Rebecca's Promise

FACING PAGE She thrust the violets into Rebecca's hand Frontispiece "Do you mean to tell us that we can't go?" 152 "Hello, Kitty!" 302 "I love you, Rebecca Mary" 324

CHAPTER I

"I never should have brought you here," murmured Cousin Susan Wentworth, as she looked across the table at young Cousin Rebecca Mary Wyman, who sat on the other side of the white cloth like a small gray mouse with bright expectant eyes, a pretty pink flush on her cheeks and her head with its crown of soft yellow brown hair held high. "I should have saved my money for new kitchen curtains. The curtains in my kitchen are a disgrace to any housekeeper. But life wouldn't be worth much if we didn't occasionally do something we shouldn't, would it?" And she smiled at pink-cheeked Rebecca Mary. "The memory of this pretty room with the gay crowds of people, the music, the good things to eat will last longer than any curtains. And I can cut down the old bedroom curtains for the kitchen. Rebecca Mary, did you ever think that is what life really is, cutting down our desires to fit our necessities?"

Rebecca Mary sniffed. She had known that for twenty-two years. She did not have to be thirty-nine like Cousin Susan to learn that necessities always crowd out desires. And anyway she did not wish to talk of necessities, they were stupid and uninteresting, when for once in her life she was a part of what no one in the wide world could ever consider a necessity.

She let Cousin Susan study the card the attentive waiter handed to her, and while Cousin Susan tried to keep her mind from prices and on names, Rebecca Mary's bright eyes roved over the big brilliant room. She had never expected to enter it. She had scarcely believed her two pink ears when they told her that Cousin Susan had said, quite casually, "Rebecca Mary, suppose we go to the Waloo for tea?" Rebecca Mary had given a startled gasp, but here she was at the Waloo trying to forget that her old blue serge suit was wide where it should be narrow and narrow where it should be wide, and that her hat had only been given a good brushing to make it ready for another season.

Afternoon tea was served at the Waloo in the Viking room, a beautiful place with its scenes from the old Norse sagas on the walls above a wainscoting of dark wood and with lights like old ship lanterns hanging from the beamed ceiling. The chairs and tables were suggestive of long ago days, also, but the linen, the silver, the dainty china, the music and the guests were very much of to-day.

Rebecca Mary watched the young people almost enviously as Cousin Susan hesitated over foie gras sandwiches, which were expensive and therefore suitable for an occasion which was to cost her kitchen its new curtains, and lettuce sandwiches which were cheap and which she made herself every time the Mifflin Fortnightly Club met with her. Rebecca Mary could easily imagine what joy it would be to come to the Viking room in smart new clothes and with a young man like--like that tall young fellow who was with the girl in the wistaria taffeta. It made the pink in Rebecca Mary's cheeks turn to rose just to think of what joy that would be.