CHAPTER XIII.

THE DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING.

"THERE! You are ready at last!" said Mrs. Sherman, as she finished b.u.t.toning Lloyd's gloves, and fastened the jewelled clasp of her long party cloak. She had come over to help the Little Colonel dress for the b.u.t.terfly Luncheon at Anna Moore's.

Feeling very elegant in her unusual party array, Lloyd surveyed herself in the mirror with a satisfied air, and sat down beside Allison to wait for the carriage that Mrs. Moore had promised to send for them. Mrs.

Walton was tying Kitty's sash, and in the next room Elise was buzzing around like an excited little bee.

"Hold still! Do now!" they heard Milly say, impatiently. "I'll never get the tangles brushed out of your curls, and the others will go off and leave you, and you'll have to miss the party."

Presently there was a long protesting wail from Elise. "Oh, Milly, what did you put that ribbon on my hair for? It isn't pink enough to match my stockings."

"There's scarcely any difference at all in the shades," answered Milly.

"Sure it would take a microscope to tell, even if they were side by side, and your head is too far away from your heels for anybody to notice."

"Oh, but it won't do at all!" cried Elise, breaking away from her to run into the next room. "See, mamma, they don't match." In her eagerness Elise leaned over, bending herself like a little acrobat, till the pink bow on her hair was on a level with the pink silk stockings.

"There's barely a shade difference," laughed Mrs. Walton. "The difference is so slight that n.o.body will notice it unless you expect to double up occasionally like a jack-knife and call attention to it."

"Of course I don't expect to do that," said Elise, with such a funny little air of injured dignity that her mother caught her up with a hasty kiss. "You're a dear little peac.o.c.k, even if you do think too much of your fine feathers. But you can't stop to make a fuss about your ribbons now. It would be making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Run back to Milly for your hat. I hear the carriage stopping out in front."

"What a lot of things I'll have to write about in my next letter to the girls," thought Lloyd, as they rolled along in the carriage a few minutes later. "Joyce and Betty will like to hear about the general's home and all the interesting things in it, and Eugenia will enjoy this part of my visit most."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE b.u.t.tERFLY CARNIVAL.]

It was with a view to impressing Eugenia with the elegance of her friends, that Lloyd noticed every detail of the beautiful luncheon. She intended that Eugenia should hear about it all. Gay b.u.t.terflies, so lifelike that one could not believe that human hands had made them, were poised everywhere, on the flowers, the candle-shades, the curtains. The menu cards were decorated with them, the fine hand-painted china bore swarms of them around their dainty rims, and even the ices were moulded to represent them. The little hostess herself, fluttering around among her guests as gracefully as if she too were a winged creature, wore a gauzy dress of palest blue, embroidered in b.u.t.terflies, and there were b.u.t.terflies caught here and there in her golden curls.

The Little Colonel could scarcely eat for admiring her. She felt very elegant and grown up to be the guest at such an entertainment, and as she took her place at the table between Malcolm and Rob, she wished with all her heart that Eugenia could peep in and see her.

It was time to start to the b.u.t.terfly Carnival almost immediately when luncheon was over, and again Lloyd felt very elegant and grown up rolling along in the carriage to the matinee. Mrs. Moore ushered the party into the box she had taken for Anna and her little friends, and more than one person in the audience turned to ask his neighbour, "Who are those lovely children? Did you ever see such handsome boys? They have such charming manners. It is like a scene from some old court-play." The Little Colonel, sitting beside Anna, with the two little knights leaning forward to talk to her, to pick up her fan, or adjust her lorgnette, was all unconscious that any one in the audience was watching her admiringly, but she wished again that Eugenia could see her.

When the curtain went up the scene on the stage was so absorbing that she forgot Eugenia. She forgot where she was, for the play carried her bodily into fairy-land. The queen of the fairies was there with her star-tipped wand and all her spangled court, and Lloyd looked and listened with breathless attention, while the naughty Puck played pranks on all the b.u.t.terflies, and, finally catching them at play in a moonlighted forest, took all the gauzy-winged creatures captive. It was as entrancing as looking into a living fairy tale, and when at last the queen released the prisoners with a wave of her star-tipped wand, and to the soft notes of the violins, the b.u.t.terflies danced off the stage, Lloyd drew a long breath and came down to earth with a sigh. She could have listened gladly for hours more.

