The Corner House Girls in a Play

Two men at either side had hold of ropes to steady the big pine stick. Up it went, higher and higher, while the overseer stood at the butt to guide it into the hole dug in the sidewalk.

Just as the pole was about half raised into its place, and a lineman had gone quickly up a neighboring pole to fasten a guy-wire to hold it, the interested children on the park bench saw a woman crossing the street near the scene of the telegraph company men's activities.

"Oh, Tess!" Dot exclaimed. "What a funny dress she wears!"

"Yes," said the older Kenway girl, eying the woman quite as curiously as her sister.

The strange woman wore a long, gray cloak, and a little gray, close bonnet, with a stiff, white frill framing her face. That face was very sweet, but rather sad of expression. The children could not see her hair and had no means of guessing her age, for her cheeks were healthily pink and her gray eyes bright.

These facts Tess and Dot observed and digested in their small minds before the woman reached the curb.

"Isn't she pretty?" whispered Tess.

Before Dot could reply there sounded a wild cry from the man on the pole. The guy-wire had slipped.

"'Ware below!" he shouted.

The woman did not notice. Perhaps the close cap she wore kept her from hearing distinctly. The writhing wire flew through the air like a great snake.

Tess dropped her history and sprang up; but Dot did not loose her hold upon the rather battered "Alice-doll" which was her dearest possession. She clung, indeed, to the doll all the closer, but she screamed to the woman quite as loudly as Tess did, and her little blue-stockinged legs twinkled across the grass to the point of danger, quite as rapidly as did Tess' brown ones.

"Oh, lady! lady!" shrieked Tess. "You'll be killed!"

"Please come away from there —please!" cried Dot.

Their voices pierced to the strange lady's ears. Just as the pole began to waver and sink sidewise, despite the efforts of the men with the spikes, she looked up, saw the gesticulating children, observed the shadow of the pole and the writhing wire, and sprang upon the walk, and across it in time to escape the peril.

The wire's weight brought the pole down with a crash, in spite of all the men could do. But the woman in the gray cloak was safe with Tess and Dot on the greensward.

CHAPTER II

THE LADY IN THE GRAY CLOAK

"My dear girls!" the woman in the gray cloak said, with a hand on a shoulder of each of the younger Corner House girls, "how providential it was that you saw my danger. I am very much obliged to you. And how brave you both were!"

"Thank you, ma'am," said Tess, who seldom forgot her manners.

But Dot was greatly excited. "Oh, my!" she gasped, clinging tightly to the Alice-doll, and quite breathless. "My – my pulse did jump so!"

"Did it? You funny little thing," said the woman, half laughing and half crying. "What do you know about a pulse?"

"Oh, I know it's a muscle that bumps up and down, and the doctor feels it to see if you're better next time he comes," blurted out Dot, nothing loath to show what knowledge she thought she possessed.

"Oh, my dear!" cried the lady, laughing heartily now. And, dropping down upon the very bench where Tess and Dot had been sitting, she drew the two children to seats beside her. "Oh, my dear! I shall have to tell that to Dr. Forsyth."

"Oh!" ejaculated Tess, who was looking at the pink-cheeked lady with admiring eyes. "Oh! we know Dr. Forsyth. He is our doctor."

"Is he, indeed? And who are you?" responded the lady, the sad look on her face quite disappearing now that she talked so animatedly with the little Kenways.

"We are Dot and Tess Kenway," said Tess. "I'm Tess. We live just over there," and she pointed to the big, old-fashioned mansion across the Parade Ground.

"Ah, then," said the woman in the gray cloak, "you are the Corner House girls. I have heard of you."

"We are only two of them," said Dot, quickly. "There's four."

"Ah! then you are only half the quartette."

"I don't believe we are half– do you, Tess?" said Dot, seriously. "You see," she added to the lady, "Ruthie and Aggie are so much bigger than we are."

The lady in the gray cloak laughed again. "You are all four of equal importance, I have no doubt. And you must be very happy together – you sisters." The sad look returned to her face. "It must be lovely to have three sisters."

"Didn't you ever have any at all?" asked Dot, sympathetically.

"I had a sister once – one very dear sister," said the lady, thoughtfully, and looking away across the Parade Ground.

Tess and Dot gazed at each other questioningly; then Tess ventured to ask:

"Did she die?"

"I don't know," was the sad reply. "We were separated when we were very young. I can just remember my sister, for we were both little girls in pinafores. I loved my sister very much, and I am sure she loved me, and, if she is alive, misses me quite as much as I do her."

"Oh, how sad that is!" murmured Tess. "I hope you will find her, ma'am."

"Not to be thought of in this big world – not to be thought of now," repeated the lady, more briskly. She picked up the history that Tess had dropped. "And which of you little tots studies this? Isn't English history rather far advanced for you?"

"Tess is nawful smart," Dot hastened to say. "Miss Andrews says so, though she's a nawful strict teacher, too. Isn't she, Tess?"

Her sister nodded soberly. Her mind reverted at once to the sovereigns of England and Miss Pepperill. "I – I'm afraid I'm not very quick to learn, after all. Miss Pepperill will think me an awful dunce when I can't learn the sovereigns."

"The sovereigns?" repeated the woman in gray, with interest. "What sovereigns?"

So Tess (of course, with Dot's valuable help) explained her difficulty, and all about the new teacher Tess expected to have.

"And she'll think I'm awfully dull," repeated Tess, sadly. "I just can't make my mind remember the succession of those kings and queens. It's the hardest thing I ever tried to learn. Do you s'pose all English children have to learn it?"

"I know they have an easy way of committing to memory the succession of their sovereigns, from William the Conqueror, down to the present time," said the lady, thoughtfully. "Or, they used to have."

"Oh, dear me!" wailed Tess. "I wish I knew how to remember the old things. But I don't."

"Suppose I teach you the rhyme I learned when I was a very little girl at school?"

"Oh, would you?" cried Tess, her pretty face lighting up as she gazed admiringly again at the woman in the gray cloak.

"Yes. And we will add a couplet or two at the end to bring the list down to date – for there have been two more sovereigns since the good Queen Victoria passed away. Now attend! Here is the rhyme. I will recite it for you, and then I will write it down and you may learn it at your leisure."

Both Tess and Dot – and of course the Alice-doll – were very attentive as the lady recited:

"'First William, the Norman,