Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/333

Rh all night long. They used to wake up and look at it, and tell the other girls the next day. And every morning Adeline would come to breakfast as pale as chalk and tired to death, and pressing her hands against her heart and looking in- scrutable when any one spoke to her. Of course the Sisters didn't know she worked nights, or they would have stopped it. She told Maudie she knew she was not long for life, so she must use every moment and finish her book of poems so it could be published right after she died. Maudie cried when she told me that. She said it seemed so sad. I did not cry. Neither did Mabel Blossom. She giggled. Oh, how I love Mabel's light-hearted girlishness and how I enjoy her society! I wish to say right out in this story that she is the most congenial friend I have at St. Catharine's.

One night about eleven o'clock I was tossing feverishly on my couch, and thinking of my Art and of Adeline's Art, and wondering why the girls liked poetry so much better than stories. I was not jealous; I was just puzzled; and no plots were stirring in me, and I didn't care. I made a discovery, too. I learned that the Artist's Art is not enough to fill life. You need other things. You do your stories for the good of the world and to make it happy. And if the world won't read them or listen to them, it's no fun to write them. Then I felt dreadfully homesick and very unhappy, and I wanted to go home to mamma and my sister Grace, and Georgie.

Just then I heard a stealthy step at my portal, and then the door began to open very quietly. I was so unhappy that if it was burglars I didn't care, but I sat up in bed and looked, and it was Mabel Blossom in her nightgown with a bathrobe over it. She said:

"May, are you awake? Don't be frightened, but get up and come with me. I've got something to show you. Don't ask any questions, but hurry."

So I got up and slipped into the kimono Grace gave me Christmas. It's silk, and dark red and blue, and it has flowing sleeves, and Mabel and Maudie say it's very becoming to me. And I went confidingly and trustfully out into the dark hall with my dear friend Mabel, though I hadn't the least idea what she was going to do. We stole along hand in hand till we came to the door of Adeline Thurston's room. Then Mabel stopped and very quietly and coolly opened it and signed to me to look in. I did. I thought maybe Adeline expected us, but, alas! alas! she did not. She was in bed, all undressed, sound asleep, and breathing long, even breaths. And right near the window, burning its very best, was a little lamp, shining out into the night the way the widow's lamp does when she puts it into the window for her wandering sailor son. We both looked good and hard, and we looked and looked, but there was no mistake. Adeline was in bed and sleeping, and the lamp was put there so those two girls who could see it would see it and think she was working. Mabel and I crept back to my room in silence, and then I said perhaps Adeline had worked and had just fallen into an exhausted slumber, and would soon awake and get up. Mabel giggled and said Adeline had been in the same kind of an exhausted slumber the night before when she had looked. And she giggled again and told me to go to bed, and that she would convince me yet. That was about eleven o'clock. Would you believe it,—three hours later, at two, Mabel came again and we did the same thing, and we saw the same picture—the faithful lamp, put where it would do the most good, and the slumbering poet.

In the mean time I had been thinking it all over. I was so excited I couldn't sleep much, and the second time we saw it I told Mabel that it must be a secret between us and that we must never, never tell. I said it would be dreadful for the school to have such a thing come out. Then Mabel looked at me and asked if it was right to have the girls fooled like that. But I knew we must be just, for, after all, Adeline did write the poems, and it was not our affair when she did it, and of course we had no right in her bedroom. We had spied on her and it was dishonorable. I felt dreadfully about that, for a distinguished officer's daughter must have what Sister Irmingarde calls "a high standard of personal honor." So I convinced Mabel, and she promised not to tell any one. Then she went right straight to Maudie Joyce's room and woke her and led her to Adeline's room, just as she had led me, and let her see with her