Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/293

 wanted to cry. I can't explain it, but there was something pathetic about her beauty.

She set the candle down and opened an old brass-bound chest. She took out a roll of cloth and brought it over and laid it on the table beside the candle.

"I bought it with some of the money that your Billy got for my Sheffield tray," she said. Then she turned to me with a quick motion and laid her hands on my shoulders. "Oh, you very dear—when I saw you making those little things—I knew that—that the good Lord had led me. Will you—will you—show me—how?"

I told Billy about it on the way home.

"She doesn't know anything about sewing, and she hasn't any patterns, and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with his mule"

Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish her as Billy did me.

"Oh, Billy, Billy," I said to him, "I'd rather live over a grocery store with you than live in a palace with anybody else"

And Billy said, "Don't cry, lady love, you are not going to live with anybody else."

And he put his arm around me, and as we walked 287