foreign places.

"Well, if here isn't Sappho!" he greeted her gaily. Missy blushed. Not for worlds had she suspected he was hearing her, that unlucky morning in the grape-arbour, when she recited her latest Poem to Miss Princess. Now she smiled perfunctorily, and started to pa.s.s him.

But Mr. Hackett, swinging his stick, stood with his feet wide apart and looked down at her.

"How's the priestess of song, this fine morning?" he persisted.

"All-right," stammered Missy.

He laughed, as if actually enjoying her confusion. Missy observed that his eyes were red-rimmed, and his face a pasty white. She wondered whether he was sick; but he jauntily waved his stick at her and went on his way.

Missy, a trifle subdued, continued hers.

But oh, it is a wonderful world! You never know what any moment may bring you. Adventures fairy-sent surprises, await you at the most unexpected turns, spring at you from around the first corner.

It was around the very first corner, in truth, that Missy met young Doc Alison, buzzing leisurely along in his Ford.

"h.e.l.lo, Missy," he greeted. "Like a lift?"

Missy would. Young Doc jumped out, and, in a deferential manner she admired very much, a.s.sisted her into the little car as though she were a grown-up and lovely young lady. Young Doc was a nice man. She knew him well. He had felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, sent her Valentines, taken her riding, and shown her many other little courtesies for as far back as she could remember. Then, too, she greatly admired his looks.

He was tall and lean and wiry. His face was given to quick flashes of smiling; and his eyes could be dreamy or luminous. He resembled, Missy now decided--and marvelled she hadn't noticed it before--that other young man, Lochinvar, "so faithful in love and so dauntless in war."

When young Doc politely enquired whether she could steal enough time from her errand to turn about for a run up "The Boulevard," Missy acquiesced. She regretted she hadn't worn her shirred mull hat. But she decided not to worry about that. After all, her appearance, at the present moment, didn't so much matter. What did matter was the way she was going to look next Wednesday--and she excitedly began telling young Doc about her coming magnificence, "It's silk organdie," she said in a reverent tone, "and has garlands of rosebuds." She went on and told him of the big leghorn hat to be filled with flowers, of the Pink Stockings--best of all, silk!--waiting, in tissue-paper, in the high-boy drawer.

"Oh, I can hardly wait!" she concluded rapturously.

Young Doc, guiding the car around the street-sprinkling wagon, did not answer. Beyond the wagon, Mr. Hackett, whom the Ford had overtaken, was swinging along. Missy turned to young Doc with a slight grimace.

"'The poor craven bridegroom said never a word,'" she quoted.

Young Doc permitted himself to smile--not too much. "Why don't you like him, Missy?"

Missy shook her head, without other reply. It would have been difficult for her to express why she didn't like stylish Mr. Hackett.

"I wish," she said suddenly, "that you were going to be the bridegroom, Doc."

He smiled a wry smile at her. "Well, to tell the truth, I wish so, too, Missy."

"Well, she'll be coming back to visit us often, and maybe you can take us out riding again."

"Maybe--but after getting used to big imported cars, I'm afraid one doesn't care much for a Ford."

There was a note of cynicism, of pain, which, because she didn't know what it was, cut Missy to the heart. It is all very well, in Romance and Poems, to meet with unhappy, discarded lovers--they played an essential part in many of the best ballads in the Anthology; but when that romantic role falls, in real life, on the shoulders of a nice young Doc, the matter a.s.sumes a different complexion. Missy's own ecstasy over the Wedding suddenly loomed thoughtless, selfish, wicked. She longed timidly to reach over and pat that lean brown hand resting on the steering-wheel. Two sentences she formed in her mind, only to abandon them unspoken, when, to her relief, the need for delicate diplomacy was temporarily removed by the car's slowing to a stop before Miss Martin's gate.

Inside the little white cottage, however, in Miss Martin's sitting-room--so queer and fascinating with its "forms," its samples and "tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs" pinned to the curtains, its alluring display of fashion magazines and "charts," and its eternal litter of varicoloured sc.r.a.ps over the floor--Missy's momentary dejection could but vanish. Finally, when in Miss Martin's artfully tilted cheval gla.s.s, she surveyed the pink vision which was herself, gone, for the time, was everything of sadness in the world. She turned her head this way and that, craning to get the effect from every angle-the bouffance of the skirt, the rosebuds wreathing the sides, the b.u.t.terfly sash in the back. Adjured by Miss Martin to stand still, she stood vibrantly poised like a lily-stem waiting the breath of the wind; bade to "lift up your arms," she obeyed and visioned winged fairies alert for flight. Even when Miss Martin, carried away by her zeal in fitting, stuck a pin through the pink tissue clear into the warmer, softer pink beneath, Missy scarcely felt the p.r.i.c.k.

But, at the midday dinner-table, that sympathetic uneasiness returned.

Father, home from the office, was full of indignation over something "disgraceful" he had heard down town. Though the conversation was held tantalizingly above Missy's full comprehension, she could gather that the "disgrace" centred in the bachelor dinner which Mr. Hackett had given at the Commercial House the night before. Father evidently held no high opinion of the introduction of "rotten Cleveland performances" nor of the man who had introduced them.

"What 'rotten Cleveland performances'?" asked Missy with lively curiosity.

"Oh, just those late, indigestible suppers," cut in mother quickly.

"Rich food at that hour just kills your stomach. Here, don't you want another strawberry tart, Missy?"

Missy didn't; but she affected a desire for it, and then a keen interest in its consumption. By this artifice, she hoped she might efface herself as a hindrance to continuation of the absorbing talk. But it is a trick of grown-ups to stop dead at the most thrilling points; though she consumed the last crumb of the tart, her ears gained no reward, until mother said:

"As soon as you've finished dinner, Missy, I wish you'd run over to Greenleafs' and ask to borrow Miss Helen's new kimono pattern."

Missy brightened. The sight of old Mrs. Greenleaf and Miss Princess, bustling gaily about, would lift this strange cloud gathering so ominously. She asked permission to carry along a bunch of sweet peas, and gathered the kind Miss Princess liked best--pinkish lavender blossoms, a delicious colour like the very fringe of a rainbow.

The Greenleafs' coloured maid let her in and showed her into the "den"

back of the parlour. "I'll tell Mrs. Greenleaf," she said. "They're all busy upstairs."

Very busy they must have been, for Missy had restlessly dangled her feet for what seemed hours, before she heard voices approaching the parlour.

"Oh, I won't--I won't--" It was Miss Princess's voice, almost unrecognizably high and quavering.

"Now, just listen a minute, darling--" This unmistakably Mr. Hackett's languorous, curiously repellent monotone.

"Don't you touch me!"

Missy, stricken by the knowledge she was eavesdropping, peered about for a means of slipping out. But the only door, portiere-hung, was the one leading into the parlour. And now this concealed poor blundering Missy from the speakers while it allowed their talk to drift through.

That talk, stormy and utterly incomprehensible, filled the child with a growing sense of terror. Accusations, quick pleadings, angry retorts, attempts at explanation, all formed a dreadful muttering background out of which shot, like sharp streaks of lightning, occasional clearly-caught phrases: "Charlie White came home dead drunk, I tell you--" "--You know I'm mad about you, Helen, or I wouldn't--" "--Oh, don't you touch me!"

To Missy, trapped and shaking with panic, the storm seemed to have raged hours before she detected a third voice, old Mrs. Greenleaf's, which cut calm and controlled across the area of pa.s.sion.

"You'd better go out a little while, Porter, and let me talk to her."