But the curtain was down, the people were rising all over the house, and Keith was holding her party cloak for her to slip into. Mrs. Moore turned to Allison.

"Elise is wild to see behind the scenes," she said. "I am going to keep her with me a little while. Your cousin Malcolm says that he and Keith can take you home in their carriage with Lloyd and Kitty. So I'll send Anna and Rob home in mine and wait here until it comes back. Tell your mother I'll take good care of Elise and bring her home as soon as I attend to my little proteges behind the scene."

Many of the children who had taken part in the performance were from the free kindergarten, and Elise, holding fast to Mrs. Moore's hand, watched the transformation behind the scenes, from gauzy wings to gingham gowns, with wondering eyes.

"It is like when Cinderella lost her gla.s.s slipper," she said. "The clock struck twelve, and her silks turned to rags."

All the glitter and glory of fairy-land had disappeared with the footlights. In the wintry light of the late afternoon, some of the faces were pitifully thin and wan.

"Here are three little b.u.t.terflies that must go back home and be grubs again," said Mrs. Moore, as she beckoned to the children whom she had promised to take home in her carriage. Elise looked at them, wondering if it could be possible that they were the same children, who, fifteen minutes before, had looked so radiantly beautiful in their spangled costumes on the stage. They were shy little things who could scarcely find words to answer Mrs. Moore's questions, but they seemed to enjoy the drive in the warm closed carriage, behind the team of prancing bays.

Elise chatted on gaily, telling Mrs. Moore how much she had enjoyed the carnival, how she had admired the fairy queen, and how she longed for a real live fairy. She had looked for them often in the morning-glories and the lily-bells. If she could find one maybe it would tell her where to look for Dot.

Presently they turned into a side street among unfamiliar tenement-houses, and paused at an alley entrance.

"I am going to the top of the stairs with the children," said Mrs.

Moore, preparing to step out of the carriage. "I want to inquire about the baby, who is sick. I'll be back in a moment, Elise."

As the carriage door closed behind her she spoke to the coachman. "Wait here a moment, d.i.c.kson." The man on the box touched his hat and then turned his fur collar higher around his ears. There was a cold wind whistling through the alley. Elise pressed her face against the gla.s.s and looked out into the wintry street. Mrs. Moore's moment stretched out into five. The baby up-stairs was worse, and she was making a list of the many things it needed for its comfort.

There was little of interest to watch from the carriage window. Few people were pa.s.sing along the narrow pavement, and Elise wondered impatiently why Mrs. Moore did not come. Presently, down the street came a ragged child with its arm held up over its eyes, sobbing and sniffling as it shuffled along in a pair of wornout shoes many sizes too large for its little feet.

Elise's heart gave a great thump, and she started forward eagerly.

"Molly's little lost sister!" she exclaimed aloud. "It must be, for she looks just like the girl in the picture. Oh, I must call her!"

She was fumbling at the k.n.o.b of the carriage door, but before she could get it open, the child turned and started up the dirty alley, still sobbing aloud, with her arm over her face.

"Oh, I must call her back," thought Elise. "Everybody will be so glad if she is found. I mustn't let her get away."

It took all her strength to turn the k.n.o.b, but with another desperate wrench she got the door open, and climbed out to the pavement. The coachman, half asleep in his great fur collar and heavy lap-robes, did not hear the tap of the little pink boots, as she ran up the dark alley between the high, rickety buildings, with their bad smells and dirty sewers.

"Oh, she is going so fast!" panted Elise. "I'll never catch up with her!" The pretty pink boots were wet and snowy now, the silk stockings splashed with muddy water. Her big velvet hat was tipped over one eye and her curls were blowing in tangles over the wide collar of her fur-trimmed cloak. But forgetting all about her fine feathers, she ran on, around corners, into strange pa.s.sages, across unfamiliar streets, following the flutter of a tattered gown. All of a sudden she paused, looking around in bewilderment. The child she was following had disappeared.

