Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/108

 like drifting rain—brought courage and reassurance.

Mrs. Driggs was wonderful, giving such large orders. Just now she was working on a miniature of Mrs. Driggs' mother, old Mrs. Barnes.

"It must be so much easier this way, from a photograph," Carrie Pyne said, looking at the three chins and the flat scalloped curls. "What I mean is—well, you never could make a live person keep so still, could you? Kind of hard to make a dainty miniature from this, though."

And Mrs. Martine had given big orders, too, and gotten lots of other people to order dinner cards and candle shades and painted satin candy boxes. It made Kate feel hot and grateful and reluctant. She hated painting things for Mrs. Martine, she put her very best work into them; scattered violets on satin sachets, sprays of forget-me-nots tied by bowknots dancing Highland flings. She worked herself into a fever, forcing herself to say, "Mrs. Martine is being very kind."

For hours she painted Dutch girls, Japanese maidens, Colonial ladies, until her shoulder ached and black spots swarmed before her eyes, while the children hung over her, breathed down her neck, ate apples in her ear, admiring every touch of her brush.

They planned secretly to help, to make money, too.

"We'll have a store," Charlotte decided. "Ona table in the front yard, under Miss Smith's lilac bush. And I'll paint dinner cards for it."