Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/62

 Arrived below she went about from room to room feeling the window fastenings. Yet she had secured them all herself, and Harriet Spencer was the last woman to doubt her own thoroughness. The long parlor was dim and shadowy in the flickering candle-light, and her own figure seen in the pier-glass as she came down the room had a ghostly look. She turned her eyes away from the glass, and was glad to go out into the hall.

In the kitchen she examined the bread, which had been set to rise. It was doing its duty bravely. The gray kitten, curled up in its little basket beside the stove, opened one eye upon the intruder, but it told no tales of hemlock boughs and Red Riding-hood capes, nor of a swift passage across the snow, held close against a wildly beating heart.

A few moments later Harriet was standing at Lucy's bedside. The girl was fast asleep, but the candle-light upon her face showed it flushed and tear-stained. In the mug upon the washstand the red rose drooped its head. Harriet bent down and breathed the delicate perfume, shading the candle lest the light should wake the sleeper. "I wish I could sleep like that," she thought, sighing deeply. T isn't much of a trouble that don't keep you awake nights."

Yet the touch was very gentle with which she drew the warm coverlid closer about the child.