With a bitter sense of disappointment swelling in her little heart, she turned to go back to the carriage, and then stood still in bewilderment.

She could not tell which way she had come. She was lost herself! For a few minutes the little pink boots trudged bravely on, then the tears began to gather in her big black eyes.

"They'll feel so bad at home," she thought, "when they hunt and hunt and can't find me anywhere. Oh, what if I'd stay lost, and get to look all ragged and dirty like Dot, and just have to stand in a corner and cry.

If there was any nice stores along here, I'd go in and ask the man to send me home, but these places look so dreadful I'm afraid."

She was in a disreputable part of the town, where second-hand clothing stores and p.a.w.n-shops were crowded in between saloons and cheap restaurants, and she dared not venture into any of them to ask for help.

Little as she was, she felt that she was safer on the streets than inside those crowded, dirty quarters, where half-drunken negroes and coa.r.s.e, brawling white men quarrelled and swore in loud tones.

"It's the saloons that brought all the trouble to Molly and Dot,"

thought Elise, shrinking away from a group of noisy loafers, as they straggled out of one. "They made their father mean and their mother die and their grandmother go crazy and them lose each other. They're worse than wild beasts, and I'm afraid of 'em. Maybe if I walk far enough I'll come to a nice policeman, but I'm so tired now." Her lip quivered as she whispered the words. "Oh, it seems as if I'd drop! And I'm so cold I am nearly frozen."

As she walked on, across her way an electric arch suddenly shot its cold white light into the street. Then another and another appeared, and as far as she could see in any direction the streets were brilliantly illuminated.

"Oh, it's night!" she sobbed. "I'll freeze to death before morning if somebody doesn't come and find me."

Still she dragged on, growing more tired and frightened at every step, until she could walk no longer. At the end of a long block she sat down on a doorstep, and huddled up in one corner out of the wind. A dismal picture came to her mind of the little match-seller in Hans Andersen's fairy tales. The little match-seller who had frozen to death on Christmas eve, on the threshold of somebody's happy home.

"She had a box of matches to warm herself with," sobbed Elise. "I haven't even that. Oh, it's awful to be lost!"

With the tears trickling down her face she pictured to herself the grief of the family in case they should never find her.

"Mamma will stand in the door and look out into the dark and call and call, but her little Elise will never answer. And Allison and Kitty will feel so bad that they won't want to play. They'll divide my things between them to remember me by, and for a long time it'll make them cry whenever they see my dolls and books, or my place at the table, or my little wicker chair in the library, that I'll never sit in any more.

Ra.n.a.ld won't cry, 'cause he's a captain and he's brave. But he'll be just as sorry. Oh, I wish Ra.n.a.ld wasn't out in the country! He could find me if he was at home."

It was growing colder and colder on the doorstep. The child's teeth chattered and her lips were blue. Still she sat there, until an evil-looking man in the next house slouched out on to the street with a lean spotted dog at his heels. Suddenly, for no reason that Elise could discover, for she did not know that he was half drunk, he turned and kicked the poor beast, cursing it violently. It shrank away, yelping with pain. Seeing that the man was coming toward her, Elise sprang up in terror, and with one frightened glance over her shoulder, darted around the corner. Once out of his sight, she stopped running, but fear kept her moving, and she walked wearily on and on. Every step carried her farther away from home.

Through unwashed windows she could see the yellow lamplight streaming over dingy rooms. Most of the sights were unattractive, but in one house, cleaner than the rest, she saw a crowd of clamouring children seated around a supper-table, all reaching their spoons and plates toward a big steaming platter in the middle. It reminded her that she was hungry herself, and she lingered a moment, looking wistfully in at the cheerful scene. Then on she started again. Once she stumbled and fell in the slush of a snowy crossing, but scrambled bravely up again, walking on and on.