The Little Colonel at Boarding-School

"You never saw such a happy face as hers when we told her. 'Oh,' she cried, 'I almost gave up last week. The pain was so terrible. I couldn't have borne it if I hadn't watched the pendulum and, every time it ticked, said, "I'll stand it one more second for daddy's sake, and one more, and one more; I'm spinning the golden thread like the Princess, and love will find a way to help me hang on a little longer!"'

"So you see, dear," said Mrs. Walton, with a playful pat of the cheek, "your face and Betty's song brought hope and strength to a poor suffering little soul of whom you never heard. Your shadow-self reached a long, long way when it brought comfort to Roney and helped keep her brave. What do you care for this trifle you are crying about? The whole affair will blow over and be forgotten in a short time. Get up and go to counting the pendulum with Roney, and sing like the real princess you are. 'Love will find a way' to make us forget the unpleasant things and remember only the good."

Lloyd sat up and threw both her arms around Mrs. Walton's neck. "You're the real princess," she said, softly, with a kiss. "For you go about doing good all the time, like a real king's daughtah."

"Now run along, little girl," said Mrs. Walton, gaily, as Lloyd slipped off the bed. "Bathe your eyes and pack your satchel. I am going to take you and Betty home with me to stay until Monday morning."

CHAPTER XIV

THE THREE WEAVERS

No better cure could have been found for Lloyd's dejection than her visit to The Beeches. It was impossible for her to brood over her troubles while Allison and Kitty were continually saying funny things, and rushing her from one interesting game to another. After a good night's sleep the events of the previous day seemed so far away that what she had considered such a disgrace had somehow lost its sting, and she wondered how she could have suffered so keenly over it.

Katie Mallard came over soon after breakfast, and they spent nearly the entire day outdoors. The air was frosty and bracing, and when Mrs. Walton saw them come running into the house just before sundown with bright eyes and red cheeks, she felt well pleased with the success of her plan.

She was sitting in her room by a front window writing letters when the girls came rushing up the stairs into the adjoining room. Kitty carried a basket of apples, and Allison some pop-corn and the popper, and presently an appetizing odour began to steal in as the white grains danced over the open fire.

As the girls hovered hungrily around, waiting for the popping to cease, they began a lively discussion which caught Mrs. Walton's attention. She paused, pen in hand, at the mention of two names, Daisy Dale and the Heiress of Dorn. They were familiar names, for only the day before Miss Edith had showed her the pile of books found in Ida's closet, and she was waiting for a suitable time to speak of them to the girls. As she folded her letter and addressed it, she decided she would call them in a little later, when they were through with their apples and their corn, for a quiet little twilight talk. A golden afterglow gleamed above the western tree-tops, and, leaning back in her rocking-chair, she sat watching it fade out, so absorbed in a story she was thinking to tell them that she ceased to hear the girlish chatter in the next room till Lloyd's voice rang out clearly:

"I've made up my mind. I'm nevah going to get married!"

"Then you'll be an old maid," was Kitty's teasing rejoinder, "and people will poke fun at you and your cats and teacups."

"I'll not have any," was the prompt reply. "I nevah expect to have any moah pets of any kind. Whenevah I get to loving anything, something always happens to it. Think of all the pets we have had at Locust. Fritz, and the two Bobs, and Boots, and the gobblah, and the goat, and the parrot, and deah old Hero! Something happened to every one of them. The ponies are the only things left, and the only kind of a pet I'd evah have again. If Tarbaby should die, I'd buy me a hawse, for I don't expect to be the kind of an old maid that sits in a chimney-cawnah with a tabby and a teapot. I expect to dash around the country' on hawseback and have fun even when I'm old and wrinkled and gray. I'll go to college, of co'se, and I'll have interesting people to visit me, so that I'll keep up my interest in the world and not get cranky."

"I'll come and live with you," said Allison. "I'll have a studio and devote my life to making a great artist of myself. We could buy Tanglewood, and make a moat all around the house so that we could pull up the drawbridge when we wanted to be alone or were afraid of burglars."

