Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/335

 covered with a clean, homely patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.

"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element—Romance itself—received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....

A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she called, "Come in!"

A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender, angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.

"Can I get something to eat here?"

Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist