and rubbing her eyes with her kitchen apron until she looked strange indeed.
“Oh, miss,” she said under her breath. “Might I—would you allow me—jest to come in?”
Sara lifted her head and looked at her. She tried to begin a smile, and somehow she could not. Suddenly—and it was all through the loving mournfulness of Becky’s streaming eyes—her face looked more like a child’s not so much too old for her years. She held out her hand and gave a little sob.
“Oh, Becky,” she said. “I told you we were
sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out