"Maybe it would be better for me to be an old maid, too," said Betty, musingly. "I'd have more time to write books than if I had a husband and a family to look after. And, besides, while I like to read about lovers and such things in stories, it would make me feel dreadfully foolish to have any man fall on his knees to me and say the things that Lord Rokeby and Guy said to Daisy Dale. I don't even like to write those speeches when I'm in a room by myself. I've tried lots of times, and I've about decided to skip that part in my story. I'll put some stars instead, and begin, 'A year has passed, and Gladys and Eugene,' etc."

"I was going to ask mothah how Papa Jack did it," said Lloyd, "but aftah all that's happened, somehow I'd rathah not say anything about such things to oldah people. Miss McCannister was so horrified when she found we had talked such 'sentimental foolishness,' as she called it. I'll nevah forget the way she screwed up her lips and said, 'It wasn't considahed propah, when I was a child, for little girls to discuss such subjects.' I felt as if I had been caught doing something wicked. It mawtified me dreadfully, and I made up my mind that I'd nevah get to be fond of anybody the way Ida was, for fear I might be mistaken in them as she was."

"Everything seems to be a warning lately," said Betty. "Even the literature lessons this week. If the Lady of Shalott hadn't left her weaving to look out of the window when Sir Lancelot rode by, the curse wouldn't have come upon her."

"There!" cried Allison, scrambling to her feet. "That reminds me that I haven't learned the verses that Miss Edith asked us to memorize for Monday."

She took a worn copy of Tennyson from the table, and began rapidly turning the leaves.

"I learned the whole thing yesterday," said Betty. "I can say every word of part first."

"It's easy," remarked Kitty. "I know part of it, although I'm not in the class. I learned it from hearing Allison read it:

"'Four gray walls and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers.
And the silent isle embowers
The Lady of Shalott.'

Isn't that right?"

"Yes, but that isn't Monday's lesson. It's part second we have to learn."

"Let's all learn it," proposed Katie. "It's so pretty and jingles along so easily I'd like to know it, too. You line it out, Allison, as Frazer does the hymns at the coloured baptizings, and we'll run a race and see who can repeat it first."

"There she weaves by night and day," read Allison, and then the five voices gabbled it all together, "There she weaves by night and day."

The concert recitation went on for some time, and presently the lines of the familiar old poem began weaving themselves into the story Mrs. Walton was thinking about. The red gold of the afterglow had not entirely faded from the sky when she left her seat by the window and went into the next room. The five girls on the hearth-rug were still chanting the lesson over and over.

"Come hear us say it, mother," called Kitty, drawing up a chair for her. "Betty learned it first."

Allison deposited the bowl of pop-corn in her lap and passed her the basket of apples, and then flourished the popper like a drum-major's baton. "Now all together!" she cried, and the five voices rang out like one:

"There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she.
The Lady of Shalott.

"And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near,
Winding down to Camelot.
There the river eddy whirls,
And the surly village churls
And the red cloaks of market-girls
Pass onward from Shalott.

"Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd lad
Or long-haired page in crimson clad
Goes by to Camelot.
And sometimes through the mirror blue
The knights come riding two by two.
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott."

"Why, she was an old maid! Wasn't she!" said Katie, so plaintively as they finished that they all laughed.

"That's what Allison and Betty and Lloyd are going to be, mother," said Kitty, teasingly. Lloyd, with a very red face, hastened to change the subject. She snuggled up against Mrs. Walton's knee, saying, as she looked into the glowing fire, "This is the best time of the day, when the wind goes 'Whooo' in the chimney, and it's cold and dark outdoahs and cheerful and bright inside. It's just the time for story-telling. Don't you know one, Mrs. Walton?"

"Of course she does," Kitty answered for her. "And if you don't know one, you can make one up to order. Can't you, mamsie?"

"Your poem suggested a story," answered Mrs. Walton, and with one hand smoothing Lloyd's fair head as it rested against her knee, and the other stroking Kitty's dark one in her lap, she began:

"Once upon a time (the same time that the Lady of Shalott wove her magic web, and near the four gray towers from which she watched the road running down to Camelot), there lived three weavers. Their houses stood side by side, and such had been their equal fortunes that whatever happened under the roof of one had always happened under the roofs of the others. They wove the same patterns in their looms, and they received the same number of shillings for their webs. They sang the same songs, told the same tales, ate the same kind of broth from the same kind of bowls, and dressed in the same coarse goods of hodden gray.