Glen still hesitated. It was an unheard of thing ... but it would take up more time; it would interpose a screen of novelty between her and her unhappy[98] cogitations. “I have no evening dress—” she began.

[98]

“That’s all right; come in your unspoiled girlish beauty! I told you I wouldn’t change.”

“There’s your little buff crêpe de chine, honey!” Miss Ada suggested eagerly. “And my amber beads!”

“’Atta girl!” Miss Jennings approved of her cordially. “Well, I’ll beat it now, and you come over as soon as you’re ready. Make it snappy!” She paused at the door. “Say, you won’t run out on me? You won’t ditch me?”

The woman answered for her, excitedly. “She will come, Miss Jennings! I pledge you my word! She will be there!”

Miss Ada was overjoyed. She shepherded Glen upstairs and waited nervously through the period of bathing and brushing, and then slipped the slim yellow dress over her head. “At last you are wearing it!” she exulted. It was rather of a tender subject between them, the little yellow-buff crêpe de chine. Miss Ada, by the exercise of much innocent guile, had contrived an invitation for Glen to attend the New Year’s reception at her Cousin Amos Tenafee’s, and then, knowing that the child had not sufficiently gala raiment, went to the smart little shop in the Bella Vista and dipped recklessly into her shallow bank account.

[99]But Glen would not go. She was stirred and touched and grateful, but she couldn’t go to the pleasures and palaces of The Hill—The Hill which had broken her mother’s heart, her soft-eyed, soft-chinned mother; The Hill which her father had damned with his dying breath.

[99]

Miss Ada, passionately desiring a fuller and richer life for her charge, came at last to see that it must come from without, not from the sacred inner circle, and she relinquished all hope of ever hearing her dear Cousin Amos, high priest and head of the clan, say—“And this is our young friend, Miss Glen Darrow, the protégée of our dear Cousin Ada.” Her remodeled desire, thereafter, took the form of distinguished strangers who would see at once the beauty and worth of her child, and she prayed for it nightly, with simple fervor. Miss Ada’s god was, after all, a tribal god: when she said—‘Our Father, which art in heaven,’ she had in mind a composite likeness of her own dear father and Cousin Amos, somewhat magnified and glorified, 

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