Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/35

 keenly and lived over the tale and longed for a hundred years to drop off the world; longed for many and many a thing, till the candle guttered and she jumped up, shivering, to blow it out.

Aunt Lucia was mending beside the library lamp. Aunt Ellen was asleep. They were very old ladies. Jane stood in the doorway, suddenly aware of how closely they were linked with all that she had been dreaming of. Why, they were little girls when the Fortune of the Indies went down!

"Have you been studying, my dear?" Miss Lucia asked. "You have been very quiet."

No, Jane hadn't been studying. In fact, she had forgotten entirely the three pages of parsing and the chapter of French history which she should have been doing. And it was bedtime now. What a scramble in the morning! She fled upstairs to see whether or not she could read any of the history while she undressed, which experiment resulted in her standing at an uncomfortable angle with one boot in her hand for at least twenty-five minutes.