"If there's one thing I despise it's washing dishes," cried the girl, her voice trembling with irritation.

The governess looked down at her own two delicate little hands and seemed to be considering. Then she raised her head quickly, and said, without a shade of resentment in her voice:

"Very well then, dear, I'll take the dishes. So here is the way it stands: You care for the plants and your own room and I'll look after my room and do the dusting and the dishes."

"You'll have more to do than I," hesitated Nan.

"No matter; if you do your share well, and don't neglect it, I am willing to stand by my part. Is it a bargain?"

Nan nodded grimly, and they shook hands upon it.

CHAPTER XV

A TUG OF WAR

"Is Nan in?" asked Ruth, coming to the house one day in the very teeth of a blinding snowstorm, and putting the question to Delia with a very decided note of excitement in her voice.

"Yes, she's in; but she's pretty busy," replied Delia, showing the guest into the dining-room, where the bright logs were blazing cheerfully in the fireplace, and where Miss Blake, enveloped in a huge ap.r.o.n, was kneeling before the hearth and polishing its tiles till they shone like gems. She stopped to welcome the guest in her own hearty, informal fashion.

"O Ruth! come in and sit down. I wondered who could be brave enough to face a storm like this. Why, it is almost a blizzard. Take off your things, dear, and get warmed. You won't mind my going on with my work?"

"Oh, no! not at all. Please don't stop. Thank you. This is as comfortable as can be. But then, one always is comfortable here. I came to see Nan about something important. She's busy?"

"Yes, in her room. But if you don't mind waiting a little I think she will soon be able to come down," responded the governess genially.

"Then I'll sit here, if you don't mind," and the girl settled herself in an engulfing armchair with a sigh of satisfaction, her eyes following Miss Blake from place to place as she tripped briskly about, energetically wielding her dust cloth and whisk broom and humming contentedly as she worked.

"Perhaps you won't approve of the plan that I've got in my mind, and won't let Nan go into it," ventured Ruth, presently.

"I can't fancy you suggesting anything that I would so seriously disapprove of as that," returned Miss Blake, smiling kindly, but asking for no further enlightenment on the subject than her guest was inclined to give of her own accord.

"Well, then, it's this: If the cold weather lasts we'll have elegant sleighing, with all this snow, and I want to hire a sleigh, just any common old thing will do, and fill it with straw, and all of us girls and boys go off on a screamingly fine sleigh-ride. If it clears we'll have a full moon, and I think it would just be the jolliest thing in the world. Now please say Nan can go. She'll love to I know, and she always makes things snap so," pleaded the girl, fixing her eyes on Miss Blake's face with a peculiar intensity of expression.

The governess hesitated.

"Oh, please say she can," reiterated Ruth.

"My dear Ruth, I can't say anything until I know more of the matter.

You say you girls and boys are to go. What girls and boys do you mean?"

"Why, Lu and Grace and Mary and the Buckstone girls, of course; and John Gardiner and Harley Morris and Everett Webster, and oh! all those fellows--the ones in our set; you've met them all."

"And is there to be no grown woman in the party--no chaperone?"

suggested Miss Blake.

Ruth looked down and began picking a thread from the thumb of her glove.

"Oh, of course; mamma wouldn't let me go unless there was a chaperone,"

she replied after a moment, but tamely, with the ring all faded out of her voice.

"No, I am sure she would not," the governess remarked dryly.

"I thought of you at once," Ruth began again with an upward glance that however did not meet Miss Blake's eye. "But then we all thought that it would be too much to ask of you--to ride all those miles with a noisy crowd in the cold and night, and--so on, and so--so--just before I came here I ran into Mrs. Cole and asked her to chaperone us, and she said she would."

The governess laid her duster on a chair, and unb.u.t.toned her ap.r.o.n very deliberately.

"Mrs. Cole," she repeated half-aloud, as if speaking to herself, and her tone had something in it that seemed to call for some sort of justification from Ruth.

"You know she's just been married, and she's as full of fun as she can be. And she likes a good time immensely, and loves to be with us girls, and it won't bore her a bit to go, and it's ever so much better to have her than--than--some one who wouldn't enjoy it, you know."

"Is Mr. Cole to be of the party?" Miss Blake inquired, still with that odd inflection.

"Why, no," responded Ruth, twisting her handkerchief into a hard knot.

"There won't be room for him. But Mrs. Cole said it didn't matter in the least. She says she often goes off and leaves him, and he has just as nice a time sitting home with his cigar and a book or something."

"They have been married, I think, three months," Miss Blake commented half to herself.

"Yes, about," replied Ruth. "And Mrs. Cole is just as gay and jolly as she ever was. You may think that it isn't very dignified for a married woman to--"

"Oh! my dear Ruth," interrupted the governess hastily, "I am not disparaging Mrs. Cole, and I have no right to express an opinion concerning her conduct, but I think--yes, I am quite sure that I prefer Nan not to join your party."

Ruth jumped from her chair with a cry of protest: "O Miss Blake! Don't say that! Think of it, we're going to drive down as far as Howe's and have a supper and it will be such fun. We want Nan awfully. She's just the best company in the world, and if she doesn't go it will be--well, it will be too bad. Do please say she may."

Miss Blake shook her head somewhat sadly. "I can't say so, Ruth.

There are special reasons why Nan ought not to go--reasons that I can only explain to her, but which I am sure she will understand. You other girls have your mothers, but Nan has none, and that means that she has no protector, now that her father is absent, unless I can stand in such a relation to her. Believe me, I do not voluntarily deny Nan any pleasure, but there are some instances in which I must."

"But it's going to be perfectly proper," Ruth insisted, almost in tears. "You don't think my mother would let me go if it wasn't going to be perfectly proper, do you, Miss Blake?"

The governess stood before the fire and rested her arm on the high mantel-shelf, tapping the fender lightly with the toe of her slipper.

At Ruth's question she turned her head quickly from the flames toward the girl with a compa.s.sionate smile.

"No," she hastened to declare, "I am sure your mother would not let you go to anything that she knew to be in any respect not altogether as it should be."

There was just the shade of an emphasis on the word knew--just the merest breath of a pause before it. Miss Blake gazed frankly and fearlessly into the girl's eyes as she spoke, and Ruth's lids dropped suddenly as if she had been trying to look at the sun and it had blinded her.

There was a pause and in it they could distinctly hear Nan's feet going to and fro on the floor above their heads, and her sharp young voice shouting the chorus of some tuneless popular air, in her own perfectly cheerful, earless fashion.

"Oh, Miss Blake, please!" quavered Ruth.

If she had known the governess as well as Nan did she would have known that it was worse than useless to "tease." As it was, she was aware of some force here that did not appear in her own easy-going mother, and unconsciously she bowed to it--but even as she did so she gave a last wail of entreaty from pure force of habit.

"Please, Miss Blake!"

"No, Ruth. I can't consent to Nan's joining you. If she goes, it will be in direct defiance of my authority and against my wish and approval.

But when she hears what I have to say I do not think she will go."