Girl Alone. Anne Austin

you’re talking. And any woman—” a delicate compliment that—“can work better when she’s singing.”

      And so Sally sang. She sang Sunday School songs, because it was Sunday.

      It was sweet to be alone in the kitchen, with David so near, his crisp, golden-brown head bent over his book, smoke spiraling lazily from his pipe. The old grandmother, looking very tiny and old-fashioned in rustling black taffeta, had gone to church, too, leading her middle-aged half-wit son by the hand. Benny had strained at his mother’s hand, trying to get loose so that he could kiss Sally and show her his bright red necktie, at which the fingers of his free hand plucked excitedly. As she remembered those vacant, grinning eyes, that slack, grinning mouth, Sally’s song changed to a heart-felt paean of thanksgiving:

      “Count your blessings!

      Name them one by one.

      Count your many blessings—

      See what God hath done!”

      Oh, she was blessed! She had a good mind; sometimes she was pretty; she could dance and sing; children liked her—and David, David! Poor half-wit Benny, whose only blessings were a dim little old mother and a new red necktie! But wasn’t a mother—even an old, old mother, whose own eyes were vague, such a big blessing that she made up for nearly everything else that God could give?

      But she resolutely banished the ache in her heart—an ache that contracted it sharply every time she thought of the mother she had never known—and began to sing again:

      “I think when I read that sweet story of old,

      When Jesus was here among men,

      How He called little children as lambs to His fold—”

      The opening and closing of the door startled her. David was there, smiling at her.

      “Won’t you sing ‘Always’ for me, Sally? It’s a new song, just out. It goes something like this—” And he began to hum, breaking into words now and then: “I’ll be loving you—always! Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not—”

      “So this is why you wouldn’t go to church with me!” a shrill voice, passionate with anger, broke into the singing lesson.

      They had not heard her, in their absorption in the song and in each other, but Pearl had come into the house through the front door, and was confronting them now in the doorway between dining room and kitchen.

      “I thought you two were up to something!” she cried. “It’s a good thing I came home when I did, or I reckon there wouldn’t be any Sunday dinner. Do you know why I came home, Sally Ford?” she demanded, advancing into the kitchen, her hands on her hips, her fingers digging spasmodically into the flesh that bulged under the silk.

      “No,” Sally gasped, retreating until she was halted by the kitchen table. “I’m cooking dinner, Pearl. It’ll be ready on time—”

      “Don’t you ‘Pearl’ me!” the infuriated girl screamed. “You mealy-mouthed little hypocrite! I’ll tell you why I came home! I couldn’t find my diamond bar-pin that Papa gave me for a Christmas present last year, and I remembered when I was in Sunday School that I saw you stoop and pick up something in the parlor last night. You little thief! Give it back to me or I’ll phone for the sheriff!”

      Sally stared at Pearl, color draining out of her cheeks and out of her sapphire eyes, until she was a pale shadow of the girl who had been glowing and sparkling under the sun of David’s affectionate interest.

      “I haven’t seen your diamond bar-pin, Pearl,” she said at last. “Honest, I haven’t!”

      “You’re lying! I saw you stoop and pick something up in front of the sofa last night. I was crazy not to think of my bar-pin then, but I remembered all right this morning, when it was gone off this dress, the same dress I was wearing last night. See, David!” she appealed shrilly to the boy, who was looking at her with narrowed eyes. “It was pinned right here! You can see where it was stuck in! Look!”

      David said nothing, but a slow, odd smile curled his lips without reaching those level, narrowed eyes of his.

      “What are you looking at me like that for?” Pearl screamed. “I won’t have you looking at me like that! Stop it!”

      Slowly, his eyes not leaving Pearl’s face for a moment, David thrust his right hand into his pocket. When he withdrew it, something lay on his palm—a narrow bar of filigreed white gold, set with a small, square-cut diamond. Still without speaking, he extended his hand slowly toward Pearl, but she drew back, her eyes popping with surprise and—yes, Sally was sure of it—fear.

      “Where did you get that?” she gasped.

      “Do you really want me to tell you?” David spoke at last, his voice queer and hard.

      “No!” Pearl shuddered. “No! Does she—does she know?”

      “No, she was telling the truth when she said that she hadn’t seen the pin,” David answered, flipping the pin contemptuously to the kitchen table. “But next time I think you’d better put it away in your own room. And Pearl, you really must try to overcome this absentmindedness of yours. It may get you into trouble sometime.”

      Pearl shivered, seemed to shrink visibly under her fussy pink georgette dress.

      “Oh!” she wailed suddenly, her face crumpling up in a spasm of weeping. “You’ll hate me now! And you used to like me, before she came! You—oh, I hate you! Quit looking at me like that!”

      “Hadn’t you better go back to church?” David suggested mildly. “Tell your mother you found your pin just where you’d left it,” that contemptuous smile deepening on his lips.

      “You won’t tell Papa, will you?” Pearl whimpered, as she turned toward the door. “And you won’t tell her?” She could not bear to utter Sally’s name.

      “No, I won’t tell,” David assured her. “But I’m sure you’ll make up to Sally for having been mistaken about the pin.”

      “She’s all you think of!” Pearl cried, then, sobbing wildly, she ran out the kitchen door.

      “Guess I’d better not bother you any longer, or they’ll be blaming me if dinner is late,” David said casually, but he paused long enough to pat the little hand that was clenching the table.

      Sally was so puzzled by the strangeness of the scene she had witnessed, so tormented by brief glimpses of something near the truth, so weak from reaction, so stirred by gratitude to David, that she was making poor headway with dinner when Clem Carson, who had not gone to church, came in from the barns, dressed in overalls in defiance of the day.

      “Got a sick yearlin’ out there,” he grumbled. “A blue-ribbon heifer calf that Dave’s grandpa persuaded me to buy. I don’t believe in this blue-ribbon stock. Always delicate—got to be nursed like a baby. I give her a whopping dose of castor oil and she slobbered all over me.”

      He took the big black iron teakettle from the stove and filled the granite wash basin half full of the steaming water. As he lathered his hands until festoons of soap bubbles hung from them, he cocked an appraising eye at Sally, who was busily rolling pie crust on a yellow pine board.

      “Dave been hanging around the kitchen this morning, ain’t he?”

      Sally’s hands tightened on the rolling pin and her eyes fluttered guiltily as she answered, “Yes, sir.”

      “Better not encourage him, if you know which side your bread’s buttered on,” the farmer advised laconically. “I reckon you know by this time that Pearl’s picked him out and that things is just about settled between ’em. Fine match, too. He’ll own his granddad’s place some day—next farm to this one, and the young folks will be mighty well fixed. I reckon Dave’s pretty much like any other young whippersnapper—ready to cock an eye at any pretty girl that comes along, before he